Commenter HistoricalLing does have a point. Katsuki Sekida explains:
“Now, ‘Mu’ means ‘nothing’ and is the first koan in Zen. You might suppose that, as you sit saying ‘Mu’, you are investigating the meaning of nothingness. But that is quite incorrect. It is true that your teacher, who has instructed you to work on Mu, may repeatedly say to you, ‘What is Mu?’ ‘Show me Mu,’ and so on, but he is not asking you to indulge in conceptual speculation. He wants you to experience Mu. And in order to do this, technically speaking, you have to take Mu simply as the sound of your own breath and entertain no other idea.”
In Zen practice, the purpose of a “koan” is to occupy the mind with a fruitless question (or in LW parlance, a wrong question). (Although “Mu” isn’t even a question!) This helps the meditator to maintain concentration, since by dwelling on a dead-end like “What is the samadhi in particle after particle?” he isn’t distracted by the normal flux of flitting thoughts.
The student is still expected to provide an answer, eventually, but not one arrived at by rational thought—rather, it is supposed to strike him spontaneously. Of course, this isn’t a generally wise approach to answering questions; but if the Zen master were to tell his student that the koan can’t be answered, he might not take the exercise seriously. (I expect that Bayesians find it difficult to meditate using koans, since they are so keenly aware of wrong questions.)
A koan is a deliberately futile question, generally short and intended to obscure thought. To use this word also to refer to puzzles which are not skew to reality and which are intended to be answered sensibly, is likely to cause bad inferences about the purpose of koans in Zen—and is jarring in this context!
Suggest a better word? Keep in mind that words which are not better will be rejected (people often seem to forget this while making alternate suggestions).
I think the division into problems and exercises usually seen in mathematics texts would be useful: A task is considered an exercise if it’s routine application of previous material, it’s a problem if it requires some kind of insight or originality. So far most of the Koans have seemed more like problems than like exercises, but depending on content both may be useful. I might be slightly biased towards this as I greatly enjoy mathematics texts and am used to that style.
“Problem” suggests something different in philosophy than in math. A philosophy “problem” is a seeming dilemma, e.g. Gettier, Newcomb’s, or Trolley. So I’d suggest “exercise” here.
“Exercise” dominates “kōan” in that both have the sense of something to stop and think about and try to solve, but ① “exercise” avoids the misconstrual of Zen practice (the purpose of a Zen kōan is not to come up with a solution, nor to set up for an explanation), ② the Orientalism (the dubiosity of saying something in Japanese to make it sound 20% cooler), and ③ the distraction of having to explain what a kōan is to those who don’t know the word.
EDIT: The claim that a purpose of a Zen kōan is not to come up with a solution appears to be a matter of disagreement, so discount ①. I think ② and ③ stand, though.
However, in Zen practice, a kōan is not meaningless, and not a riddle or a puzzle. Teachers do expect students to present an appropriate response when asked about a kōan.
According to the history of the word given there, it originally meant accounts of legal decisions (and literally, a magistrate’s bench). In Chinese Buddhism it came to refer to snippets of dialogue between masters. From there it mutated to the contemplation of mysterious sayings, and eventually to what looks very like an exercise in guessing the teacher’s password, with authorised answers that were specifically taught and had to be given to acquire promotion in the Japanese monastery system. (I have this book, which is subtitled “281 Zen Koans with Answers”.)
The modern meaning of “koan” dealt with in the section “Koan-practice” describes what looks very like Eliezer’s intention in using the word here: a problem that cannot be answered by merely applying known rules to new examples, but requires new thoughts and ideas: a problem that begins by seeming impossible: a problem that cannot be solved without in the process learning something that one has not been taught.
Perhaps there is, somewhere, a better word, but I think “koan” will be hard to beat.
So… the main thing I want to convey over and above “exercise” is that rather than there being a straightforward task-to-solve, you’re supposed to ponder the statement and say, “What do I think of this?”
A word other than “koan” which conveys this intent-to-ponder would indeed be appreciated.
The only trouble I see is that “koan” makes it totally okay to think about it for a while without finding the answer, while “puzzle” might cause people to propose solutions.
Given that most people seem likely to look at the koan and think “yeah, I could solve that if I thought about it for a while” and then move on without actually thinking about it, anything that actually gets people to think about it seems like a good thing.
