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.
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.