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blacktrance comments on Yet more "stupid" questions - Less Wrong
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If you taboo the word "nihilism", the question almost answers itself.
Can you elaborate? I don't understand this.
Ask "Why are you not a nihilist?", replacing the word "nihilist" with a phrase that objectively explains it to a person unfamiliar with the concept of nihilism.
Rationalist taboo is a technique for fighting muddles in discussions. By prohibiting the use of a certain word and all the words synonymous to it, people are forced to elucidate the specific contextual meaning they want to express, thus removing ambiguity otherwise present in a single word.
Take free will as an example. To my knowledge, many compatiblists (free will and determinism are compatible) and people who deny that free will exist do not disagree on anything other than what the correct label for their position is. I imagine the same can often be said about nihilism.
Indeed, Hume, perhaps the most famous compatibilist, denies the existence of free will in his Treatise, only advocating compatibilism later, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It certainly seems to me that he doesn't actually change his mind; his early position seems to be "this thing people call free will is incoherent, so we should talk about things that matter instead," and his later position seems to be "people won't stop talking about free will, so I'll call the things that matter free will and reject the incoherent stuff under some other label (indifference)."
So his opinions kind of did change over that time period, but only from "I reject these words" to "alright, if you insist, I'll try to salvage these words". I'm not sure which policy's best. The second risks arguments with people who don't know your definitions. They will pass through two phases, the first is where the two of you legitimately think you're talking about the same thing but the other is a total idiot who doesn't know what it's like. The second phase is perhaps justifiable umbrage on their discovering that you are using a definition you totally just made up, and how were they even supposed to know.
The former position, however, requires us to leave behind what we already sort of kind of suspect about these maybe-not-actual concepts and depart into untilled, unpopulated lands, with a significant risk of wheel-reinvention.
What's a nihilist, and how would you distinguish it empirically from Eliezer?
If you meant to ask why we don't benefit your tribe politically by associating ourselves with it: we don't see any moral or practical reason to do so. It it turns out that nihilists have actually faced discrimination from the general public in the ways atheists have (and therefore declaring ourselves nihilists would help them at our slight expense), I might have to reconsider. Though happily, I don't belong to a religion that requires this, even if I turn out to meet the dictionary definition.