I think that in general people have a tendency to create too much notation rather than too little (“advanced vocabulary” is really just a type of notation). The LessWrong community seems particularly susceptible to this: we often create new words when existing concepts already exist, or when it wouldn’t be that hard to explain what we mean in the first place. This is problematic because it makes idea transfer with outsiders far more difficult: not just because they are less willing to engage, but because one now needs to translate between notations, which is often much harder than it would naievely seem. So I would actually be in favor of less vocabulary, more effort to tie existing concepts to concepts that exist in other communities, and more effort on simple explanations of ideas that don’t require someone to have read the Sequences.
we often create new words when existing concepts already exist
Every time I read this, it comes without specific examples. And it keeps returning for years.
If some people think this is a real problem, the best way to solve it would be to publish a dictionary of LW-specific words and their equivalents used by the outside world. I believe that such article would be upvoted, and if there is an agreement that those words really are equivalent, many of them would be replaced. At least you could give a hyperlink to that article every time this topic appears in the debate.
If writing an article is too much work, writing a short list or just a single example in the Open Thread would be a good start.
we often create new words when existing concepts already exist
Every time I read this, it comes without specific examples.
It doesn’t come up much (Google only gave me twoexamples on LW), but “funge against” winds me up. I don’t see what the phrase does that “displace”, “crowd out”, and “substitute for” don’t do already. It’s a needless, opaque neologism.
Here are some. One reason that translation between jargons is hard is because there are often not words in one jargon that can be used exactly in place of words in the other jargon. I’ve therefore included substitute words as long as they point to the same concepts. The words below were taken from the LW wiki.
Belief as attire: jumping on the bandwagon, groupthink
Dark arts: hard sell, manipulation
Fully general counterargument: reductio ad absurdum
Fuzzy: warm fuzzy feeling, self gratification
Luminosity: self awareness, emotional awareness
Ugh field: aversion
I like: jumping on the bandwagon, manipulation, self awareness. On the other hand, I disagree with the reductio ad absurdum. Reduction as absurdum is like this: “if X, then Y, but Y is obviously silly, therefore not X.” The Y is somehow derived from X. Fully general counterargument is something that actually does not depend on X (this is what makes it fully general); it is a chain of words where you can substitute any value X and get the result “therefore not X”. Being a fully general counterargument is a semantic property of some arguments; and probably most of them are syntactically reduction ad absurdum.
More meta: that’s the point. If we have specific examples, we can discuss them specifically, and perhaps accept some and refuse others. (And even the act of refusing is helpful for communication, because it makes more clear what exactly we mean by saying something.)
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that reductio ad absurdum is the weakest of the examples I gave, but let me try to justify it anyways: if X is a fully general counterargument, then we can use it to argue against true statements as well as false ones. So applying X without any additional justification would lead to patently false conclusions, and therefore (by reductio ad absurdum) X is not a valid form of reasoning. Perhaps this is not the best word for it, but it is similar to a very pervasive idea in mathematics, where when formulating possible approaches to prove a theorem, a key criterion is whether those approaches can distinguish between the theorem and similar statements that are known or suspected to be false.
ETA: And yes, I agree that specific examples are good!
Yes, that’s the usual application, but it’s the wrong level of generality to make them synonyms. “Fully general counterargument” is one particular absurdity that you can reduce things to. Even after you’ve specified that you’re performing a reductio ad absurdum against the proposition “argument X is sound”, you still need to say what the absurd conclusion is, so you still need a term for “fully general counterargument”.
I think that in general people have a tendency to create too much notation rather than too little (“advanced vocabulary” is really just a type of notation). The LessWrong community seems particularly susceptible to this: we often create new words when existing concepts already exist, or when it wouldn’t be that hard to explain what we mean in the first place. This is problematic because it makes idea transfer with outsiders far more difficult: not just because they are less willing to engage, but because one now needs to translate between notations, which is often much harder than it would naievely seem. So I would actually be in favor of less vocabulary, more effort to tie existing concepts to concepts that exist in other communities, and more effort on simple explanations of ideas that don’t require someone to have read the Sequences.
Every time I read this, it comes without specific examples. And it keeps returning for years.
If some people think this is a real problem, the best way to solve it would be to publish a dictionary of LW-specific words and their equivalents used by the outside world. I believe that such article would be upvoted, and if there is an agreement that those words really are equivalent, many of them would be replaced. At least you could give a hyperlink to that article every time this topic appears in the debate.
If writing an article is too much work, writing a short list or just a single example in the Open Thread would be a good start.
It doesn’t come up much (Google only gave me two examples on LW), but “funge against” winds me up. I don’t see what the phrase does that “displace”, “crowd out”, and “substitute for” don’t do already. It’s a needless, opaque neologism.
Edit, 5 days later: oh no!
Here are some. One reason that translation between jargons is hard is because there are often not words in one jargon that can be used exactly in place of words in the other jargon. I’ve therefore included substitute words as long as they point to the same concepts. The words below were taken from the LW wiki.
Belief as attire: jumping on the bandwagon, groupthink Dark arts: hard sell, manipulation Fully general counterargument: reductio ad absurdum Fuzzy: warm fuzzy feeling, self gratification Luminosity: self awareness, emotional awareness Ugh field: aversion
Thank you for the specific examples!
I like: jumping on the bandwagon, manipulation, self awareness. On the other hand, I disagree with the reductio ad absurdum. Reduction as absurdum is like this: “if X, then Y, but Y is obviously silly, therefore not X.” The Y is somehow derived from X. Fully general counterargument is something that actually does not depend on X (this is what makes it fully general); it is a chain of words where you can substitute any value X and get the result “therefore not X”. Being a fully general counterargument is a semantic property of some arguments; and probably most of them are syntactically reduction ad absurdum.
More meta: that’s the point. If we have specific examples, we can discuss them specifically, and perhaps accept some and refuse others. (And even the act of refusing is helpful for communication, because it makes more clear what exactly we mean by saying something.)
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that reductio ad absurdum is the weakest of the examples I gave, but let me try to justify it anyways: if X is a fully general counterargument, then we can use it to argue against true statements as well as false ones. So applying X without any additional justification would lead to patently false conclusions, and therefore (by reductio ad absurdum) X is not a valid form of reasoning. Perhaps this is not the best word for it, but it is similar to a very pervasive idea in mathematics, where when formulating possible approaches to prove a theorem, a key criterion is whether those approaches can distinguish between the theorem and similar statements that are known or suspected to be false.
ETA: And yes, I agree that specific examples are good!
Yes, that’s the usual application, but it’s the wrong level of generality to make them synonyms. “Fully general counterargument” is one particular absurdity that you can reduce things to. Even after you’ve specified that you’re performing a reductio ad absurdum against the proposition “argument X is sound”, you still need to say what the absurd conclusion is, so you still need a term for “fully general counterargument”.
It often happens that you invent new words precisely because you aren’t familiar with existing words for a given task.