I do quite agree on the “the best jargon is self explanatory” thing, just noting that it’s often fairly hard. (I’m interested if you have alternate suggestions for demon thread, although fwiw I find “unholy thread” a bit more intuitive than ‘uphill battle in snow’, since there’s a lot of reasons something might be like an uphill battle in snow, and one feature of the demon thread is ‘everyone is being subtly warped into more aggressive, hostile versions of themselves’. I agree that connotation still pretty culture dependent though)
“Uphill battle” is a standard English idiom, such idioms are often fairly nonsensical if you think about them hard enough (e.g, “have your cake and eat it too”), but they get a free pass because everyone knows what they mean.
and one feature of the demon thread is ‘everyone is being subtly warped into more aggressive, hostile versions of themselves’
See that’s obvious in your mind, but I don’t think it’s obvious to others from the phrase ‘demon thread’. In fact, hearing it put like that the name suddenly makes much more sense! However, it would never be apparent to me from hearing the phrase. I would go for something like “Escalation Spiral” or “Reciprocal Misperception” or perhaps “Retaliation Bias”.
One thing I like to do before I pick a phrase in this vein, is take the most likely candidates and do a survey with people I know where I ask them, before they know anything else, what they think when they hear the phrase. That’s often steered me away from things I thought conveyed the concept well but actually didn’t.
It’s importantly different from a flame war – flame war implies things are already gone to hell, and people are all-out hostile at each other.
Escalation Spiral feels closest to what I was aiming for there (although it still feels a bit off to me, or at least I feel like I have a harder time using it in sentences for some reason. It felt kind of important to have the word “thread” in there, or to refer more directly to a forum discussion in some way)
The key point of a demon thread/escalation spiral/whatever is that it means things are subtly but noticeably bending towards confusion and hostility, even when everyone is well intentioned and on the same side, and you can see it happening in advance but it’s still real hard to do anything about.
If your product has subtle differences from existing products, that’s not a benefit. To buyers it’s a cost, and your product is supposed to have some benefit that compensates for that cost. For new words, that benefit is usually clarity, but the words “demon thread” are the opposite of clarity.
The whole point of jargon is to point to fine distinctions in things IMO
(not defending “demon thread” as a term, just the necessity of having a phrase for that concept. If I imagine calling a given LW demon thread a “flame war” I imagine people being like ’huh? it’s not a flame war?”)
Not objecting to the concept—having more concepts is good. But I think if you want to contribute to language, concepts are less than half of the work. Most of the work is finding the right words and making them work well with other words. Here’s a programming analogy: if you come up with a cool new algorithm and want to add it to a system that already has a billion lines of code, most of your effort should be spent on integrating with the system. Otherwise the whole system becomes crap over time. That’s how I think about these things: coining an ugly new word is affixing an ugly shed to the cathedral of language.
“Escalation spiral” is mixing two spatial metaphors, both far removed from the thing we’re talking about. That’s too abstract for me: being in a bad online argument doesn’t feel like walking up a spiral staircase. I prefer words that say how I feel about the thing—something like “quarreling”, “petty disagreement”, or “argumentative black hole”.
And for several months before writing the demon thread post, the entire ontology of how I thought about online discussion depended heavily on the demon-thread concept (which I still think is quite important). So, whenever I’d explain why I thought a given interaction was going poorly or how to improve it, I’d first have to explain a bunch of relevant concepts about the ontology, which made it harder to have a conversation.
I don’t know how much double-illusion of transparency has been going on. Maybe a lot. But my impression is that I’m now able to refer to “Demon Threads” as a small bite sized chunk of an argument, and
a) many people in the discussion have read the post, and even if the phrase was unintuitive to them, they know enough of what it means for me to make my point
b) the worst case scenario is that they think it means “bad thread”, which is, in fact, often good enough. (and in situations where the precise mechanics of demon threads matter, if the subject comes up and people seem to be missing subtleties there’s a post I can link to now that explains it in more detail)
[edit: I actually think it’s an important enough subgoal of the term to gracefully degrade into “bad thread”, which I’m less confident escalation spiral does, although unsure]
(I’ve updated the original demon thread article to begin with a much more succinct and hopefully clear definition at the top. I’ll try out “escalation spiral” and similar terms in conversation and see if they feel like they work, and consider updating the name)
For what it’s worth, I don’t feel like ‘escalation spiral’ is particularly optimal. The concept you’re going for is hard to compress into a few words because there are so many similar things. It was just the best I could come up with without spending a few hours thinking about it.
