Nod. I do generally agree with this (fyi I think I more frequently complain to jargon-coiners that they are trying to coin jargon that won’t actually survive memetic drift, than I complain to people about using words wrong).
And reflecting on both this most recent example, and on Pivotal Acts Means Something Specific, (not sure if you had a third example in mind), I also think the way I went about arguing the case wasn’t that great (I was doing it in a way that sounded like “speak authoritatively about what the term means” as opposed to a clarifying “so-and-so defined the word this way, for these reasons.”)
I’ve updated my previous comment here to say “Eliezer defines it such-and-such way (not sure if you mean to be it as Eliezer defines it)”, and made a similar update to the pivotal act post.
I have more thoughts about meta-honesty and how it should be defined but it’s probably getting off topic.
The reason I made a big deal about these particular jargon-terms, was that they were both places where Eliezer noted “this is a concept that there will be a lot of pressure to distort or drift the term, and this concept is really important, so I’m going to add BIG PROMINENT WARNINGS about how important it is not to distort the concept.” (AFAICT he’s only done this twice, for metahonesty and pivotal acts)
I think I agree with you in both cases that Eliezer didn’t actually name the concept very well, but I think it was true that the concepts were important, and likely to get distorted, and probably still would have gotten distorted even if he had named them better. So I endorse people having the move available of “put a giant warning that attempts to fight against linguistic entropy, when you have a technical term you think is important to preserve its meaning, which the surrounding intellectual community helps reinforce.”
In this case I think there were some competing principles (protect technical terms, vs avoid cluttering the nomenclature-commons with bad terms). I was trying to do the former. My main update here is that I can do the former without imposing as much costs from the latter, and think more about the tradeoffs.
Nod. I do generally agree with this (fyi I think I more frequently complain to jargon-coiners that they are trying to coin jargon that won’t actually survive memetic drift, than I complain to people about using words wrong).
And reflecting on both this most recent example, and on Pivotal Acts Means Something Specific, (not sure if you had a third example in mind), I also think the way I went about arguing the case wasn’t that great (I was doing it in a way that sounded like “speak authoritatively about what the term means” as opposed to a clarifying “so-and-so defined the word this way, for these reasons.”)
I’ve updated my previous comment here to say “Eliezer defines it such-and-such way (not sure if you mean to be it as Eliezer defines it)”, and made a similar update to the pivotal act post.
I have more thoughts about meta-honesty and how it should be defined but it’s probably getting off topic.
Cool! This was very much in line with the kind of update I was aiming for here, cheers :)
I maybe want to add:
The reason I made a big deal about these particular jargon-terms, was that they were both places where Eliezer noted “this is a concept that there will be a lot of pressure to distort or drift the term, and this concept is really important, so I’m going to add BIG PROMINENT WARNINGS about how important it is not to distort the concept.” (AFAICT he’s only done this twice, for metahonesty and pivotal acts)
I think I agree with you in both cases that Eliezer didn’t actually name the concept very well, but I think it was true that the concepts were important, and likely to get distorted, and probably still would have gotten distorted even if he had named them better. So I endorse people having the move available of “put a giant warning that attempts to fight against linguistic entropy, when you have a technical term you think is important to preserve its meaning, which the surrounding intellectual community helps reinforce.”
In this case I think there were some competing principles (protect technical terms, vs avoid cluttering the nomenclature-commons with bad terms). I was trying to do the former. My main update here is that I can do the former without imposing as much costs from the latter, and think more about the tradeoffs.