there doesn’t seem to actually exist a word in English for the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say “chemicals”.
Maybe that’s because “chemicals” isn’t a natural category? I don’t really know what is meant by that word. It could be something about the manufacturing process. But possibly it just means “complicated words listed on the packaging” and nothing more.
I am not saying: you, yes you, have to talk to people who use words you can’t stand or in ways you can’t stand
Yes. And if I don’t want to talk to people who use those words, and someone says those words to me, then I’m going to reply with something like your “No” replies. Thus, saying “Technically, everything is chemicals”, is, in fact, very reasonable.
One polite way to respond to people using words you prefer they not use is “[Word] upsets me for [Reason], can you use [Replacement Word] instead?” If they can’t (because they’re not a native English speaker, or they have a linguistic disability, or they are chronically sleep deprived, to name just three of the reasons that word replacement can be impossible), then you have to judge how important not being around people who use Word is for you.
You could also consider asking what they mean if you don’t know what they mean. My rough sense is something like “a cluster of chemicals the central examples of which require industrial manufacturing processes to create, did not exist before the 20th century, are not part of any culture’s traditional way of doing things, could not be manufactured in a home kitchen, and bear little resemblance to petroleum, corn, or soybeans in spite of being derived from them.”
What this post about politeness all along? I thought it was about efficient communication.
“a cluster of chemicals the central examples of which require industrial manufacturing processes to create, did not exist before the 20th century, are not part of any culture’s traditional way of doing things, could not be manufactured in a home kitchen, and bear little resemblance to petroleum, corn, or soybeans in spite of being derived from them.”
The part about cultures cuts out way too much, I think. The part about home kitchen, seems dubious, I suspect some “chemicals” are quite easy to make, though I don’t know. The part about 20th century could work.
But then it remains to ask whether “I avoid eating chemicals”, is any more reasonable than “I avoid eating yellow food”. Can we use the fact that a chemical was first synthesized in the 20th century, to predict something about that chemical?
Politeness is often useful instrumentally in order to communicate efficiently.
I attempted to describe the central examples of a similarity cluster; not everything in a similarity cluster will have all the traits associated with that cluster. (“Ten fingers” is part of the human similarity cluster, but some humans have nine fingers.)
It might be silly to have a “I don’t eat yellow food” diet, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the concept of yellow. Indeed, I would argue that there are far more concepts that do not provide good diet advice than concepts which do.
Politeness is often useful instrumentally in order to communicate efficiently.
Rudeness is also often useful instrumentally in order to communicate efficiently.
It might be silly to have a “I don’t eat yellow food” diet, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the concept of yellow.
I admit, the complaints “chemical isn’t a natural category” and “avoiding chemicals is a silly diet” are distinct. But somehow it makes sense for me to say the former when I also think the latter. I think, the fact that the category isn’t natural makes the diet sillier. E.g. if someone said “I don’t eat meat (for non-moral reasons)”, I may still think they’re being silly, but at least I can imagine possible worlds where that diet would make sense. On the other hand, “I don’t eat meat from animals with 3 toes”, is on a whole different order of magnitude of silliness.
What do you mean by “works well”? Getting positive responses from real people? I doubt it, but I don’t think I’ve ever explained it like this to anyone. I don’t do the “everything is chemicals” reply that often in the first place.
I wouldn’t be surprised there was some Bible verse about how it is a sin to eat meat from animals with 3 toes. Religions tend to have diet advice which is “silly” by your definition.
Extensionally, “chemicals” is food coloring that doesn’t come straight out of a whole food, disodium edta, ammonia, peroxide, acetone, sulfur dioxide, aspartame, sodium aluminosilicate, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium sorbate, methylchloroisothiazolinone....
And not: apple juice, water, table salt, vodka, flour, sugar, milk...
A thing doesn’t have to be a natural category for people to want to talk about it and have a legitimate interest in talking about it.
I disagree with your second point and think you’re missing mine. If you don’t want to talk to someone, don’t talk to them. You don’t have to be cruel, and your desire to be cruel doesn’t make it reasonable.
“Cruel” might be a bit of a stretch. I could agree that your “No” replies are passive aggressive, which is frowned upon, but I don’t think that being passive aggressive is an unreasonable strategy.
