Well, I thought the rationality-and-adjacent community emphasizes and would be a good place to clarify and disentangle concepts and meanings. These are major places, on blogs etc., where ingroup and outgroup are popularly used online.
And I don’t mean to bring too much whataboutism into this, but I find it noteworthy that of criticism of two posts that I got recently downvoted for, one seemed to center around not enough explicitness and usage of common language (over the term “stereotype”) but the other about asking for too much explicitness (over the term “ïngroup”).
If someone uses a term, it makes sense to ask them what they mean with the term. Discussing terms in a vaccum is generally not productive.
Thomas Kuhn makes the point that physicists and chemists use different notions of what “molecule” means. That’s in hard sciences. Different scientific paradigms usually operationlize terms differently.
There are likely plenty of different academic disciplines that likely use the term “ingroups” / “outgroups”. There’s a good chance that many of them have their own operationalizing and some field likely even have multiple ones.
If you ask what’s concept of molecule is the most frequent we have to count physics papers and papers by chemists. You likely get into some problems because some papers aren’t specific about their notion. You likely can write a academic paper about it in history of science and philosophy or in linguistics but you wouldn’t write that paper in physics or chemistry.
And I don’t mean to bring too much whataboutism into this, but I find it noteworthy that of criticism of two posts that I got recently downvoted for, one seemed to center around not enough explicitness and usage of common language
I asked you to move from focusing on words to focusing on empiric reality. Your post has the same problem. If you made a post asking “What do people mean when they say ‘tree’ without saying much about why that’s a useful question you are likely going to get downvoted on LessWrong. On the other hand a post like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fRwdkop6tyhi3d22L/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-tree-phylogenetically says interesting things about the concept of ‘tree’.
Why are you surprised that common usage of terms isn’t very explicit? That’s frequently how people use words in common language.
Well, I thought the rationality-and-adjacent community emphasizes and would be a good place to clarify and disentangle concepts and meanings. These are major places, on blogs etc., where ingroup and outgroup are popularly used online.
And I don’t mean to bring too much whataboutism into this, but I find it noteworthy that of criticism of two posts that I got recently downvoted for, one seemed to center around not enough explicitness and usage of common language (over the term “stereotype”) but the other about asking for too much explicitness (over the term “ïngroup”).
If someone uses a term, it makes sense to ask them what they mean with the term. Discussing terms in a vaccum is generally not productive.
Thomas Kuhn makes the point that physicists and chemists use different notions of what “molecule” means. That’s in hard sciences. Different scientific paradigms usually operationlize terms differently.
There are likely plenty of different academic disciplines that likely use the term “ingroups” / “outgroups”. There’s a good chance that many of them have their own operationalizing and some field likely even have multiple ones.
If you ask what’s concept of molecule is the most frequent we have to count physics papers and papers by chemists. You likely get into some problems because some papers aren’t specific about their notion. You likely can write a academic paper about it in history of science and philosophy or in linguistics but you wouldn’t write that paper in physics or chemistry.
I asked you to move from focusing on words to focusing on empiric reality. Your post has the same problem. If you made a post asking “What do people mean when they say ‘tree’ without saying much about why that’s a useful question you are likely going to get downvoted on LessWrong. On the other hand a post like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fRwdkop6tyhi3d22L/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-tree-phylogenetically says interesting things about the concept of ‘tree’.