I’ve thought a bit about this common pattern [name concepts with unusual names] I see in rationalist writing and tried to formulate a theory of why it happens that accounts not only for why we see it here but also why I don’t see it as much in other writing communities.
I see the pattern a lot in “spiritual” writings. See, for example, the “Integral Spirituality” being discussed in another recent post.
One is that different spiritual traditions have their own deep, complex system of jargon that sometimes stretch back thousands of years through multiple translations, schisms, and acts of syncretism. So when you first encounter it you can feel like it’s a lot and it’s new and why can’t these people just talk normally.
Of course, most LW readers live in a world full of jargon even before you add on the LW jargon, much of it from STEM disciplines. People from outside that cluster feel much the same way about STEM jargon as the average LW reader may feel about spiritual jargon. I point this out merely because I realized, when you brought up the spiritual example, that I wasn’t given a full account of what’s different about rationalists, maybe, in that there’s a tendency to make new jargon even when a literature search would reveal existing jargon exists.
Which is relevant to your point and my second thought, which is that you are right, many things we might call “new age spirituality” have the exact same jargon-coining pattern in their writing as rationalist writing does, with nearly ever author striving to elevate some metaphor to the level of word so that it can becomes a part of a wider shared approach to ontology.
This actually seems to suggest then that my story is too specific and pointing to Eliezer’s tendency to do this as a cause is maybe unfair: it may be a tendency that exists within many people, and there is something similar about the kind of people or the social incentives that are similar between rationalists and new age spiritualists that produces this behavior.
I point this out merely because I realized, when you brought up the spiritual example, that I wasn’t given a full account of what’s different about rationalists, maybe, in that there’s a tendency to make new jargon even when a literature search would reveal existing jargon exists.
I don’t think this is different for STEM, or cognitive science, or self-help. After having studied both CS and Math and studied some physics in my off-time, everyone constantly invents new names for all the things. To give you a taste, the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Tikhonov regularization:
Tikhonov regularization, named for Andrey Tikhonov, is the most commonly used method of regularization of ill-posed problems. In statistics, the method is known as ridge regression, in machine learning it is known as weight decay, and with multiple independent discoveries, it is also variously known as the Tikhonov–Miller method, the Phillips–Twomey method, the constrained linear inversion method, and the method of linear regularization. It is related to the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm for non-linear least-squares problems.
You will find the same pattern of lots of different names for the exact same thing in almost all statistical concepts in the Wikipedia series on statistics.
The color coding that was discussed there isn’t anything that the integral community came up with. Wilber looked around for existing paradigms of adult development and picked the one he liked best and took their terms.
I understand what Wilber knows when he says blue because I studied spiral dynamics in a context outside of Wilber’s work. It’s similar towards when rationalists take names of biases from the psychological literature that might not be known by wider society. It’s quite different from EY making up new terms.
Wilber’s whole idea about being integral is to take existing concepts from other domains.
I see the pattern a lot in “spiritual” writings. See, for example, the “Integral Spirituality” being discussed in another recent post.
I have two thoughts on this.
One is that different spiritual traditions have their own deep, complex system of jargon that sometimes stretch back thousands of years through multiple translations, schisms, and acts of syncretism. So when you first encounter it you can feel like it’s a lot and it’s new and why can’t these people just talk normally.
Of course, most LW readers live in a world full of jargon even before you add on the LW jargon, much of it from STEM disciplines. People from outside that cluster feel much the same way about STEM jargon as the average LW reader may feel about spiritual jargon. I point this out merely because I realized, when you brought up the spiritual example, that I wasn’t given a full account of what’s different about rationalists, maybe, in that there’s a tendency to make new jargon even when a literature search would reveal existing jargon exists.
Which is relevant to your point and my second thought, which is that you are right, many things we might call “new age spirituality” have the exact same jargon-coining pattern in their writing as rationalist writing does, with nearly ever author striving to elevate some metaphor to the level of word so that it can becomes a part of a wider shared approach to ontology.
This actually seems to suggest then that my story is too specific and pointing to Eliezer’s tendency to do this as a cause is maybe unfair: it may be a tendency that exists within many people, and there is something similar about the kind of people or the social incentives that are similar between rationalists and new age spiritualists that produces this behavior.
I don’t think this is different for STEM, or cognitive science, or self-help. After having studied both CS and Math and studied some physics in my off-time, everyone constantly invents new names for all the things. To give you a taste, the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Tikhonov regularization:
You will find the same pattern of lots of different names for the exact same thing in almost all statistical concepts in the Wikipedia series on statistics.
The color coding that was discussed there isn’t anything that the integral community came up with. Wilber looked around for existing paradigms of adult development and picked the one he liked best and took their terms.
I understand what Wilber knows when he says blue because I studied spiral dynamics in a context outside of Wilber’s work. It’s similar towards when rationalists take names of biases from the psychological literature that might not be known by wider society. It’s quite different from EY making up new terms.
Wilber’s whole idea about being integral is to take existing concepts from other domains.