Thank you! This is the most rational post on proper word usage I've read on this site. There's been an evolution in the usage of inflationary terms, where people use them instead of proper words. It wasn't intentional; it was more of an emergent process where people added exponentially more inflationary terms until we reached a linguistic singularity.
I was losing hope the course would reverse, but now that you've pointed it out I have faith we can stop it. We should cryogenically store this post in the LessWrong wiki so that others can link back to it. We could even impliment a filter that goes through each post and nano-scrapes them for offending words. It would be the rationalest thing to do to increase the utility of those who use the site. I'd definitely rather live in the Everett Branch where people communicate without so much memetically-drifted jargon.
Upvoted. Edit: Since this was moved to Main, I've changed this to a downvote. I don't think it belongs there.
More words this is happening to:
Everett branch
Can you give an example of the kind of usage of "Everett branch" that you consider to be inappropriately inflationary? I cannot think of an example. This either means that I have not cached the undesirable usages or that I disagree about when it is appropriate to use the phrase.
A possibility is that I actually think in terms of abstract decision theoretical concerns, Many Worlds and Big Worlds in general more than average. This would make me more likely to use the phrase as a literal description of thoughts about a scenario than as, say, just an attempt to make a preference sound a little bit cooler.
I would add "Prisoner's Dilemma" to the list. I've seen it used to describe basically any game theoretic scenario with payoffs rather than just one example of how (relative) payoffs could be set up in a symmetrical two person game.
I am loathe to point to a comment a user has actually made, but anything like "I decided to go to grad school because I'm better off in the Everett branch where I have a post-grad degree than the Everett branch in which I don't." No, Mr. Example, you are not going to turn into 1/sqrt(2)|grad student> + 1/sqrt(2)|not grad student>. To the extent to which you are able to choose at all, your decision algorithm is deterministic. What you really mean is "I'm better off in the counterfactual where I have a post-grad degree."
Looking up the comments I remember, I can find two or three comments that are not quite as bad as the one I made up above, but still seem to confuse Everett branches with counterfactual choices. They're usually corrected by other users.
I'm pleased and impressed that you used a mistake of your own to illustrate the point; that's an excellent way to disarm people's usual aversion to a critique of a common practice. Good post!
Biology is ridden with this right now - terms in immediate danger of inflating into their own universe include:
"sytems biology" "High throughput" "Integrative"
As well of course as the old favourites - "complexity" and "emergence". I'm reminded of Steven Pinkers "euphemistic treadmill". In both cases we have words losing their information content through use - losing meaning in terms of information, and in the latter sense at least gaining in in terms of emotional weight. Maybe there's a general tendency for words to melt out into smears across meaning-space because of the way we learn them by association? After all the process if unbounded should lead you to associate words with everything right?
Cybernetics is one of my favorite words (and fields of study) but it got so destroyed by misuse that even cyberneticists don't use it anymore and we have to use obnoxiously long winded phrases such as "the study of dynamic control systems which utilize feedback."
Similarly, Cryogenics is the science of keeping things really cold. And of course Cryonics is a form of that. But saying "Cryogenics" when you really mean exactly Cryonics is an incredibly harmful practice which actual Cryonicists generally avoid. Most people who work in Cryogenics have nothing to do with Cryonics, and this kind of confusion in popular culture has apparently engendered animosity towards Cryonics among Cryogenics specialists.
I wouldn't so much call that "inflationary". I'd usually call that a typographical error! ie. The speaker is usually intending to use the label of the corpsicle specific practice and just said it wrong.
To sum up: Avoid making words cheaper and less effective for their specialized tasks. Don't use them for things where a better and more appropriate term exists. As your brain gets used to an idea, be prepared to discard old terms you have co-opted from other domains that were really just useful placeholders to get you started. Specialized jargon exists for a reason!
Excellent point, and excellent post. I expect to link here in the future.
However the reaction of some lesswrongers to the title I initially chose for the post was distinctly negative. The title was "Most rational programming language?"
Many people have chosen similar titles for their posts. Many. It is very unusual to respond to criticism by writing a good post like "Avoid Inflationary use of Terms."
How did you do it?
Perhaps you initially had a defensive reaction to criticism just as others have had, and in addition have a way of responding to criticism well. Alternatively, perhaps your only advantage ov...
This reminds me a little of Thomas Sowell's essay "Verbal Inflation" from his book "The Vision of the Anointed." He makes similar points about misused words becoming less meaningful, but does it in the context of politics. His primary focus, however, is inflationary terms as a means of dishonest rhetoric, rather than as a common mistake people innocently make.
All this may be possible thanks to a "driverless" car that does a human driver's normal job and much more. The car is operated by a computer that obtains information 10 times per second from short-range transmitters on surrounding road conditions, including where other cars are and what they are doing. That's exponentially faster than the human mind can process the same information.
Ack!
On the use of the word rational, I agree, but think you could go even farther. Even terms like "optimal" or "best" elide the fact that you have to optimize some particular goal.
In your example, if you don't know enough about programming languages to know exactly what you want to optimize, a more specific and answerable question might be, "What are the advantages and disadvantages of different programming languages? which ones are similar to which others? Which ones would help me learn others, and which ones would give me skills I can transfer into other parts of life?"
"Bayesian evidence" has sometimes been inflated from "evidence as mathematically measured by Bayesian probability theory" to simply mean "evidence, but it sounds so much more sciencey and rational to call it 'Bayesian'", or further to mean "not just useful evidence, but useless evidence as well".
