Come 2028, I hope Less Wrong can seriously consider for instance retiring terms like “NPC” and “normie”, and instead adopt a more humble and cooperative attitude toward the rest of the human race.
I am interested in links to the most prominent use of these terms (e.g. in highly-upvoted posts on LW, or by high-karma users). I have a hypothesis that it’s only really used on the outskirts or on Twitter, and not amongst those who are more respected.
I certainly don’t use “NPC” (I mean I’ve probably ever used it, but I think probably only a handful of times) because it aggressively removes agency from people, and I think I’ve only used “normie” for the purpose of un-self-serious humor – I think it’s about as anti-helpful term as “normal person” which (as I’ve written before) I believe should almost always be replaced by referring to a specific population.
Good call. I haven’t been reading Less Wrong in enough detail for a while to pull this up usefully. My impression comes from in-person conversations plus Twitter interactions. The thickest use of my encountering these terms in rationality circles was admittedly about a decade ago. But I’m not sure how much of that is due to my not spending as much time in rationality circles versus discourse norms moving on. I still encounter it almost solely from folk tied to LW-style rationality.
I don’t recall hearing you use the terms in ways that bothered me this way, FWIW.
I think “NPC” in that sense is more used by the conspiracy theory community than rationalists.
With the idea being that only the person using the term is smart enough to realize that e.g. the Government is controlled by lizards from outer space, and everyone else just believes the media.
The fundamental problem with the term is that you might actually be wrong about e.g. the lizards from outer space, and you might not be as smart as you think.
I am interested in links to the most prominent use of these terms (e.g. in highly-upvoted posts on LW, or by high-karma users). I have a hypothesis that it’s only really used on the outskirts or on Twitter, and not amongst those who are more respected.
I certainly don’t use “NPC” (I mean I’ve probably ever used it, but I think probably only a handful of times) because it aggressively removes agency from people, and I think I’ve only used “normie” for the purpose of un-self-serious humor – I think it’s about as anti-helpful term as “normal person” which (as I’ve written before) I believe should almost always be replaced by referring to a specific population.
Good call. I haven’t been reading Less Wrong in enough detail for a while to pull this up usefully. My impression comes from in-person conversations plus Twitter interactions. The thickest use of my encountering these terms in rationality circles was admittedly about a decade ago. But I’m not sure how much of that is due to my not spending as much time in rationality circles versus discourse norms moving on. I still encounter it almost solely from folk tied to LW-style rationality.
I don’t recall hearing you use the terms in ways that bothered me this way, FWIW.
I think “NPC” in that sense is more used by the conspiracy theory community than rationalists.
With the idea being that only the person using the term is smart enough to realize that e.g. the Government is controlled by lizards from outer space, and everyone else just believes the media.
The fundamental problem with the term is that you might actually be wrong about e.g. the lizards from outer space, and you might not be as smart as you think.