About a decade ago people were worried that LW and cults would be associated through search [1] and and started using “phyg” instead. Having a secret ingroup word for “cult” to avoid being associated with it is actually much more culty than a few search results, and I wish we hadn’t done it.
I disagree, I think the rest of the world has built a lot of superweapons around certain terms to the point where you can’t really bring them up. I think it’s a pretty clever strategy to be like “If you come here to search for drama, you cannot get to drama with search terms.” For instance, I think if someone wanted to talk about some dynamics of enpvfz or frkhny zvfpbaqhpg in a community, they might be able to make a far less charged and tense discussion if everyone collectively agreed to put down the weapon “I might use a term while criticizing your behavior that means whenever a random person wants to look for dirt on you they can google this and use it to try to get you fired”.
Taking this line of reasoning one step further, it seems plausible to me that it’s pro social to do this sometimes anyway, just to create plausible deniability about why you’re doing it, similar to why it’s good to use Signal for lots of communications.
About a decade ago people were worried that LW and cults would be associated through search [1] and and started using “phyg” instead. Having a secret ingroup word for “cult” to avoid being associated with it is actually much more culty than a few search results, and I wish we hadn’t done it.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hxGEKxaHZEKT4fpms/our-phyg-is-not-exclusive-enough?commentId=4mSRMZxmopEj6NyrQ
I disagree, I think the rest of the world has built a lot of superweapons around certain terms to the point where you can’t really bring them up. I think it’s a pretty clever strategy to be like “If you come here to search for drama, you cannot get to drama with search terms.” For instance, I think if someone wanted to talk about some dynamics of enpvfz or frkhny zvfpbaqhpg in a community, they might be able to make a far less charged and tense discussion if everyone collectively agreed to put down the weapon “I might use a term while criticizing your behavior that means whenever a random person wants to look for dirt on you they can google this and use it to try to get you fired”.
Taking this line of reasoning one step further, it seems plausible to me that it’s pro social to do this sometimes anyway, just to create plausible deniability about why you’re doing it, similar to why it’s good to use Signal for lots of communications.