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.
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.