Hi, Wei—thanks for commenting! (And sorry for the arguably somewhat delayed reply; it’s been a really tough week for me.)
can you give a concrete example that might come up on LW or otherwise have some relevance to us?
Is Slate Star Codex close enough? In his “Anti-Reactionary FAQ”, Scott Alexander writes—
Why use this made-up word [“demotism”] so often?
Suppose I wanted to argue that mice were larger than grizzly bears. I note that both mice and elephants are “eargreyish”, meaning grey animals with large ears. We note that eargreyish animals such as elephants are known to be extremely large. Therefore, eargreyish animals are larger than noneargreyish animals and mice are larger than grizzly bears.
As long as we can group two unlike things together using a made-up word that traps non-essential characteristics of each, we can prove any old thing.
This post is mostly just a longer, more detailed version (with some trivial math) of the point Scott is making in these three paragraphs: mice and elephants form a cluster if you project into the subspace spanned by “color” and “relative ear size”, but using a word to point to a cluster in such a “thin”, impoverished subspace is a dishonest rhetorical move when your interlocutors are trying to use language to mostly talk about the many other features of animals which don’t covary much with color and relative-ear-size. This is obvious in the case of mice and elephants, but Scott is arguing that a similar mistake is being made by reactionaries who classify Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as “demotist”, and then argue that liberal democracies suffer from the same flaws on account of being “demotist.” Scott had previously dubbed this kind of argument the “noncentral fallacy” and analyzed how it motivates people to argue over category boundaries like “murder” or “theft.”
My interest in terminological debates is usually not to discover new ideas but to try to prevent confusion (when readers are likely to infer something wrong from a name, e.g., because of different previous usage or because a compound term is defined to mean something that’s different from what one would reasonably infer from the combination of individual terms).
I agree that preventing confusion is the main reason to care about terminology; it only takes a moderate amount of good faith and philosophical sophistication for interlocutors to negotiate their way past terminology clashes (“I wouldn’t use that word because I think it conflates these-and-such things, but for the purposes of this conversation …” &c.) and make progress discussing actual ideas. But I wanted to have this post explaining in detail a particular thing that can go wrong when philosophical sophistication is lacking or applied selectively, which was mostly covered by Eliezer’s “A Human’s Guide to Words”, but of which I hadn’t seen the “which subspace to pay attention to / do clustering on” problem treated anywhere in such terms.
Thanks, I think I have a better idea of what you’re proposing now, but I’m still not sure I understand it correctly, or if it makes sense.
mice and elephants form a cluster if you project into the subspace spanned by “color” and “relative ear size”, but using a word to point to a cluster in such a “thin”, impoverished subspace is a dishonest rhetorical move when your interlocutors are trying to use language to mostly talk about the many other features of animals which don’t covary much with color and relative-ear-size.
But there are times when it’s not a dishonest rhetorical move to do this, right? For example suppose an invasive predator species has moved into some new area, and I have an hypothesis that animals with grey skin and big ears might be the only ones in that area who can escape being hunted to extinction (because I think the predator has trouble seeing grey and big ears are useful for hearing the predator and only this combination of traits offers enough advantage for a prey species to survive). While I’m formulating this hypothesis, discussing how plausible it is, applying for funding, doing field research, etc., it seems useful to create a new term like “eargreyish” so I don’t have to keep repeating “grey animals with relatively large ears”.
Since it doesn’t seem to make sense to never use a word to point to a cluster in a “thin” subspace, what is your advice for when it’s ok to do this or accept others doing this?
(I continue to regret my slow reply turnaround time.)
But there are times when it’s not a dishonest rhetorical move to do this, right?
Right. In Scott’s example, the problem was using the “eargrayish” concept to imply (bad) inferences about size, but your example isn’t guilty of this.
However, it’s also worth emphasizing that the inferential work done by words and categories is often spread across many variables, including things that aren’t as easy to observe as the features that were used to perform the categorization. You can infer that “mice” have very similar genomes, even if you never actually sequence their DNA. Or if you lived before DNA had been discovered, you might guess that there exists some sort of molecular mechanism of heredity determining the similarities between members of a “species”, and you’d be right (whereas similar such guesses based on concepts like “eargrayishness” would probably be wrong).
Since it doesn’t seem to make sense to never use a word to point to a cluster in a “thin” subspace, what is your advice for when it’s ok to do this or accept others doing this?
Um, watch out for cases where the data clusters in the “thin” subspace, but doesn’t cluster in other dimensions that are actually relevant in the context that you’re using the word? (I wish I had a rigorous reduction of what “relevant in the context” means, but I don’t.)