The goal is to apply those algorithms we call “rationality” towards solving the koan, one of which involves withholding even just mentally formulating solutions as much as possible, and instead just thinking about the elements and properties of the problem properly without subjecting oneself to hack heuristics.
The word puzzle is, for most people, loaded with a trained impulse to shoot the first solution-sounding thing that pops to mind so that you can see whether you get a hedon / tribal status coin for a good answer or not.
However, the trained behavior of most people when facing a puzzle is to look at it for a few seconds and then throw the first good-sounding solution you can think of.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Either they’ll get a right answer despite throwing the first possible solution at it, or they’ll widely miss the mark, in which case they might actually realize that they’ve learned something by the time that the right answer is demonstrated.
You have a point. My (subconscious) priors on that end are skewed towards “Never, ever throw out solutions before you’ve laid things out properly” because of lots and lots of little personal experiences with complete failure modes due to stopping with the first solution I found.
The word “pabulum” (from Latin for “fodder”) was once used in English to mean “food for thought”. However, it (or “pablum”) is now more likely to denote insipid fare. We could reclaim the original meaning—in which case these statements-to-be-pondered are “pabula”.
Interesting that “pondering” is a cognitive skill that needs exercised. The term derives from a latin term for “weight”. Perhaps this can be thought of as something analogous to barbells or dumbells for epistemological strength-training.
Pondering means thinking about something in a way that makes it “heavy” or difficult for the mind to process (just as heavy objects are difficult to lift). Like the metaphorical “burden of proof,” it references mental difficulty of processing ideas to physical difficulty in lifting objects. The way this happens involves increasing the complexity of your mental instantiation of an idea, thereby bringing more cognitive algorithms to bear on it.
The strength-training metaphor only works if it can be contrasted with endurance-training. Otherwise it would just be a generic kind of training. Strength training involves shorter bursts of focused effort followed by a recovery period. These koans are short and intended for 5-15-minutes of focused thought, so they are probably more on that end of the spectrum than lengthier articles that describe complex concepts.
Epistemological endurance training (assuming there is such a thing) would be where you use longer periods of time thinking about a problem that has a fair degree of mental effort required but not overwhelming. That would analogize to running, biking, and so forth where rather than doing the hardest thing you can do, you are doing something rather hard for a longer time.
Ooops I miscommunicated. I think the surface analogy isn’t the most interesting part of this.
I was more interested in what ideas you had for training epistemological ability. The burst vs endurance thing could be interesting if it could be detailed in on its own terms (ie. inside view instead of analogizing).
I’ve been thinking a lot about rationality training recently, so anything that looks like a possible excercise really catches my attention.
So it must have been “pondering as a rationality skill” which got your attention. Sorry for misinterpreting. :)
For me it’s not hard to ponder. I do that naturally. But I don’t always ponder exactly what I’m told to ponder, even when I have every reason to think the person who told me to ponder something knows what they’re talking about and this is something that if I ponder it I will benefit from the resulting enlightenment. It’s like there is something in the nature of pondering that is perverse and rebellious (at least for the way my mind works, some of the time).
Perhaps a good exercise would be to deliberately ponder specific things that you aren’t (yet) naturally curious about. Maybe set a timer and commit to only focus on that particular topic until the timer goes off. I wonder what an optimal time length would be? Also, what kinds of topics could/should be used for the exercise?
Whether it’s better or not for your purposes is of course your call, but as I said to chaosmosis above, I resolve this tension in my own mind by understanding “koan” as you use it to mean “exercise.”
Then again, I also replace all of your Japanese phrases in my head with their corresponding English.
I suspect this just reflects my not valuing a particular kind of myth-building very much in this context, so I just experience it as a mildly annoying distraction. If you find it valuable, by all means continue with it.
I resolve this tension in my own mind by understanding “koan” as you use it to mean “exercise.”
I do the same. I could find no deeper meaning in EY’s use of “koan”. Maybe I’m missing something.
I also replace all of your Japanese phrases in my head with their corresponding English.
Same here, except I have to look up this annoying pseudo-Japanese in-group slang almost every time. Is using it intended as some kind of status signaling?
A koan is a deliberately futile question, generally short and intended to obscure thought. To use this word also to refer to puzzles which are not skew to reality and which are intended to be answered sensibly, is likely to cause bad inferences about the purpose of koans in Zen—and is jarring in this context!
