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Kevin92 comments on Conversation Halters - Less Wrong
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I notice I'm confused.
I literally don't know what it means to say "The definition of words are not arbitrary." I suspect either that I lack the background knowledge to understand this sentence, or ironically Eliezer and I may have a different definition of the word arbitrary.
Furthermore, I don't know what the implications are of what he's trying to say. Is he saying that language is not a system of symbols? Is he saying that every word has a "correct" definition?
This but with different quantifiers: some possible definitions are incorrect, as discussed in the article linked in that paragraph.
If there's a missing qualifier here then it's “in practice”. I can perfectly well randomly select an element of the power set of all things which could possibly be referred to by nouns, and declare that that is the definition of “flutzpah”, and that would be an arbitrarily defined word — which no one would ever have a reason to use to actually communicate with.
Read the linked post. The main reasons we can't define words however we like are because that leads to not cutting reality at the joints and because humans are bad at avoiding hidden inferences. Not being a biologist, I can't assign an ideal definition to "duck", but I do know that calling lobsters ducks is clearly unhelpful to reasoning. For a more realistic example, note the way Reactionaries (Michael Anissimov, Mencius Moldbug and such) use "demotist" to associate things that are clearly not similar.