= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jack comments on Woo! - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (57)
The term is actually derived from the verb to "woo".
The definition "A woo is a label for a commonly used argument or strategy to persuade" encompasses any commonly used and persuasive argument, including both valid and invalid arguments, or arguments that may or not be valid depending on how they're used (such as the Consensus Woo).
I think however an attribute attached to each Woo of its intrinsic validity would be a good idea. That kind of data could then be used to rate experts according to how often they use bad arguments, and hence contribute to the calculation of Eliezer's Correct Contrarian Cluster.
It's just a really annoying sounding word. Also, neologisms should be avoided whenever possible.
Yes... the presence of unnecessary jargon is a truly loathsome feature of many classes of developed knowledge... should be avoided at all costs...
At one point I considered having any arbitrary tag for a quote. However, this was too open-ended. I thought it made sense to constrain the meaning of the tags to the tactics used to persuade. I then started thinking about categories of such tactics, and realized that the instances of persuasive tactics didn't neatly neatly fall into categories. I found many tactics weren't clearly classified as an argument or a rhetorical device, but somewhere in-between. Furthermore, I realized: what value is there in even deliberating over that choice? It seemed sufficient to simply have a term that captured the general case: a persuasive tactic. Now, I could have chosen the term "argument" but then some people will complain that they're not all arguments. That's how the new term came about.