Extensionally, “chemicals” is food coloring that doesn’t come straight out of a whole food, disodium edta, ammonia, peroxide, acetone, sulfur dioxide, aspartame, sodium aluminosilicate, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium sorbate, methylchloroisothiazolinone....
Well, that’s a long list. Doesn’t explain very much though. How do you feel about carbonic acid, baking soda or pure alcohol? Also, what would happen if I took one item from you chemical list, and discovered that it is contained in and extractable from one of the items in your non-chemical list?
A thing doesn’t have to be a natural category for people to want to talk about it and have a legitimate interest in talking about it.
Nobody can stop you from talking about whatever you want. But it doesn’t help you reach correct conclusions.
I had a similar reaction: for the example of grandma saying “no technology”, yes, I know what she means and pointing out the thing about tables and glasses would just be stupid. But for the thing with chemicals, until I read this post, I didn’t feel like I had a good handle of what exactly their mental model was and how they defined this category.
Now, in the process of writing this comment, I gave it some thought, and came to the conclusion that something like “synthesized vs. naturally-occuring” would probably be roughly what these people mean. But that was only after it was specifically suggested to me that they might have a sensible concept they’re pointing at; when I read the example, my assumption was just that they didn’t have a coherent model and weren’t very familiar with chemistry, in which case “everything is chemicals” would have been fine as a response.
I guess this post is a bit of a typical mind-fallacy check for me, on the “not everyone has read In Defense of Food (or something similar)” front.
Defense of Food has a bit of the naturalistic fallacy going on, but I think it’s core point is at least a hypothesis worth talking about and being able to make distinctions around.
Somewhere in the 20th century, people started getting a cluster of “Western diseases” (i.e obesity, heart disease) that seem to have something to do with diet (although non-diet lifestyle changes are another contender).
In general, the 20th century saw lots of industrialization that radically changed both diet and lifestyle. But in the diet front, there’s a specific with worth noting:
Prior to mid-20th century, we did not have very fine control over what sorts of chemicals went into food. Food was made of chunks of organic matter with a lot of complex reactions going on. Mid-20th century, we started being able to break that down into parts and optimize it.
And this meant that suddenly, food became goodhartable in a way that it hadn’t before. Industry could optimize it for tastiness/addictiveness, with a lot of incentives to do that without regard for health (and, not a lot of clear information on how to optimize it for health even if you wanted to, since health is long-term and tastiness is immediate).
So there is reason to want to be able to distinguish “food constructed the way we’ve been constructing it for thousands of years” and “food we only recently began to be able to construct.”
Now, this hypothesis might be wrong. Lots of people are just applying the naturalistic fallacy (in a way that also outputs preferences for ‘alternative medicine’ and the like). But, if you’re worried about that, it’s probably more helpful to respond one of the first three ways Alicorn suggests, rather than on the level of “obviously everything is chemicals.”
...
I did realizing in seeing Kaj’s comment and thinking through my reply, that this is fairly complex background framing, and if you don’t have it in mind, it may be hard to notice in realtime that the “everything is chemicals” response might be missing the point, and I’m not (currently) sure if there’s an algorithm I could recommend people run that would easily separate pedantry from potentially-important reframing
I guess this post is a bit of a typical mind-fallacy check for me, on the “not everyone has read In Defense of Food (or something similar)” front.
Defense of Food has a bit of the naturalistic fallacy going on, but I think it’s core point is at least a hypothesis worth talking about and being able to make distinctions around.
Yup, a book. Not sure whether it’s super important to read in full (I think my comment here roughly covers the most important bit, but if it seemed interesting you may want to check it out)
Also, I wrote a LW Post on it many years back (I think it’s possible this was literally my first LW post, and if not was my second or third, so it has a bit of the “newbie introducing themselves” vibe.)
I wish to clarify that I’m not asserting that everyone knows exactly what things are “chemicals” and what things are not. There’s room for disagreement, for one thing, and the disagreements might turn on all kinds of little points about where a substance came from and even why it was added to the food. But I do think that given two lists of ingredients for different brands of, say, packaged guacamole, you could distinguish “few to no chemicals” from “lots of chemicals”. That there isn’t a strict, look-up-able boundary of necessary and sufficient conditions that fits in a “coherent model” doesn’t mean it’s not useful to gesture at for some purposes, sort of like music genres. I don’t have a coherent model of music genres and I couldn’t elaborate much on what I mean if I call a song “poppy” or “jazzy” but that doesn’t mean it’s not a statement I might reasonably utter.
