TheAncientGeek comments on Why Don't Rationalists Win? - Less Wrong
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It only creates a common vocabulary amongst a subculture. LW vocabulary relabels a lot of traditional rationality terms.
Has anyone put together a translation dictionary? Because it seems to me that most of the terms are the same, and yet it is common to claim that relabeling is common without any sort of quantitative comparison.
Huh, lemme do it.
Schelling fence → bright-line rule
Semantic stopsign → thought-terminating cliché
Anti-inductiveness → reverse Tinkerbell effect
"0 and 1 are not probabilities" → Cromwell's rule
Tapping out → agreeing to disagree (which sometimes confuses LWers when they take the latter literally (see last paragraph of linked comment))
ETA (edited to add) → PS (post scriptum)
That's off the top of my head, but I think I've seen more.
Thanks for this. Let me know if you have any others and I will add them to this wiki page I created: Less Wrong Canon on Rationality. Here are some more that I already had.
Funging Against -> Considering the alternative
Akrasia -> Procrastination/Resistance
Belief in Belief -> Self-Deception
Ugh Field ->Aversion to (I had a better fit for this but I can't think of it now)
Instrumental/terminal = hypothetical/categorical
rationalist taboo = unpacking.
Instrumental and terminal are pretty common terms. I've seen them in philosophy and business classes.
Thanks for the list!
I am amused by this section of Anti-Inductiveness in this context, though:
It was many times debated on LW whether LW needlessly invents new words for already existing terms, or whether the new words label things that are not considered elsewhere.
I don't remember the outcomes of those debates. It seems to me they usually went like this:
"LW invents new words for many things that already have standard names."
"Can you give me five examples?"
"What LW calls X is called Y everywhere else." (provides only one example)
"Actually X is not the same concept as Y."
"Yes it is."
"It is not."
...
So I guess at the end both sides believe they have won the debate.
I just ran into this one because it became used in a reddit thread: in this post Eliezer uses the term "catgirl" to mean a non-sentient sexbot. While that isn't a traditional rationality term, I think it fits the spirit of the question (and predictably, many people responded to the Reddit thread using the normal meaning of "catgirl" rather than Eliezer's.)
Previously.
RationalWiki discusses a few:
In my view, RationalWiki cherry picks certain LessWrongers to bolster their case. You can't really conclude that these people represent LessWrong as a whole. You can find plenty of discussion of the terminology issue here, for example, and the way RationalWiki presents things makes it sound like LessWrongers are ignorant. I find this sort of misrepresentation to be common at RationalWiki, unfortunately.
Their approach reduces to an anti-epistemic affect-heuristic, using the ugh-field they self-generate in a reverse affective death spiral (loosely based on our memeplex) as a semantic stopsign, when in fact the Kolmogorov distance to bridge the terminological inferential gap is but an epsilon.
You know you've been reading Less Wrong too long when you only have to read that comment twice to understand it.
I got waaay too far into this before I realized what you were doing... so well done!
What are you talking about?
I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by Kolmogorov distance.
Well yes. And I fully support LW moving towards more ordinary terminology. But it's still good to have someone compiling it all together.