I don’t think repurposing the word ‘koan’ is that terrible. We are not going to do Zen koans in this context, and I would not be surprised to find that many here are more familiar with things such as Ruby koans.
Also, there is some disagreement about the meaning and use of koans—Zen (and Chan, Seon) buddhism has many flavors. Notably, historically koans (and the Chinese sayings they were based on) did not necessarily have the character you attribute to them above; they were originally just teachings passed down in the form of sayings.
The origins of the word aren’t very relevant to its current meaning; almost no one on this site would have known those origins before now and so those origins don’t have much influence on the way we think about the word now. The standard understanding of koans that dominates pretty much everywhere is in line with what Doriana quotes.
Using the word koan is inaccurate. I think Yudkowsky is either trying to do it to associate feelings of mystic power with rationality, or to attack feelings of mystic power by setting up expectations and then destroying those; I don’t have any idea which. But it somewhat annoys me. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s annoying.
I’m all for repurposing words, but only if there’s a decent justification to do so and I don’t see one here.
Using the word koan is inaccurate. I think Yudkowsky is either trying to do it to associate feelings of mystic power with rationality, or to attack feelings of mystic power by setting up expectations and then destroying those; I don’t have any idea which. But it somewhat annoys me. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s annoying.
The first of those two hypotheses but yes, it’s annoying and jarring. I had kind of hoped Eliezer got the mystic zen martial arts nonsense out of his system years ago and could start talking plain sense now.
I voted “Don’t care”, whereas in reality it’s more that I like the things like the cult koans and Tsuyoku Naritai, but find the current use of “Koan” so-so (I like the questions, the term “koan” is a bit jarring, but I can get used to it)
I find it super obnoxious, in exactly the same way I felt when my martial arts teachers talked about using my dantian to focus my chi instead of breathing with my diaphragm or whatever is actually useful.
The problem with regular theory exposition is that we don’t have a good theoretical framework for discussing how to put theory to practice, so the difficult to express parts about applying the theory just get omitted. I like the martial arts nonsense so far as it connotes an intention that you are supposed to actually put the subject matter to use and win with it, in addition to just appreciating the theory. Since we don’t know how to express general instructions for putting theory to practice very well in plain speech, some evocative mysticism may be the best we can do.
I don’t always dislike it. “I must become stronger” benefited from the approach. I dislike this specific instance because it’s jarring and doesn’t fit with the context and it’s a misuse of the word “koan”.
The origins of the word aren’t very relevant to its current meaning
If you’ll allow me to take this a bit out of context, please think of typical Zen usage as “origins of the word” and usage in this sequence of posts as “its current meaning.”
The difference is obvious, of course—you know what the word means, and anything else is wrong. Which is totally fine. I just wanted to point out that if you try to make your conclusions universal or absolute here, you will in fact create more relativism—the solution is to claim the non-universal knowledge of how words should be used if you’re the audience.
The standard understanding of koans that dominates pretty much everywhere is in line with what Doriana quotes.
I disagree. I would predict that most people have no idea what “koan” means, those that have seriously studied Buddhism are aware of the controversy, and a significant mass of people (especially represented in this demographic) are more familiar with the use of “koan” in programming, as with Ruby koans.
The concern seems to be that those who haven’t actually studied varieties of Buddhism but are somehow aware of the word “koan” might be confused—but the word is clearly defined before its first use in this sequence:
(A ‘koan’ is a puzzle that the reader is meant to attempt to solve before continuing. It’s my somewhat awkward attempt to reflect the research which shows that you’re much more likely to remember a fact or solution if you try to solve the problem yourself before reading the solution; succeed or fail, the important thing is to have tried first . This also reflects a problem Michael Vassar thinks is occurring, which is that since LW posts often sound obvious in retrospect, it’s hard for people to visualize the diff between ‘before’ and ‘after’; and this diff is also useful to have for learning purposes. So please try to say your own answer to the koan—ideally whispering it to yourself, or moving your lips as you pretend to say it, so as to make sure it’s fully explicit and available for memory—before continuing; and try to consciously note the difference between your reply and the post’s reply, including any extra details present or missing, without trying to minimize or maximize the difference.)
When I google “koan”, the first result is Wikipedia which says a koan is “a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen practice to provoke the “great-doubt”, and test the students progress in Zen practice”. Very Zen, that supports my side. The second result is Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, which says a koan is “a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason”. My side. The third result is for a page titled “101 Zen Koans”, which again supports my belief.