It’s a statement that’s reasonable to utter, and a statement that a more music-savvy friend might want to understand by asking what you mean, getting some positive and negative examples, and suggesting more precise terminology (along with suggesting specific music, one hopes). Pointing out that your use of those words is likely to confuse people and search engines is something I’d expect you to encourage rather than invoking your peeve. Note that I recognize that this comment may be an example of the thing you oppose—I’m verbosely challenging a (possibly) non-central point. I’d be interested to hear whether you find this example to be exasperating or valuable.
Suggesting search engine terms might be helpful. I don’t think I’d ever find “you’re going to confuse people” helpful—either I already know that I’m not being very precisely expressive and these are all the words I have, or, if that’s not the case, “could you elaborate/rephrase that” would be better. I didn’t feel exasperated by this comment but might by a long chain of them on this branch.
(not sure why the parent is so downvoted—it’s a bit abrasive, but on-topic and not terribly mean. ]
Maybe that’s because “chemicals” isn’t a natural category? I don’t really know what is meant by that word. It could be something about the manufacturing process. But possibly it just means “complicated words listed on the packaging” and nothing more.
I’m not sure I accept the concept “natural category”. In context of food shopping, there is a colloquial use of the term “chemical’ that is not precisely defined but used commonly enough to expect that one’s friends know mostly what is meant, and in context the edge-cases are irrelevant. “complicated words listed on the packaging” is actually pretty close.
I think many people forget that words don’t mean anything. People mean things and use words to convey that meaning. The shared experiences and expectations of what a person might mean by a given set of words is a relationship between the people, not between the words.
I’m fully behind your last point—both participants are free to leave. Both are free to ask the other to change, for that matter, and to complain on the internet.
I think the point was distinguishing between reasonable and unreasonable replies to people you value communication with. All else being equal—in the event using such a word doesn’t move them from out of the reasonable category for you—a preference is being given for not doing these things.
(I still do similar things with people who value it, because I know people who enjoy talking about language, but otherwise I don’t find it as time effective as ‘Don’t Feed The Trolls’, though this tends to be easier said than done, and communicating with people who have poor epistemic/conversational, etc. standards can be difficult (due to inferential distance, or other priorities) - some people go on about today being a ‘post-truth’ era, because they’ve talked to too many people who just don’t care about truth. There’s a feeling you get when you walk away from a discussion knowing that neither of you got anything out of it, and communication didn’t take place. Relatedlinks.)
Following this post’s policy can increase the utility of reasonable people you talk to, and I find that useful because I value reasonable discussion.
I’m all for less pedantry, but
Maybe that’s because “chemicals” isn’t a natural category? I don’t really know what is meant by that word. It could be something about the manufacturing process. But possibly it just means “complicated words listed on the packaging” and nothing more.
Yes. And if I don’t want to talk to people who use those words, and someone says those words to me, then I’m going to reply with something like your “No” replies. Thus, saying “Technically, everything is chemicals”, is, in fact, very reasonable.
One polite way to respond to people using words you prefer they not use is “[Word] upsets me for [Reason], can you use [Replacement Word] instead?” If they can’t (because they’re not a native English speaker, or they have a linguistic disability, or they are chronically sleep deprived, to name just three of the reasons that word replacement can be impossible), then you have to judge how important not being around people who use Word is for you.
You could also consider asking what they mean if you don’t know what they mean. My rough sense is something like “a cluster of chemicals the central examples of which require industrial manufacturing processes to create, did not exist before the 20th century, are not part of any culture’s traditional way of doing things, could not be manufactured in a home kitchen, and bear little resemblance to petroleum, corn, or soybeans in spite of being derived from them.”
What this post about politeness all along? I thought it was about efficient communication.
The part about cultures cuts out way too much, I think. The part about home kitchen, seems dubious, I suspect some “chemicals” are quite easy to make, though I don’t know. The part about 20th century could work.
But then it remains to ask whether “I avoid eating chemicals”, is any more reasonable than “I avoid eating yellow food”. Can we use the fact that a chemical was first synthesized in the 20th century, to predict something about that chemical?
