I think this is mostly excellent, but one thing rings false to me.
When discussing costs of new words, you repeatedly say or assume something along the following lines: “The cost to me of introducing a new word is the inconvenience / cognitive burden / manipulation risk that I take on by using that new word”. That’s true if the question is “should I start using this new word?”. But if this is meant to be relevant to your posting things on LW proposing new terminology, the actual question is something more like “should this community start using this new word?”, and that brings in both new benefits and new costs.
You do explicitly acknowledge the benefits that come from a community, rather than an isolated individual, acquiring a new concept-word. But nothing in what you write acknowledges the costs:
If the rest of the community is using a new term, then I have to choose between getting it into my head and having trouble understanding what everyone else is saying.
If a community starts using a new term that isn’t standard elsewhere, then someone encountering the community for the first time will (1) have a little bit more difficulty making sense of what everyone else is saying and (2) be a little bit more likely to think “bunch of weirdos with their own jargon, avoid”.
These aren’t pure costs. (If I find some neologism useless, and the people holding a particular discussion find it useful enough that I can’t contribute to the discussion without getting my head around the neologism … well, maybe that indicates that I’m not familiar enough with some relevant issues for my opinions to be valuable. Maybe newcomers who aren’t willing to put in some effort to figure out the local jargon are less likely to be useful contributors. Maybe newcomers who would be put off by neologism-dense discussion are less likely to be useful contributors.) But they are costs, and not necessarily negligible ones.
(The following is pure handwaving unsupported by actual data: my impression is that highly neologistic communities are often unhealthy ones, perhaps partly because they put off other people who might criticize, perhaps because the neologisms actually have exclusion as a goal either consciously or not. I don’t know whether this is a likely failure mode for the LW community, nor even whether it’s actually a thing that happens much outside my imagination, but to me it feels like something worth worrying about a little bit.)
Yeah (strong upvote); this is why I was pretty darn apologetic in both the “sazen” and “cup-stacking skills” posts, and much less apologetic in the “setting the zero point” and “concentration of force” posts.
galaxy brain take that just fluttered through my mind and might be worth ignoring and/or not ignoring: what if every time you coin a new word/phrase, you had to get a new domain name for the word/phrase and make a website succinctly introducing people to the concept. see, eg, https://www.microsolidarity.cc/, for a website that I already use as “obvious-things-documentation website that defines a word clearly and also is a good word according to me”
That’s a brute-force solution to a nuanced social problem.
Telling newcomers to go read a website every time they encounter a new bit of jargon isn’t any more welcoming than telling them “go read the sequences”.
Yup, this is a good summary of why I avoid jargon whenever I can in online discussions; and in IRL discussions, I make sure people know about it before using it.
Something people don’t realize is that most of the exposure people get to an online community isn’t from its outwards-facing media, it’s from random blog posts and from reading internal discussions community members had about their subjects of choice. You can get a lot of insight into a community by seeing what they talk about between themselves, and what everybody takes as granted in these discussions.
If those discussions are full of non-obvious jargon (especially hard-to-Google jargon) and everybody is reacting to the jargon as if it’s normal and expected and replies with their own jargon, then the community is going to appear inaccessible and elitist.
It’s an open question how much people should filter their speech for not appearing elitist to uncharitable outside readers; but then again, this OP did point out that you don’t necessarily need to filter your speech, so much as change your ways of thinking such that elitist behavior doesn’t come naturally to you.
I think this is mostly excellent, but one thing rings false to me.
When discussing costs of new words, you repeatedly say or assume something along the following lines: “The cost to me of introducing a new word is the inconvenience / cognitive burden / manipulation risk that I take on by using that new word”. That’s true if the question is “should I start using this new word?”. But if this is meant to be relevant to your posting things on LW proposing new terminology, the actual question is something more like “should this community start using this new word?”, and that brings in both new benefits and new costs.
You do explicitly acknowledge the benefits that come from a community, rather than an isolated individual, acquiring a new concept-word. But nothing in what you write acknowledges the costs:
If the rest of the community is using a new term, then I have to choose between getting it into my head and having trouble understanding what everyone else is saying.
If a community starts using a new term that isn’t standard elsewhere, then someone encountering the community for the first time will (1) have a little bit more difficulty making sense of what everyone else is saying and (2) be a little bit more likely to think “bunch of weirdos with their own jargon, avoid”.
These aren’t pure costs. (If I find some neologism useless, and the people holding a particular discussion find it useful enough that I can’t contribute to the discussion without getting my head around the neologism … well, maybe that indicates that I’m not familiar enough with some relevant issues for my opinions to be valuable. Maybe newcomers who aren’t willing to put in some effort to figure out the local jargon are less likely to be useful contributors. Maybe newcomers who would be put off by neologism-dense discussion are less likely to be useful contributors.) But they are costs, and not necessarily negligible ones.
(The following is pure handwaving unsupported by actual data: my impression is that highly neologistic communities are often unhealthy ones, perhaps partly because they put off other people who might criticize, perhaps because the neologisms actually have exclusion as a goal either consciously or not. I don’t know whether this is a likely failure mode for the LW community, nor even whether it’s actually a thing that happens much outside my imagination, but to me it feels like something worth worrying about a little bit.)
Yeah (strong upvote); this is why I was pretty darn apologetic in both the “sazen” and “cup-stacking skills” posts, and much less apologetic in the “setting the zero point” and “concentration of force” posts.
galaxy brain take that just fluttered through my mind and might be worth ignoring and/or not ignoring: what if every time you coin a new word/phrase, you had to get a new domain name for the word/phrase and make a website succinctly introducing people to the concept. see, eg, https://www.microsolidarity.cc/, for a website that I already use as “obvious-things-documentation website that defines a word clearly and also is a good word according to me”
That’s a brute-force solution to a nuanced social problem.
Telling newcomers to go read a website every time they encounter a new bit of jargon isn’t any more welcoming than telling them “go read the sequences”.
Yup, this is a good summary of why I avoid jargon whenever I can in online discussions; and in IRL discussions, I make sure people know about it before using it.
Something people don’t realize is that most of the exposure people get to an online community isn’t from its outwards-facing media, it’s from random blog posts and from reading internal discussions community members had about their subjects of choice. You can get a lot of insight into a community by seeing what they talk about between themselves, and what everybody takes as granted in these discussions.
If those discussions are full of non-obvious jargon (especially hard-to-Google jargon) and everybody is reacting to the jargon as if it’s normal and expected and replies with their own jargon, then the community is going to appear inaccessible and elitist.
It’s an open question how much people should filter their speech for not appearing elitist to uncharitable outside readers; but then again, this OP did point out that you don’t necessarily need to filter your speech, so much as change your ways of thinking such that elitist behavior doesn’t come naturally to you.