I’m in the process of coming up with terminology for various theories, similar to lots of other work on LessWrong and The EA Forum.
Naming things is a bit of a unilateralist action. While community members don’t have to accept a specific naming proposal, they are likely to do so if they like the concept. I can’t think of many cases where Eliezer or someone named a concept, and the community decided that that name was poor, and renamed it.
However, I can’t find much theory on how to figure out great names for things, or even what to consider when doing so. I would have expected there to be comprehensive discussion around Information Architecture, UX Design, or the Library Sciences on this topic, but couldn’t identify much outside of card sorting and a few lists of rough heuristics.
This was also an issue for me when I did more software engineering, and I was then also frustrated by the lack of discussion I could find. The best there was work on Software Patterns, which I used primarily for naming conventions.
[Question] Existing work on creating terminology & names?
I’m in the process of coming up with terminology for various theories, similar to lots of other work on LessWrong and The EA Forum.
Naming things is a bit of a unilateralist action. While community members don’t have to accept a specific naming proposal, they are likely to do so if they like the concept. I can’t think of many cases where Eliezer or someone named a concept, and the community decided that that name was poor, and renamed it.
However, I can’t find much theory on how to figure out great names for things, or even what to consider when doing so. I would have expected there to be comprehensive discussion around Information Architecture, UX Design, or the Library Sciences on this topic, but couldn’t identify much outside of card sorting and a few lists of rough heuristics.
This was also an issue for me when I did more software engineering, and I was then also frustrated by the lack of discussion I could find. The best there was work on Software Patterns, which I used primarily for naming conventions.
Some related links I could find:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_convention
https://www2.staffingindustry.com/eng/Editorial/Archived-Blog-Posts/Adam-Pode-s-Blog/Probably-the-best-file-naming-convention-ever
https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/naming-conventions/
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48578/naming-features-of-an-app-or-site https://www.martyneumeier.com/strong-vs-weak-names