= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on Antijargon Project - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (29)
I agree that the distinction between neologisms and overloading existing words is an important one (and your examples are good!) - but I think the ordinary understanding of "jargon" covers both.
If someone announces "I'm going to stop using jargon!", and goes on to say things like "steel man", "shut up and multiply", "dark arts", then most people will agree he failed. The list of LessWrong Jargon contains plenty of non-neologisms like that.
Neologisms are a bit more obvious, but even the distinction between somewhat rare words (like "neologism") and specialized jargon (like "overloading") is pretty fuzzy.
But no-one's going to assume that “steel man” refers to a man made of steel, or “dark arts” to arts of a dark colour, so they do qualify as neologisms in fubarobfusco's sense. (OTOH, I do seem to recall someone on LW or OB who had assumed that “shut up and multiply” was an exhortation to have lots of children, and went WTF.)
A lot of the LW sense of "dark arts" could be found in the mainstream expression "dirty tricks", which is slightly more general but not much: "cognitive dirty tricks" would be pretty clear. A significant part of both terms' meaning is that using the techniques so named is unethical or unfair on account of being manipulative of others.
I don't recall this incident, but if a newcomer came across an evolutionary psychology discussion and saw that expression, that would be the obvious interpretation!