Politeness is often useful instrumentally in order to communicate efficiently.
I attempted to describe the central examples of a similarity cluster; not everything in a similarity cluster will have all the traits associated with that cluster. (“Ten fingers” is part of the human similarity cluster, but some humans have nine fingers.)
It might be silly to have a “I don’t eat yellow food” diet, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the concept of yellow. Indeed, I would argue that there are far more concepts that do not provide good diet advice than concepts which do.
Rudeness is also often useful instrumentally in order to communicate efficiently.
I admit, the complaints “chemical isn’t a natural category” and “avoiding chemicals is a silly diet” are distinct. But somehow it makes sense for me to say the former when I also think the latter. I think, the fact that the category isn’t natural makes the diet sillier. E.g. if someone said “I don’t eat meat (for non-moral reasons)”, I may still think they’re being silly, but at least I can imagine possible worlds where that diet would make sense. On the other hand, “I don’t eat meat from animals with 3 toes”, is on a whole different order of magnitude of silliness.
Interesting—to rephrase, you’re saying that you might react this way as part of a reductio-ad-absurdum argument? Seems reasonable, does it work well?
What do you mean by “works well”? Getting positive responses from real people? I doubt it, but I don’t think I’ve ever explained it like this to anyone. I don’t do the “everything is chemicals” reply that often in the first place.
I wouldn’t be surprised there was some Bible verse about how it is a sin to eat meat from animals with 3 toes. Religions tend to have diet advice which is “silly” by your definition.
Extensionally, “chemicals” is food coloring that doesn’t come straight out of a whole food, disodium edta, ammonia, peroxide, acetone, sulfur dioxide, aspartame, sodium aluminosilicate, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium sorbate, methylchloroisothiazolinone....
And not: apple juice, water, table salt, vodka, flour, sugar, milk...
A thing doesn’t have to be a natural category for people to want to talk about it and have a legitimate interest in talking about it.
I disagree with your second point and think you’re missing mine. If you don’t want to talk to someone, don’t talk to them. You don’t have to be cruel, and your desire to be cruel doesn’t make it reasonable.
“Cruel” might be a bit of a stretch. I could agree that your “No” replies are passive aggressive, which is frowned upon, but I don’t think that being passive aggressive is an unreasonable strategy.
Well, that’s a long list. Doesn’t explain very much though. How do you feel about carbonic acid, baking soda or pure alcohol? Also, what would happen if I took one item from you chemical list, and discovered that it is contained in and extractable from one of the items in your non-chemical list?
Nobody can stop you from talking about whatever you want. But it doesn’t help you reach correct conclusions.
I had a similar reaction: for the example of grandma saying “no technology”, yes, I know what she means and pointing out the thing about tables and glasses would just be stupid. But for the thing with chemicals, until I read this post, I didn’t feel like I had a good handle of what exactly their mental model was and how they defined this category.
Now, in the process of writing this comment, I gave it some thought, and came to the conclusion that something like “synthesized vs. naturally-occuring” would probably be roughly what these people mean. But that was only after it was specifically suggested to me that they might have a sensible concept they’re pointing at; when I read the example, my assumption was just that they didn’t have a coherent model and weren’t very familiar with chemistry, in which case “everything is chemicals” would have been fine as a response.
I guess this post is a bit of a typical mind-fallacy check for me, on the “not everyone has read In Defense of Food (or something similar)” front.
Defense of Food has a bit of the naturalistic fallacy going on, but I think it’s core point is at least a hypothesis worth talking about and being able to make distinctions around.
Somewhere in the 20th century, people started getting a cluster of “Western diseases” (i.e obesity, heart disease) that seem to have something to do with diet (although non-diet lifestyle changes are another contender).
In general, the 20th century saw lots of industrialization that radically changed both diet and lifestyle. But in the diet front, there’s a specific with worth noting:
Prior to mid-20th century, we did not have very fine control over what sorts of chemicals went into food. Food was made of chunks of organic matter with a lot of complex reactions going on. Mid-20th century, we started being able to break that down into parts and optimize it.
And this meant that suddenly, food became goodhartable in a way that it hadn’t before. Industry could optimize it for tastiness/addictiveness, with a lot of incentives to do that without regard for health (and, not a lot of clear information on how to optimize it for health even if you wanted to, since health is long-term and tastiness is immediate).