Eliezer has a history of associating mysticism with rationality, as well.
My personal concern is that using words wrong is annoying because I don’t like people mucking up my conceptual spaces. I can’t disassociate koans from mysticism and riddles, which makes it awkward and aesthetically unpleasing for me to approach problems of rationality from a “koan”.
That said, it’s probably too late to change the format of the problems in this current sequence. But I’d like it to never happen again after this gets done.
I suspect it will continue to happen. Invoking the cultural trappings of a certain kind of mysticism while discussing traditionally “rational” topics is, as you note, a popular practice… and not only of Eliezer’s.
I recommend treating the word “koan” as used here as a fancy way of saying “exercise”.
Commenter HistoricalLing does have a point. Katsuki Sekida explains:
“Now, ‘Mu’ means ‘nothing’ and is the first koan in Zen. You might suppose that, as you sit saying ‘Mu’, you are investigating the meaning of nothingness. But that is quite incorrect. It is true that your teacher, who has instructed you to work on Mu, may repeatedly say to you, ‘What is Mu?’ ‘Show me Mu,’ and so on, but he is not asking you to indulge in conceptual speculation. He wants you to experience Mu. And in order to do this, technically speaking, you have to take Mu simply as the sound of your own breath and entertain no other idea.”
In Zen practice, the purpose of a “koan” is to occupy the mind with a fruitless question (or in LW parlance, a wrong question). (Although “Mu” isn’t even a question!) This helps the meditator to maintain concentration, since by dwelling on a dead-end like “What is the samadhi in particle after particle?” he isn’t distracted by the normal flux of flitting thoughts.
The student is still expected to provide an answer, eventually, but not one arrived at by rational thought—rather, it is supposed to strike him spontaneously. Of course, this isn’t a generally wise approach to answering questions; but if the Zen master were to tell his student that the koan can’t be answered, he might not take the exercise seriously. (I expect that Bayesians find it difficult to meditate using koans, since they are so keenly aware of wrong questions.)
A koan is a deliberately futile question, generally short and intended to obscure thought. To use this word also to refer to puzzles which are not skew to reality and which are intended to be answered sensibly, is likely to cause bad inferences about the purpose of koans in Zen—and is jarring in this context!
Suggest a better word? Keep in mind that words which are not better will be rejected (people often seem to forget this while making alternate suggestions).
I think the division into problems and exercises usually seen in mathematics texts would be useful: A task is considered an exercise if it’s routine application of previous material, it’s a problem if it requires some kind of insight or originality. So far most of the Koans have seemed more like problems than like exercises, but depending on content both may be useful. I might be slightly biased towards this as I greatly enjoy mathematics texts and am used to that style.
“Problem” suggests something different in philosophy than in math. A philosophy “problem” is a seeming dilemma, e.g. Gettier, Newcomb’s, or Trolley. So I’d suggest “exercise” here.
“Exercise” dominates “kōan” in that both have the sense of something to stop and think about and try to solve, but ① “exercise” avoids the misconstrual of Zen practice (the purpose of a Zen kōan is not to come up with a solution, nor to set up for an explanation), ② the Orientalism (the dubiosity of saying something in Japanese to make it sound 20% cooler), and ③ the distraction of having to explain what a kōan is to those who don’t know the word.
EDIT: The claim that a purpose of a Zen kōan is not to come up with a solution appears to be a matter of disagreement, so discount ①. I think ② and ③ stand, though.
The account in the Wikipedia article says differently:
According to the history of the word given there, it originally meant accounts of legal decisions (and literally, a magistrate’s bench). In Chinese Buddhism it came to refer to snippets of dialogue between masters. From there it mutated to the contemplation of mysterious sayings, and eventually to what looks very like an exercise in guessing the teacher’s password, with authorised answers that were specifically taught and had to be given to acquire promotion in the Japanese monastery system. (I have this book, which is subtitled “281 Zen Koans with Answers”.)
The modern meaning of “koan” dealt with in the section “Koan-practice” describes what looks very like Eliezer’s intention in using the word here: a problem that cannot be answered by merely applying known rules to new examples, but requires new thoughts and ideas: a problem that begins by seeming impossible: a problem that cannot be solved without in the process learning something that one has not been taught.
