“We DO NOT WANT lukeprog’s How To Be Happy to sound authoritative. The reason for that is if it turns out to be ‘more wrong’ it will be that much easier to let go of.”
This.
Whenever you give a collection of concepts a name, you almost automatically start to create a conceptual “immune system” to defend it, keep it intact in the face of criticism. This sort of getting-attached-to-names strikes me as approximately the opposite of Rationalist Taboo. (Hey, did someone just dis Rationalist Taboo? Lemme at ’em!)
I suspect that giving a name to a hypothesis can cause you to defend it but it might be able to do the opposite also if it is already a hypothesis you dislike. I suspect that it is more likely to move one’s emotional attachment towards extremes rather than move one’s attitude in any specific direction. I also suspect this is more likely to be a problem for extended hypotheses that are more networks of interlocking ideas than simple hypotheses (so e.g. NLP would be a name in this sense, but I suspect that “Rationalist Taboo” would be too simple to have much of an actual impact.)
Shorthand hypothesis names are generally helpful. I suspect that for most purposes naming hypotheses will provide more help (in terms of efficient communication and in terms of one’s own mental shortcuts and processing) than it will harm.
I think the problem is not just giving hypotheses names, but giving large collections of hypotheses names. It bundles them together so that the strongest hypotheses in the group can defend the weakest ones, or the weakest ones can damage the strongest ones, even if the different hypotheses aren’t actually related in a technical sense.
Dividing hypotheses into “NLP” and “not-NLP” is an attempt to carve hypothesis-space at its natural joints, and therefore needs to be justified by clear shared dependencies among those hypotheses.
“We DO NOT WANT lukeprog’s How To Be Happy to sound authoritative. The reason for that is if it turns out to be ‘more wrong’ it will be that much easier to let go of.”
This.
Whenever you give a collection of concepts a name, you almost automatically start to create a conceptual “immune system” to defend it, keep it intact in the face of criticism. This sort of getting-attached-to-names strikes me as approximately the opposite of Rationalist Taboo. (Hey, did someone just dis Rationalist Taboo? Lemme at ’em!)
I suspect that giving a name to a hypothesis can cause you to defend it but it might be able to do the opposite also if it is already a hypothesis you dislike. I suspect that it is more likely to move one’s emotional attachment towards extremes rather than move one’s attitude in any specific direction. I also suspect this is more likely to be a problem for extended hypotheses that are more networks of interlocking ideas than simple hypotheses (so e.g. NLP would be a name in this sense, but I suspect that “Rationalist Taboo” would be too simple to have much of an actual impact.)
Shorthand hypothesis names are generally helpful. I suspect that for most purposes naming hypotheses will provide more help (in terms of efficient communication and in terms of one’s own mental shortcuts and processing) than it will harm.
I think the problem is not just giving hypotheses names, but giving large collections of hypotheses names. It bundles them together so that the strongest hypotheses in the group can defend the weakest ones, or the weakest ones can damage the strongest ones, even if the different hypotheses aren’t actually related in a technical sense.
Dividing hypotheses into “NLP” and “not-NLP” is an attempt to carve hypothesis-space at its natural joints, and therefore needs to be justified by clear shared dependencies among those hypotheses.
The idea that giving a name to a hypothesis causes you to defend it is an interesting one.
That’s the most meta concept I’ve heard in a while.