Just use the googlebox here for the phrase "is Bayesian evidence for" to see what I'm talking about. Or Google itself -- there are only 7 hits, three of them to LW.
(Agree, expanding.)
Just use the googlebox here for the phrase "is Bayesian evidence for" to see what I'm talking about. Or Google itself -- there are only 7 hits, three of them to LW.
That phrase makes sense when describing evidence that is not considered evidence according to other standards - such as science or traditional rationalism. For example "Absence of evidence is (Bayesian) evidence of absence".
This is also why I discourage people from overusing words like "awesome" and "magnificent"; I want to be able to say that about the Horsehead Nebula, but other people keep applying it to skateboard tricks. It really is very much like living in Zimbabwe and finding out your million dollars in the bank has just been turned into the price of a pack of gum.
It's also why the best way to defuse an offensive word is actually to use it a lot; the more often we say "fuck" the less "fuck" will seem to mean, until ultimately it doesn't bother anyone anymore. (Of course, we may invent some new swear word that is deemed taboo and repeat the cycle.)
I think part of the problem is signaling. I get annoyed when I see people saying "X is true modulo Y", because that seems like an inflationary use of the word "modulo". But if somebody uses "modulo" that makes them sound smart, because they are using math jargon!
Anyway, I try to avoid using technical terms I don't feel I have a firm grasp on, and calibrate the fuzziness of my language to the fuzziness of my thinking.
What meaning does the word have if Faith is something absolutely everyone has?
IMO all neurotypical people do have "Faith" in some form, because religion is an important part of human firmware, and necessarily follows from the workings of our brain in any environment where cultures emerge. (As proven by every relevant anthropological study since Durkheim.)
Inflationary terms! You see them everywhere. And for those who actually know and care about the subject matter they can be very frustrating. These terms are notorious for being used in contexts where:
Some examples:
The problem is not that these words are meaningless in their original form, nor that you shouldn't ever use them. The problem is that they often get used in stupid ways that make them much less meaningful. By that I mean, less useful for keeping a focus on the topic and understanding what the person is really talking about.
For example, terms like Nanotech (or worse, "Nanobot") do apply in a certain loose sense to several kinds of chemistry and biological innovations that are currently in vogue. Nonetheless, each time the term is used to refer to these things it makes it much harder to know if you are referring to Drexlerian Mechanosynthesis. Hint: If you get your grant money by convincing someone you are working on one thing whereas you are really working on something completely different, that's fraud.
Similarly, Cryogenics is the science of keeping things really cold. And of course Cryonics is a form of that. But saying "Cryogenics" when you really mean exactly Cryonics is an incredibly harmful practice which actual Cryonicists generally avoid. Most people who work in Cryogenics have nothing to do with Cryonics, and this kind of confusion in popular culture has apparently engendered animosity towards Cryonics among Cryogenics specialists.
Recently I fell prey to something like this with respect to the term "Rational". I wanted to know in general terms what the best programming language for a newbie would be and why. I wanted some in depth analysis, from a group I trust to do so. (And I wasn't disappointed -- we have some very knowledgeable programmers whose opinions were most helpful to me.) However the reaction of some lesswrongers to the title I initially chose for the post was distinctly negative. The title was "Most rational programming language?"
After thinking about it for a while I realized what the problem was: This way of using the term, despite being more or less valid, makes the term less meaningful in the long run. And I don't want to be the person who makes Rational a less meaningful word. Nobody here wants that to happen. Thus it would have been better to use a term such as "Best" or "Most optimal" instead.
Another example that comes to mind is when people (usually outsiders) refer to Transhumanism, Bayeseanism, the Singularity, or even skepticism, as a "Faith" or "Belief". Well yeah, trivially, if you are willing to stretch that word to its broadest possible meaning you can feel free to apply it to such as us. But... for crying out loud! What meaning does the word have if Faith is something absolutely everyone has? We're really referring to something like "Confidence" here.
Then there's Evolution. Is Transhumanism really about the next stage in human Evolution? Perhaps in a certain loose sense it is -- but let's not lose sight of the mutilation of the language (and consequent noise-to-signal increase) that occurs when you say such a thing. Human Evolution is an existing scientific specialty with absolutely zilch to do with cybernetic body modification or genetic engineering, and everything to do with the effects of natural selection and mutation on the development of humans in the past.
Co-opting terms isn't always bad. If you are brand-new to a topic, seeing an analogy to something with which you are already familiar may reduce the inferential distance and help you click the idea in your brain. But this gets more hazardous the closer the terms actually are in meaning. Distant terms are safer -- when I say "Avoid inflationary use of terms" you can instantly see that I'm definitely not talking about money, nor rubber objects with compressed air inside of them, but about words and phrases.
On the other hand with such things as Rational versus Optimal, we're taking two surface-level-similar words and blurring them in such a way that one cannot meaningfully talk about either without accidentally importing baggage from the other. Rational is more suitable for use in contrast with clear examples of irrationality -- cognitive biases, for example, or drug addiction, and is a rather unabashedly idealistic term. Optimal on the other hand doesn't so much require specific contrast because pretty much everything is suboptimal by default to some degree or another -- optimizing is understood as an ongoing and very relativistic process.
To sum up: Avoid making words cheaper and less effective for their specialized tasks. Don't use them for things where a better and more appropriate term exists. As your brain gets used to an idea, be prepared to discard old terms you have co-opted from other domains that were really just useful placeholders to get you started. Specialized jargon exists for a reason!