Perhaps there is, somewhere, a better word, but I think “koan” will be hard to beat.
So… the main thing I want to convey over and above “exercise” is that rather than there being a straightforward task-to-solve, you’re supposed to ponder the statement and say, “What do I think of this?”
A word other than “koan” which conveys this intent-to-ponder would indeed be appreciated.
What about “riddle” or “puzzle”?
The only trouble I see is that “koan” makes it totally okay to think about it for a while without finding the answer, while “puzzle” might cause people to propose solutions.
Given that most people seem likely to look at the koan and think “yeah, I could solve that if I thought about it for a while” and then move on without actually thinking about it, anything that actually gets people to think about it seems like a good thing.
The only trouble is if people then have to unthink things, which humans are notoriously bad at :P
People have already been proposing solutions to the “koans”, and I don’t understand why that’s a bad thing.
The goal is to apply those algorithms we call “rationality” towards solving the koan, one of which involves withholding even just mentally formulating solutions as much as possible, and instead just thinking about the elements and properties of the problem properly without subjecting oneself to hack heuristics.
The word puzzle is, for most people, loaded with a trained impulse to shoot the first solution-sounding thing that pops to mind so that you can see whether you get a hedon / tribal status coin for a good answer or not.
Alright. I see where you’re coming from, though I doubt that “puzzle” and “koan” have as many deep connotations as you claim.
Maybe the right thing to do is to actually write something to the effect of “Here is how you should be approaching these puzzles/koans”?
“Puzzle” is good because it suggests that there is a solution, whereas some “problems” don’t have solutions, because they are simply confused.
However, the trained behavior of most people when facing a puzzle is to look at it for a few seconds and then throw the first good-sounding solution you can think of.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Either they’ll get a right answer despite throwing the first possible solution at it, or they’ll widely miss the mark, in which case they might actually realize that they’ve learned something by the time that the right answer is demonstrated.
You have a point. My (subconscious) priors on that end are skewed towards “Never, ever throw out solutions before you’ve laid things out properly” because of lots and lots of little personal experiences with complete failure modes due to stopping with the first solution I found.
I don’t think “noodle” is taken, yet.
Hm. I like the direction this points. Any similar suggestions?
.
Your suggestion has been… accepted!
.
You could use “udon” instead of “noodle” to make it sound foreign and mysterious ;)
The word “pabulum” (from Latin for “fodder”) was once used in English to mean “food for thought”. However, it (or “pablum”) is now more likely to denote insipid fare. We could reclaim the original meaning—in which case these statements-to-be-pondered are “pabula”.
Consider adding “straightforward” exercises for the lesser mortals, and mark the harder ones, (koans?) with stars, like the standard textbooks do.
“Pondering exercise” maybe?
Interesting that “pondering” is a cognitive skill that needs exercised. The term derives from a latin term for “weight”. Perhaps this can be thought of as something analogous to barbells or dumbells for epistemological strength-training.
I like the way you think. Care to elaborate?
Pondering means thinking about something in a way that makes it “heavy” or difficult for the mind to process (just as heavy objects are difficult to lift). Like the metaphorical “burden of proof,” it references mental difficulty of processing ideas to physical difficulty in lifting objects. The way this happens involves increasing the complexity of your mental instantiation of an idea, thereby bringing more cognitive algorithms to bear on it.
The strength-training metaphor only works if it can be contrasted with endurance-training. Otherwise it would just be a generic kind of training. Strength training involves shorter bursts of focused effort followed by a recovery period. These koans are short and intended for 5-15-minutes of focused thought, so they are probably more on that end of the spectrum than lengthier articles that describe complex concepts.
Epistemological endurance training (assuming there is such a thing) would be where you use longer periods of time thinking about a problem that has a fair degree of mental effort required but not overwhelming. That would analogize to running, biking, and so forth where rather than doing the hardest thing you can do, you are doing something rather hard for a longer time.
Ooops I miscommunicated. I think the surface analogy isn’t the most interesting part of this.
I was more interested in what ideas you had for training epistemological ability. The burst vs endurance thing could be interesting if it could be detailed in on its own terms (ie. inside view instead of analogizing).
I’ve been thinking a lot about rationality training recently, so anything that looks like a possible excercise really catches my attention.
