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Xachariah comments on Avoid inflationary use of terms - Less Wrong
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Thank you! This is the most rational post on proper word usage I've read on this site. There's been an evolution in the usage of inflationary terms, where people use them instead of proper words. It wasn't intentional; it was more of an emergent process where people added exponentially more inflationary terms until we reached a linguistic singularity.
I was losing hope the course would reverse, but now that you've pointed it out I have faith we can stop it. We should cryogenically store this post in the LessWrong wiki so that others can link back to it. We could even impliment a filter that goes through each post and nano-scrapes them for offending words. It would be the rationalest thing to do to increase the utility of those who use the site. I'd definitely rather live in the Everett Branch where people communicate without so much memetically-drifted jargon.
Alicorn and I regret that we have but two upvotes to give this comment.
I bet people could be convinced to sell you one for a reasonable fee.
ಠ_ಠ
Is this a metajoke or a misunderstanding?
It looks to me like the word 'rational' in this case is somewhat misused in the same way it's misused in titles and is and example of an inflationary use of the word, as per this post. Better to have said "the best post on proper word usage" or "a very good post on proper word usage".
Yeah, sounds like a misunderstanding. If you read through Xachariah's post again I think you'll find it's not just the word "rational"; he pretty much does roll call on all the inflationary words used as examples in the OP.
Oops, you're right.
Edit: I've gained way too much karma from this exchange when it seems I should've instead lost some for not paying attention.
Graceful recovery is more impressive, and useful to the community as a whole, than not having slipped up in the first place.
Christians seem to agree. :D
Perhaps a loss due to not paying attention, but I think making a rapid correction based on criticism is worthy of some amount of karma, even on something trivial. I've misunderstood loads of things and felt stupid every single time, and I do believe it helps some amount to see someone else publicly brush the dirt off here and there. For me one of the hallmarks of lousy dialogue quality is that it seems like 100% of participants either believe they have 0% error rate or that they cannot brush it off publicly for emotional reasons.
Beware my opinion though, it is possible that seeing you do something against my views, then later retract and agree with my views makes me feel good. I am sorry to say that it is difficult for me to tell if that is playing a significant role or if I am some sort of dialogue connoisseur. Perhaps more likely is that it is some finicky combination. Or even more insidiously, I could be pointing this out to try and seem more aware than I am. Oh how bias is like a six-headed, head-regenerating dragon.
The classical Lernaean hydra had one unkillable head which was eventually pinned under a rock and forgotten about.