The answer is, of course, (B), but what LW adds is a common vocabulary and a massive compilation of material in one place. Most people who learn how to think from disparate sources have a hard time codifying what they understand or teaching it to others. Vocabulary and discourse help immensely with that.
So, for instance, I can neatly tell people, “Reversed stupidity is not intelligence!”, and thus save myself incredible amounts of explanation about how real life issues are searches through spaces for tiny sub-spaces encoding solutions to your problem, and thus “reversing” some particularly bad solution hasn’t done any substantial work locating the sub-space I actually wanted.
LW vocabulary relabels a lot of traditional rationality terms.
Has anyone put together a translation dictionary? Because it seems to me that most of the terms are the same, and yet it is common to claim that relabeling is common without any sort of quantitative comparison.
Thanks for this. Let me know if you have any others and I will add them to this wiki page I created: Less Wrong Canon on Rationality.
Here are some more that I already had.
I am amused by this section of Anti-Inductiveness in this context, though:
Not that this is standard terminology—but perhaps “efficient market” doesn’t convey quite the same warning as “anti-inductive”. We would appear to need stronger warnings.
It was many times debated on LW whether LW needlessly invents new words for already existing terms, or whether the new words label things that are not considered elsewhere.
I don’t remember the outcomes of those debates. It seems to me they usually went like this:
“LW invents new words for many things that already have standard names.” “Can you give me five examples?” ”What LW calls X is called Y everywhere else.” (provides only one example) ”Actually X is not the same concept as Y.” “Yes it is.” ”It is not.” ...
So I guess at the end both sides believe they have won the debate.
I just ran into this one because it became used in a reddit thread: in this post Eliezer uses the term “catgirl” to mean a non-sentient sexbot. While that isn’t a traditional rationality term, I think it fits the spirit of the question (and predictably, many people responded to the Reddit thread using the normal meaning of “catgirl” rather than Eliezer’s.)
Another problem of LessWrong is that its isolationism represents a self-made problem (unlike demographics). Despite intense philosophical speculation, the users tend towards a proud contempt of mainstream and ancient philosophy[39] and this then leads to them having to re-invent the wheel. When this tendency is coupled with the metaphors and parables that are central to LessWrong’s attraction, it explains why they invent new terms for already existing concepts.[40] The compatibilism position on free will/determinism is called “requiredism”[41] on LessWrong, for example, and the continuum fallacy is relabeled “the fallacy of gray.” The end result is a Seinfeldesque series of superfluous neologisms.
In my view, RationalWiki cherry picks certain LessWrongers to bolster their case. You can’t really conclude that these people represent LessWrong as a whole. You can find plenty of discussion of the terminology issue here, for example, and the way RationalWiki presents things makes it sound like LessWrongers are ignorant. I find this sort of misrepresentation to be common at RationalWiki, unfortunately.
Their approach reduces to an anti-epistemic affect-heuristic, using the ugh-field they self-generate in a reverse affective death spiral (loosely based on our memeplex) as a semantic stopsign, when in fact the Kolmogorov distance to bridge the terminological inferential gap is but an epsilon.
The answer is, of course, (B), but what LW adds is a common vocabulary and a massive compilation of material in one place. Most people who learn how to think from disparate sources have a hard time codifying what they understand or teaching it to others. Vocabulary and discourse help immensely with that.
So, for instance, I can neatly tell people, “Reversed stupidity is not intelligence!”, and thus save myself incredible amounts of explanation about how real life issues are searches through spaces for tiny sub-spaces encoding solutions to your problem, and thus “reversing” some particularly bad solution hasn’t done any substantial work locating the sub-space I actually wanted.
It only creates a common vocabulary amongst a subculture. LW vocabulary relabels a lot of traditional rationality terms.
Has anyone put together a translation dictionary? Because it seems to me that most of the terms are the same, and yet it is common to claim that relabeling is common without any sort of quantitative comparison.
Huh, lemme do it.
Schelling fence → bright-line rule
Semantic stopsign → thought-terminating cliché
Anti-inductiveness → reverse Tinkerbell effect
“0 and 1 are not probabilities” → Cromwell’s rule
Tapping out → agreeing to disagree (which sometimes confuses LWers when they take the latter literally (see last paragraph of linked comment))
ETA (edited to add) → PS (post scriptum)
That’s off the top of my head, but I think I’ve seen more.
Thanks for this. Let me know if you have any others and I will add them to this wiki page I created: Less Wrong Canon on Rationality. Here are some more that I already had.
Fallacy of gray → Continuum fallacy
Motivated skepticism → disconfirmation bias
Marginally zero-sum game → arms race
Weirdness points --> idiosyncrasy credits
Funging Against → Considering the alternative
Akrasia → Procrastination/Resistance
Belief in Belief → Self-Deception
Ugh Field ->Aversion to (I had a better fit for this but I can’t think of it now)
Thanks for the list!
I am amused by this section of Anti-Inductiveness in this context, though:
Instrumental/terminal = hypothetical/categorical
rationalist taboo = unpacking.
Instrumental and terminal are pretty common terms. I’ve seen them in philosophy and business classes.
It was many times debated on LW whether LW needlessly invents new words for already existing terms, or whether the new words label things that are not considered elsewhere.
I don’t remember the outcomes of those debates. It seems to me they usually went like this:
“LW invents new words for many things that already have standard names.”
“Can you give me five examples?”
”What LW calls X is called Y everywhere else.” (provides only one example)
”Actually X is not the same concept as Y.”
“Yes it is.”
”It is not.”
...
So I guess at the end both sides believe they have won the debate.
I just ran into this one because it became used in a reddit thread: in this post Eliezer uses the term “catgirl” to mean a non-sentient sexbot. While that isn’t a traditional rationality term, I think it fits the spirit of the question (and predictably, many people responded to the Reddit thread using the normal meaning of “catgirl” rather than Eliezer’s.)
Previously.
RationalWiki discusses a few:
In my view, RationalWiki cherry picks certain LessWrongers to bolster their case. You can’t really conclude that these people represent LessWrong as a whole. You can find plenty of discussion of the terminology issue here, for example, and the way RationalWiki presents things makes it sound like LessWrongers are ignorant. I find this sort of misrepresentation to be common at RationalWiki, unfortunately.
Their approach reduces to an anti-epistemic affect-heuristic, using the ugh-field they self-generate in a reverse affective death spiral (loosely based on our memeplex) as a semantic stopsign, when in fact the Kolmogorov distance to bridge the terminological inferential gap is but an epsilon.
You know you’ve been reading Less Wrong too long when you only have to read that comment twice to understand it.
I got waaay too far into this before I realized what you were doing… so well done!
What are you talking about?
I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean by Kolmogorov distance.
Well yes. And I fully support LW moving towards more ordinary terminology. But it’s still good to have someone compiling it all together.