ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure whether I buy that argument. It would be quite possible to go out and study naming in the real world and study problems that arise and what goes well.
Yes, I agree. That's why I like the analogy to composition: most of the songs you might write, if you were sampling at random from song-space, are terrible. So we don't sample randomly: our search through song-space is guided by our own reactions and a great body of accumulated theory and lore. But despite that, the consensus on which songs are the best, and on how to write them, is very loose.
(Actually it's worse, I think composition is somewhat anti-inductive, but that's outside the scope of this thread)
My experience is that naming is similar. There are some concrete tricks you can learn -- do read the C2 wiki if you don't already -- and there's a little bit of theory, some of which I tried to share insofar as I understand it. But naming is communication, communication requires empathy, and empathy is a two-place word: you can't have empathy in the abstract, you can only have empathy for someone.
It might help to see a concrete example of this tension. I don't endorse everything in this essay. But it's a long-form example of a man grappling with the problem I've tried to describe.