So… there surely are things like (overlapping, likely non-exhaustive):
Memetic Darwinian anarchy—concepts proliferating without control, trying to carve out for themselves new niches in the noosphere or grab parts of real estate belonging to incumbent concepts.
Memetic warfare—individuals, groups, egregores, trying to control the narrative by describing the same thing in the language of your own ideology, yadda yadda.
Independent invention of the same idea—in which case it’s usually given different names (but also, plausibly, since some people may grow attached to their concepts of choice, they might latch onto trivial/superficial differences and amplify that, so that one or more instances of this multiply independently invented concept now is now morphed into something else than what it “should be”).
Memetic rent seeking—because introducing a new catchy concept might marginally bump up your h-index.
Still, the thing Jan describes is real and often a big problem.
I also think I somewhat disagree with this:
An idea should either be precisely defined enough that it’s clear why it can’t be rounded off (once the precise definition is known), or it’s a vague idea and it either needs to become more precise to avoid being rounded or it is inherently vague and being vague there can’t be much harm from rounding because it already wasn’t clear where its boundaries were in concept space.
Meanings are often subtle, intuited but not fully grasped, in which case a (premature) attempt to explicitize them risks collapsing their reference to the important thing they are pointing at. Many important concepts are not precisely defined. Many are best sorta-defined ostensively: “examples of X include A, B, C, D, and E; I’m not sure what it makes all of them instances of X, maybe it’s that they share the properties Y and Z … or at least my best guess is that Y and Z are important parts of X and I’m pretty sure that X is a Thing™”.
Eliezer has a post (I couldn’t find it at the moment) where he noticed that the probabilities he gave were inconsistent. He asks something like, “Would I really not behave as if God existed if I believed that P(Christianity)=1e-5?” and then, “Oh well, too bad, but I don’t know which way to fix it, and fixing it either way risks losing important information, so I’m deciding to live with this lack of consistency for now.”
So… there surely are things like (overlapping, likely non-exhaustive):
Memetic Darwinian anarchy—concepts proliferating without control, trying to carve out for themselves new niches in the noosphere or grab parts of real estate belonging to incumbent concepts.
Memetic warfare—individuals, groups, egregores, trying to control the narrative by describing the same thing in the language of your own ideology, yadda yadda.
Independent invention of the same idea—in which case it’s usually given different names (but also, plausibly, since some people may grow attached to their concepts of choice, they might latch onto trivial/superficial differences and amplify that, so that one or more instances of this multiply independently invented concept now is now morphed into something else than what it “should be”).
Memetic rent seeking—because introducing a new catchy concept might marginally bump up your h-index.
So, as usual, the law of equal and opposite advice applies.
Still, the thing Jan describes is real and often a big problem.
I also think I somewhat disagree with this:
Meanings are often subtle, intuited but not fully grasped, in which case a (premature) attempt to explicitize them risks collapsing their reference to the important thing they are pointing at. Many important concepts are not precisely defined. Many are best sorta-defined ostensively: “examples of X include A, B, C, D, and E; I’m not sure what it makes all of them instances of X, maybe it’s that they share the properties Y and Z … or at least my best guess is that Y and Z are important parts of X and I’m pretty sure that X is a Thing™”.
Eliezer has a post (I couldn’t find it at the moment) where he noticed that the probabilities he gave were inconsistent. He asks something like, “Would I really not behave as if God existed if I believed that P(Christianity)=1e-5?” and then, “Oh well, too bad, but I don’t know which way to fix it, and fixing it either way risks losing important information, so I’m deciding to live with this lack of consistency for now.”