Edit: The below still feels insufficiently charitable, to me, but I wasn’t able to pin it down and zero it out just yet, and will probably only be able to do so several hours from now, after mulling things over. Curious whether, in future similar situations, people would prefer the comment disappear until that time, or stay and then be clarified in follow-ups, or whether it doesn’t even come across as rude enough to worry about, or what.
I feel that your claim is undermined by the very fact that you used a bunch of useful-to-have named concepts in your argument. I do not think this is a cheap shot/social trick—I think it is actually a defeater for the thing you’re arguing, particularly given that you didn’t even seem to address the irony except with an offhand mention in section 5.
I do agree that many of your specific caveats are genuine problems to worry about and pump against. For instance, I suspect that many people have taken the word “akrasia” as a license to just … lean into their doing-things deficit, and similarly people who identify themselves as having some specific character trait (like introversion) often go too far with the label.
But I don’t think anything in this post serves as an actual argument against naming things, in the sense that it creates a clear causal model of “why this is a cost that outweighs the benefit” or “here’s how the benefit could be gotten some entirely other way.” They strike me as reasons to be careful as you go about creating handles for finer and finer distinctions, not reasons to stop doing so.
I’m generally in favor of pro-thing posts being responded to with anti-thing posts, or the other way around. But I don’t think this counts as pivoting from my initial statement into a genuine dialogue. I think the way I’d want such dialogues to begin is with the other person making at least a token attempt to demonstrate that they understood the goods the other person was bidding for (which in jargon is “passing my ideological Turing test”). This seemed … non-rigorous? Too social status-y? Lacking in clear answerability? e.g. in the paragraph beginning “You can’t stop titling,” it said not to optimize for several things that I definitely wasn’t advocating in my own post.
I grant that my post was non-rigorous and so forth, too. But I wasn’t trying to argue against someone else’s specifically made bid.
(I don’t consider this rude at all, and will welcome your post-mulling thoughts should you choose to add them. I can also say more about where I’m coming from when I get the chance.)
I think the main thing I want to say [besides my response to Oliver below] is that this post was not framed in my head as starting a conversation in response to your post, but as gesturing in the direction of some under-emphasized considerations as one contribution in a long-running conversation about rationalist jargon. Of course, I ended up opening with and only taking quotes from you, and now it looks the way it does, i.e. targeting your “bid” but somewhat askew. So that was a mistake, for which I apologize.
Also, I know I basically asked for your “actually a defeater” response, but I really was non-rhetorically hoping people would think about what I was leaning upon and accomplishing (or not) by using the Names that I chose throughout that might not align with their prior ideas about what the Names are for.
Edit: The below still feels insufficiently charitable, to me, but I wasn’t able to pin it down and zero it out just yet, and will probably only be able to do so several hours from now, after mulling things over. Curious whether, in future similar situations, people would prefer the comment disappear until that time, or stay and then be clarified in follow-ups, or whether it doesn’t even come across as rude enough to worry about, or what.
I feel that your claim is undermined by the very fact that you used a bunch of useful-to-have named concepts in your argument. I do not think this is a cheap shot/social trick—I think it is actually a defeater for the thing you’re arguing, particularly given that you didn’t even seem to address the irony except with an offhand mention in section 5.
I do agree that many of your specific caveats are genuine problems to worry about and pump against. For instance, I suspect that many people have taken the word “akrasia” as a license to just … lean into their doing-things deficit, and similarly people who identify themselves as having some specific character trait (like introversion) often go too far with the label.
But I don’t think anything in this post serves as an actual argument against naming things, in the sense that it creates a clear causal model of “why this is a cost that outweighs the benefit” or “here’s how the benefit could be gotten some entirely other way.” They strike me as reasons to be careful as you go about creating handles for finer and finer distinctions, not reasons to stop doing so.
I’m generally in favor of pro-thing posts being responded to with anti-thing posts, or the other way around. But I don’t think this counts as pivoting from my initial statement into a genuine dialogue. I think the way I’d want such dialogues to begin is with the other person making at least a token attempt to demonstrate that they understood the goods the other person was bidding for (which in jargon is “passing my ideological Turing test”). This seemed … non-rigorous? Too social status-y? Lacking in clear answerability? e.g. in the paragraph beginning “You can’t stop titling,” it said not to optimize for several things that I definitely wasn’t advocating in my own post.
I grant that my post was non-rigorous and so forth, too. But I wasn’t trying to argue against someone else’s specifically made bid.
(I don’t consider this rude at all, and will welcome your post-mulling thoughts should you choose to add them. I can also say more about where I’m coming from when I get the chance.)
Thanks. That reduced my anxiety by a meaningful amount.
I think the main thing I want to say [besides my response to Oliver below] is that this post was not framed in my head as starting a conversation in response to your post, but as gesturing in the direction of some under-emphasized considerations as one contribution in a long-running conversation about rationalist jargon. Of course, I ended up opening with and only taking quotes from you, and now it looks the way it does, i.e. targeting your “bid” but somewhat askew. So that was a mistake, for which I apologize.
Also, I know I basically asked for your “actually a defeater” response, but I really was non-rhetorically hoping people would think about what I was leaning upon and accomplishing (or not) by using the Names that I chose throughout that might not align with their prior ideas about what the Names are for.