“maleficient” might be slightly too simplistic of a classification
There is an interesting phenomenon around culture wars where a crazy amount of concepts is generated to describe the contested territory with mind-boggling nuance. I have a hunch that this is not just expertise signaling, but actually useful for dissolving the conceptual superweapons in a sea of distinctions. This divests the original contentious immediately-decision-relevant concept of its special role that gives it power, by replacing it with a hundred slightly-decision-relevant distinctions where none of them have significant power.
A disagreement that was disputing a definition about placement of its boundaries becomes a disagreement about decision procedures in terms of many unchanging and uncontroversial definitions that cover all contested territory in detail. After the dispute is over, most of the technical distinctions can once again be discarded.
Could you give some examples? I understand you may not want to talk about culture war topics on lesswrong, so it’s fine if you decline, but without examples I unfortunately cannot picture what you’re talking about
There is an interesting phenomenon around culture wars where a crazy amount of concepts is generated to describe the contested territory with mind-boggling nuance. I have a hunch that this is not just expertise signaling, but actually useful for dissolving the conceptual superweapons in a sea of distinctions. This divests the original contentious immediately-decision-relevant concept of its special role that gives it power, by replacing it with a hundred slightly-decision-relevant distinctions where none of them have significant power.
A disagreement that was disputing a definition about placement of its boundaries becomes a disagreement about decision procedures in terms of many unchanging and uncontroversial definitions that cover all contested territory in detail. After the dispute is over, most of the technical distinctions can once again be discarded.
Could you give some examples? I understand you may not want to talk about culture war topics on lesswrong, so it’s fine if you decline, but without examples I unfortunately cannot picture what you’re talking about
The cost of this statement is feeding the frame where it’s not necessarily fine.