Same. I think there’s a tendency to see superficially similar names and say “ah, these are the same concept, we should use commonly used phrases to refer to them”, which sometimes miss the nuances that the new concept was actually aiming at.
Yeah, this can be really difficult to bring out. The word “just” is a good noticer for this creeping in.
It’s like a deliberate fallacy of compression: sure you can tilt your view so they look the same and call it “abstraction”, but maybe that view is too lossy for what we’re trying to do! You’re not distilling, you’re corrupting!
I don’t think the usual corrections for fallacies of compression can help either (eg. Taboo) because we’re operating at the subverbal layer here. It’s much harder to taboo cleverness at that layer. Better off meditating on the virtue of The Void instead.
But it is indeed a good habit to try to unify things, for efficiency reasons. Just don’t get caught up on those gains.
Same. I think there’s a tendency to see superficially similar names and say “ah, these are the same concept, we should use commonly used phrases to refer to them”, which sometimes miss the nuances that the new concept was actually aiming at.
Yeah, this can be really difficult to bring out. The word “just” is a good noticer for this creeping in.
It’s like a deliberate fallacy of compression: sure you can tilt your view so they look the same and call it “abstraction”, but maybe that view is too lossy for what we’re trying to do! You’re not distilling, you’re corrupting!
I don’t think the usual corrections for fallacies of compression can help either (eg. Taboo) because we’re operating at the subverbal layer here. It’s much harder to taboo cleverness at that layer. Better off meditating on the virtue of The Void instead.
But it is indeed a good habit to try to unify things, for efficiency reasons. Just don’t get caught up on those gains.