So there is reason to want to be able to distinguish “food constructed the way we’ve been constructing it for thousands of years” and “food we only recently began to be able to construct.”
Now, this hypothesis might be wrong. Lots of people are just applying the naturalistic fallacy (in a way that also outputs preferences for ‘alternative medicine’ and the like). But, if you’re worried about that, it’s probably more helpful to respond one of the first three ways Alicorn suggests, rather than on the level of “obviously everything is chemicals.”
...
I did realizing in seeing Kaj’s comment and thinking through my reply, that this is fairly complex background framing, and if you don’t have it in mind, it may be hard to notice in realtime that the “everything is chemicals” response might be missing the point, and I’m not (currently) sure if there’s an algorithm I could recommend people run that would easily separate pedantry from potentially-important reframing
What’s this now…? A book, or what?
Yup, a book. Not sure whether it’s super important to read in full (I think my comment here roughly covers the most important bit, but if it seemed interesting you may want to check it out)
Also, I wrote a LW Post on it many years back (I think it’s possible this was literally my first LW post, and if not was my second or third, so it has a bit of the “newbie introducing themselves” vibe.)
Amazon link for the book is here.
I wish to clarify that I’m not asserting that everyone knows exactly what things are “chemicals” and what things are not. There’s room for disagreement, for one thing, and the disagreements might turn on all kinds of little points about where a substance came from and even why it was added to the food. But I do think that given two lists of ingredients for different brands of, say, packaged guacamole, you could distinguish “few to no chemicals” from “lots of chemicals”. That there isn’t a strict, look-up-able boundary of necessary and sufficient conditions that fits in a “coherent model” doesn’t mean it’s not useful to gesture at for some purposes, sort of like music genres. I don’t have a coherent model of music genres and I couldn’t elaborate much on what I mean if I call a song “poppy” or “jazzy” but that doesn’t mean it’s not a statement I might reasonably utter.
It’s a statement that’s reasonable to utter, and a statement that a more music-savvy friend might want to understand by asking what you mean, getting some positive and negative examples, and suggesting more precise terminology (along with suggesting specific music, one hopes). Pointing out that your use of those words is likely to confuse people and search engines is something I’d expect you to encourage rather than invoking your peeve.
Note that I recognize that this comment may be an example of the thing you oppose—I’m verbosely challenging a (possibly) non-central point. I’d be interested to hear whether you find this example to be exasperating or valuable.
Suggesting search engine terms might be helpful. I don’t think I’d ever find “you’re going to confuse people” helpful—either I already know that I’m not being very precisely expressive and these are all the words I have, or, if that’s not the case, “could you elaborate/rephrase that” would be better. I didn’t feel exasperated by this comment but might by a long chain of them on this branch.
(not sure why the parent is so downvoted—it’s a bit abrasive, but on-topic and not terribly mean. ]
I’m not sure I accept the concept “natural category”. In context of food shopping, there is a colloquial use of the term “chemical’ that is not precisely defined but used commonly enough to expect that one’s friends know mostly what is meant, and in context the edge-cases are irrelevant. “complicated words listed on the packaging” is actually pretty close.
I think many people forget that words don’t mean anything. People mean things and use words to convey that meaning. The shared experiences and expectations of what a person might mean by a given set of words is a relationship between the people, not between the words.
I’m fully behind your last point—both participants are free to leave. Both are free to ask the other to change, for that matter, and to complain on the internet.
I think the point was distinguishing between reasonable and unreasonable replies to people you value communication with. All else being equal—in the event using such a word doesn’t move them from out of the reasonable category for you—a preference is being given for not doing these things.
(I still do similar things with people who value it, because I know people who enjoy talking about language, but otherwise I don’t find it as time effective as ‘Don’t Feed The Trolls’, though this tends to be easier said than done, and communicating with people who have poor epistemic/conversational, etc. standards can be difficult (due to inferential distance, or other priorities) - some people go on about today being a ‘post-truth’ era, because they’ve talked to too many people who just don’t care about truth. There’s a feeling you get when you walk away from a discussion knowing that neither of you got anything out of it, and communication didn’t take place. Related links.)
Following this post’s policy can increase the utility of reasonable people you talk to, and I find that useful because I value reasonable discussion.