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Ishaan comments on The Relevance of Advanced Vocabulary to Rationality - Less Wrong
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I think that having words for things is very useful - both for communicating about things and thinking about them. I do think that having a larger and more specialized vocabulary about a topic actually makes you better at thinking about a topic.
For an example of the benefits of verbal labels spilling over into non-verbal domains, check out this experiment, which showed that giving verbal labels to things facilitates learning and raises peak performance on a visual discrimination task. Original paper.
Even taking into account purely personal experience, I feel extremely confident of this opinion. I am actually rather surprised at the number of users who believe that possessing a large vocabulary isn't extremely important for learning and thinking and general purpose / domain specific intelligence...for my part, I think it's actually one of the most important things, even more important than quantitative skills.
Could you list something like the ten most important words for rationality that the average person doesn't know and where they would benefit from learning them?
It's hard, because "rationality" is really general. This would be a lot easier with something more domain specific (epistemology? emotional regulation? efficiency?). Here's an attempt to start a list though:
Necessary and Sufficient - helps verbalize many real world logic problems
Opportunity Cost -" Your current action might be beneficial, but what could you be doing instead?"
Diminishing Returns-"Doing what worked before isn't always the best strategy
Rate-Limiting-Step- To speed up any process, Identify it
Pleiotropic constraint - (try applying it to non-genetic things)
implicit / explicit
I missed one of those words "pleiotropic", I add it to Anki. How wwould the 10 or 20 word list look like for epistemology/emotional regulation/efficiency?
Thank you for the link - this was essentially what I was looking for! I have yet to read the article, but it's an interesting conclusion - perhaps other commenters were simply going by their intuition or what they felt, instead of looking for evidence?