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.

I'm new here and couldn't find a better place to ask this: Are there any exercises to train such skills on the site? For example a list of statements to assess their testability?

Also I was wondering if there is some sort of pleasant way to access this site using an Android phone. I would like to read the sequences on mine.

Oh and hello everybody! :) I hope I can find the time and motivation to spend some time in this place, I think I might like to have your skills. ^^

If I violate any of your rules or anything just let me know I have barely scratched the surface of this seemingly massive site.

Minor nitpick: I find it rather silly when people say "a full x percent" (as in, a full 89%) of something - either you're being correct and specific, and you mean 89% exactly, or you're being fairly specific and mean 89.124535% or something. You wouldn't use it to mean "around 89%" or "just under but close to 89%" - you'd round down to 88% or, again, be specific.

This was an excellent article, though - something I have thought about fleetingly before but never really considered. My personal area of interest is animal rights, which is a lot harder to evaluate (also, I'm not in America, so GIveWell probably hasn't evaluated any charities which I would donate to) - however, it's given me a lot to think about, and a new way to approach charity.

Off-topic:

I'm not talking about a basic vocabulary, but a vocabulary beyond that of the average, white, English-as-a-first-language adult.

Why white?

Great post. Right now, I think that you do need an advanced vocabulary to understand what's on LessWrong. In general, most people that have been involved with LW-style explicit rationality as it exists today are unusually intelligent and this are likely to use such terms.

However, I think that that is a flaw with our own methods rather than a flaw with rationality-in-general. A more accessible form of rationality would be very useful.

One post that you might want to read is lukeprog's "Explicit and tacit rationality."

I think a doctor would do just fine inventing her own word for heart attack, if she didn't have any colleagues to communicate with. A rationalist would only get extra value out of using "real" words for concepts rather than ones they made up if they could speak with other people who knew of the same concepts.

Now that I think about it, some of my friends have done something sort of like inventing words when we needed to refer to concepts that didn't have an existing label. One of my programmer friends tends to take a common word that's sorta close and write it like a PHP variable ($protect, etc.). I use "ouroboros" to mean a being that can't exist without hurting itself, and I'll tell people that I use the word that way if the concept comes up in discussion so that I can refer to it later without having to re-explain.

Would Magnus Carlsen be unable to play chess if he had no words for it? This old post suggests some people don't have mental imagery at all. If that's true, these people would probably make some interesting claims about thinking.

Or could he not even be able to understand, say, that a patient was having a heart attack if he did not have the words for it?

I can visualize a "heart attack" in my mind with all the relevant steps involved, no words needed. People (and animals) understand other kinds of phenomenoms they don't have words for, so I would deduce that it applies to this situation also. Symbols are needed for understanding phenomenoms you're not directly experiencing, but they don't have to be words.

So do you have an argument for or against the need for an advanced or specialised vocabulary to be rational? Is it a question that's too vague, or with too variable an answer?

Specialized vocabulary usually makes thinking and communication more effective by allowing shorthand for complex concepts. This applies to many kinds of thinking, most of it not necessarily rational. You'd probably find correlation, but good luck with the causation part.

Are you saying then, that if we fully understood what other people were saying, there would be less irrationality?

I think I'm pointing the arrow in the other direction. A common mistake people make is to misunderstand each other and themselves; if they did not make that mistake, they wouldn't necessarily be better at understanding each other or themselves, but they would at least be clearer about the boundaries of their knowledge. (This could lead them to behave in ways that do actually make them understand themselves and others better.)

Consider the double illusion of transparency.

It's not particularly useful to have a big vocabulary - it's actually often counterproductive for getting your point understood. That said, it's sometimes useful to substitute words to prevent using a single word for multiple distinct meanings.

obstropolous

So, obstreperous is an actual word, that means something very similar.

So do you have an argument for or against the need for an advanced or specialised vocabulary to be rational?

Have you read the A Human's Guide to Words sequence? A lot of irrationality in arguments centers around misunderstanding what words are and how they work, but I don't think size of vocabulary has a huge impact on that understanding (once you've corrected for IQ).