As long as we’re talking about animal taxonomy (dolphins, mice, elephants, &c.), a concrete example of a mechanism that systematically produces this kind of distribution might be Batesian or Müllerian mimicry (or convergent evolution more generally, as with dolphins’ likeness to fish). If you’re working as a wildlife photographer and just want some cool snake photos, then a concept of “red-‘n’-yellow stripey snake” that you formed from observation (abstractly: you noticed a cluster in the subspace spanned by “snake colors” and “snake stripedness”) might be completely adequate for your purposes: as a photographer, you just don’t care whether or not there’s more structure to the distribution of snakes than what looks good in your pictures. On the other hand, if you actually have to handle the snakes, suddenly the difference between the harmless scarlet kingsnake and the poisonous coral snake (“red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, venom lack”) is very relevant and you want to be modeling them as separate species!
Hi, Wei—thanks for commenting! (And sorry for the arguably somewhat delayed reply; it’s been a really tough week for me.)
Is Slate Star Codex close enough? In his “Anti-Reactionary FAQ”, Scott Alexander writes—
This post is mostly just a longer, more detailed version (with some trivial math) of the point Scott is making in these three paragraphs: mice and elephants form a cluster if you project into the subspace spanned by “color” and “relative ear size”, but using a word to point to a cluster in such a “thin”, impoverished subspace is a dishonest rhetorical move when your interlocutors are trying to use language to mostly talk about the many other features of animals which don’t covary much with color and relative-ear-size. This is obvious in the case of mice and elephants, but Scott is arguing that a similar mistake is being made by reactionaries who classify Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as “demotist”, and then argue that liberal democracies suffer from the same flaws on account of being “demotist.” Scott had previously dubbed this kind of argument the “noncentral fallacy” and analyzed how it motivates people to argue over category boundaries like “murder” or “theft.”
Downthread, you wrote—
I agree that preventing confusion is the main reason to care about terminology; it only takes a moderate amount of good faith and philosophical sophistication for interlocutors to negotiate their way past terminology clashes (“I wouldn’t use that word because I think it conflates these-and-such things, but for the purposes of this conversation …” &c.) and make progress discussing actual ideas. But I wanted to have this post explaining in detail a particular thing that can go wrong when philosophical sophistication is lacking or applied selectively, which was mostly covered by Eliezer’s “A Human’s Guide to Words”, but of which I hadn’t seen the “which subspace to pay attention to / do clustering on” problem treated anywhere in such terms.
Thanks, I think I have a better idea of what you’re proposing now, but I’m still not sure I understand it correctly, or if it makes sense.
But there are times when it’s not a dishonest rhetorical move to do this, right? For example suppose an invasive predator species has moved into some new area, and I have an hypothesis that animals with grey skin and big ears might be the only ones in that area who can escape being hunted to extinction (because I think the predator has trouble seeing grey and big ears are useful for hearing the predator and only this combination of traits offers enough advantage for a prey species to survive). While I’m formulating this hypothesis, discussing how plausible it is, applying for funding, doing field research, etc., it seems useful to create a new term like “eargreyish” so I don’t have to keep repeating “grey animals with relatively large ears”.
Since it doesn’t seem to make sense to never use a word to point to a cluster in a “thin” subspace, what is your advice for when it’s ok to do this or accept others doing this?
(I continue to regret my slow reply turnaround time.)
Right. In Scott’s example, the problem was using the “eargrayish” concept to imply (bad) inferences about size, but your example isn’t guilty of this.
However, it’s also worth emphasizing that the inferential work done by words and categories is often spread across many variables, including things that aren’t as easy to observe as the features that were used to perform the categorization. You can infer that “mice” have very similar genomes, even if you never actually sequence their DNA. Or if you lived before DNA had been discovered, you might guess that there exists some sort of molecular mechanism of heredity determining the similarities between members of a “species”, and you’d be right (whereas similar such guesses based on concepts like “eargrayishness” would probably be wrong).
(As it is written: “Having a word for a thing, rather than just listing its properties, is a more compact code precisely in those cases where we can infer some of those properties from the other properties.”)
Um, watch out for cases where the data clusters in the “thin” subspace, but doesn’t cluster in other dimensions that are actually relevant in the context that you’re using the word? (I wish I had a rigorous reduction of what “relevant in the context” means, but I don’t.)
As long as we’re talking about animal taxonomy (dolphins, mice, elephants, &c.), a concrete example of a mechanism that systematically produces this kind of distribution might be Batesian or Müllerian mimicry (or convergent evolution more generally, as with dolphins’ likeness to fish). If you’re working as a wildlife photographer and just want some cool snake photos, then a concept of “red-‘n’-yellow stripey snake” that you formed from observation (abstractly: you noticed a cluster in the subspace spanned by “snake colors” and “snake stripedness”) might be completely adequate for your purposes: as a photographer, you just don’t care whether or not there’s more structure to the distribution of snakes than what looks good in your pictures. On the other hand, if you actually have to handle the snakes, suddenly the difference between the harmless scarlet kingsnake and the poisonous coral snake (“red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, venom lack”) is very relevant and you want to be modeling them as separate species!