I do quite agree on the “the best jargon is self explanatory” thing, just noting that it’s often fairly hard. (I’m interested if you have alternate suggestions for demon thread, although fwiw I find “unholy thread” a bit more intuitive than ‘uphill battle in snow’, since there’s a lot of reasons something might be like an uphill battle in snow, and one feature of the demon thread is ‘everyone is being subtly warped into more aggressive, hostile versions of themselves’. I agree that connotation still pretty culture dependent though)
“Uphill battle” is a standard English idiom, such idioms are often fairly nonsensical if you think about them hard enough (e.g, “have your cake and eat it too”), but they get a free pass because everyone knows what they mean.
See that’s obvious in your mind, but I don’t think it’s obvious to others from the phrase ‘demon thread’. In fact, hearing it put like that the name suddenly makes much more sense! However, it would never be apparent to me from hearing the phrase. I would go for something like “Escalation Spiral” or “Reciprocal Misperception” or perhaps “Retaliation Bias”.
One thing I like to do before I pick a phrase in this vein, is take the most likely candidates and do a survey with people I know where I ask them, before they know anything else, what they think when they hear the phrase. That’s often steered me away from things I thought conveyed the concept well but actually didn’t.
Flame war. Don’t invent new words ;-)
It’s importantly different from a flame war – flame war implies things are already gone to hell, and people are all-out hostile at each other.
Escalation Spiral feels closest to what I was aiming for there (although it still feels a bit off to me, or at least I feel like I have a harder time using it in sentences for some reason. It felt kind of important to have the word “thread” in there, or to refer more directly to a forum discussion in some way)
The key point of a demon thread/escalation spiral/whatever is that it means things are subtly but noticeably bending towards confusion and hostility, even when everyone is well intentioned and on the same side, and you can see it happening in advance but it’s still real hard to do anything about.
If your product has subtle differences from existing products, that’s not a benefit. To buyers it’s a cost, and your product is supposed to have some benefit that compensates for that cost. For new words, that benefit is usually clarity, but the words “demon thread” are the opposite of clarity.
Is “escalation spiral” opposite of clarity?
The whole point of jargon is to point to fine distinctions in things IMO
(not defending “demon thread” as a term, just the necessity of having a phrase for that concept. If I imagine calling a given LW demon thread a “flame war” I imagine people being like ’huh? it’s not a flame war?”)
Not objecting to the concept—having more concepts is good. But I think if you want to contribute to language, concepts are less than half of the work. Most of the work is finding the right words and making them work well with other words. Here’s a programming analogy: if you come up with a cool new algorithm and want to add it to a system that already has a billion lines of code, most of your effort should be spent on integrating with the system. Otherwise the whole system becomes crap over time. That’s how I think about these things: coining an ugly new word is affixing an ugly shed to the cathedral of language.
Still curious if “escalation spiral” feels more or less clear.
Also wanted to flag that I think your most recent argument seems quite different from your initial one (i.e. “flame war. don’t invent new words.”)
“Escalation spiral” is mixing two spatial metaphors, both far removed from the thing we’re talking about. That’s too abstract for me: being in a bad online argument doesn’t feel like walking up a spiral staircase. I prefer words that say how I feel about the thing—something like “quarreling”, “petty disagreement”, or “argumentative black hole”.
And for several months before writing the demon thread post, the entire ontology of how I thought about online discussion depended heavily on the demon-thread concept (which I still think is quite important). So, whenever I’d explain why I thought a given interaction was going poorly or how to improve it, I’d first have to explain a bunch of relevant concepts about the ontology, which made it harder to have a conversation.
I don’t know how much double-illusion of transparency has been going on. Maybe a lot. But my impression is that I’m now able to refer to “Demon Threads” as a small bite sized chunk of an argument, and
a) many people in the discussion have read the post, and even if the phrase was unintuitive to them, they know enough of what it means for me to make my point
b) the worst case scenario is that they think it means “bad thread”, which is, in fact, often good enough. (and in situations where the precise mechanics of demon threads matter, if the subject comes up and people seem to be missing subtleties there’s a post I can link to now that explains it in more detail)
[edit: I actually think it’s an important enough subgoal of the term to gracefully degrade into “bad thread”, which I’m less confident escalation spiral does, although unsure]
(I’ve updated the original demon thread article to begin with a much more succinct and hopefully clear definition at the top. I’ll try out “escalation spiral” and similar terms in conversation and see if they feel like they work, and consider updating the name)
For what it’s worth, I don’t feel like ‘escalation spiral’ is particularly optimal. The concept you’re going for is hard to compress into a few words because there are so many similar things. It was just the best I could come up with without spending a few hours thinking about it.
Seconded; this interpretation didn’t ever occur to me before reading Raemon’s comment just now.