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RichardKennaway comments on Biases of Intuitive and Logical Thinkers - Less Wrong
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It's useful as what Edward de Bono (who is too rarely mentioned on LessWrong) calls a "porridge word": a name given to a vague concept just in order to have a name to call something by when we know little about what it is. Like porridge, it has no flavour of its own, and can take on any shape without resistance. Or to drop the metaphor, the word says nothing about the thing it vaguely points to, and can come to mean whatever subsequent evidence tells us about it. But a porridge word is never an explanation: any definition of a porridge word should include somewhere the words "we don't know".
ETA: 29 hits for "de Bono" in the LW search box, so not as unmentioned as I had thought.
Is it the same thing which Marvin Minsky calls a "suitcase word"?
See http://edge.org/conversation/consciousness-is-a-big-suitcase : "Most words we use to describe our minds (like "consciousness", "learning", or "memory") are suitcase-like jumbles of different ideas. ... those suitcase-words (like intuition or consciousness) that all of us use to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. We use those words as suitcases in which to contain all sorts of mysteries that we can't yet explain."
Something like, although de Bono sees them more positively as tools for thought, that let you talk about something when you don't know what it is, and avoid premature commitment to explanations. Minsky is talking about what happens when they are mistaken for explanations.