So it must have been “pondering as a rationality skill” which got your attention. Sorry for misinterpreting. :)
For me it’s not hard to ponder. I do that naturally. But I don’t always ponder exactly what I’m told to ponder, even when I have every reason to think the person who told me to ponder something knows what they’re talking about and this is something that if I ponder it I will benefit from the resulting enlightenment. It’s like there is something in the nature of pondering that is perverse and rebellious (at least for the way my mind works, some of the time).
Perhaps a good exercise would be to deliberately ponder specific things that you aren’t (yet) naturally curious about. Maybe set a timer and commit to only focus on that particular topic until the timer goes off. I wonder what an optimal time length would be? Also, what kinds of topics could/should be used for the exercise?
Whether it’s better or not for your purposes is of course your call, but as I said to chaosmosis above, I resolve this tension in my own mind by understanding “koan” as you use it to mean “exercise.”
Then again, I also replace all of your Japanese phrases in my head with their corresponding English.
I suspect this just reflects my not valuing a particular kind of myth-building very much in this context, so I just experience it as a mildly annoying distraction.
If you find it valuable, by all means continue with it.
I do the same. I could find no deeper meaning in EY’s use of “koan”. Maybe I’m missing something.
Same here, except I have to look up this annoying pseudo-Japanese in-group slang almost every time. Is using it intended as some kind of status signaling?
I don’t think repurposing the word ‘koan’ is that terrible. We are not going to do Zen koans in this context, and I would not be surprised to find that many here are more familiar with things such as Ruby koans.
Also, there is some disagreement about the meaning and use of koans—Zen (and Chan, Seon) buddhism has many flavors. Notably, historically koans (and the Chinese sayings they were based on) did not necessarily have the character you attribute to them above; they were originally just teachings passed down in the form of sayings.
The origins of the word aren’t very relevant to its current meaning; almost no one on this site would have known those origins before now and so those origins don’t have much influence on the way we think about the word now. The standard understanding of koans that dominates pretty much everywhere is in line with what Doriana quotes.
Using the word koan is inaccurate. I think Yudkowsky is either trying to do it to associate feelings of mystic power with rationality, or to attack feelings of mystic power by setting up expectations and then destroying those; I don’t have any idea which. But it somewhat annoys me. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s annoying.
I’m all for repurposing words, but only if there’s a decent justification to do so and I don’t see one here.
The first of those two hypotheses but yes, it’s annoying and jarring. I had kind of hoped Eliezer got the mystic zen martial arts nonsense out of his system years ago and could start talking plain sense now.
I like the mystic Zen martial arts nonsense. Looks like it’s the time for a poll.
Eliezer’s mystic Zen martial arts nonsense is...
[pollid:182]
I voted “Don’t care”, whereas in reality it’s more that I like the things like the cult koans and Tsuyoku Naritai, but find the current use of “Koan” so-so (I like the questions, the term “koan” is a bit jarring, but I can get used to it)
I find it super obnoxious, in exactly the same way I felt when my martial arts teachers talked about using my dantian to focus my chi instead of breathing with my diaphragm or whatever is actually useful.
In general the “mystic Zen martial arts nonsense” is a nice antidote to the Straw Vulcan stereotype.
That’s no excuse for misusing a word in this specific instance, though.
The problem with regular theory exposition is that we don’t have a good theoretical framework for discussing how to put theory to practice, so the difficult to express parts about applying the theory just get omitted. I like the martial arts nonsense so far as it connotes an intention that you are supposed to actually put the subject matter to use and win with it, in addition to just appreciating the theory. Since we don’t know how to express general instructions for putting theory to practice very well in plain speech, some evocative mysticism may be the best we can do.
I don’t always dislike it. “I must become stronger” benefited from the approach. I dislike this specific instance because it’s jarring and doesn’t fit with the context and it’s a misuse of the word “koan”.
If you’ll allow me to take this a bit out of context, please think of typical Zen usage as “origins of the word” and usage in this sequence of posts as “its current meaning.”
The difference is obvious, of course—you know what the word means, and anything else is wrong. Which is totally fine. I just wanted to point out that if you try to make your conclusions universal or absolute here, you will in fact create more relativism—the solution is to claim the non-universal knowledge of how words should be used if you’re the audience.
I disagree. I would predict that most people have no idea what “koan” means, those that have seriously studied Buddhism are aware of the controversy, and a significant mass of people (especially represented in this demographic) are more familiar with the use of “koan” in programming, as with Ruby koans.
The concern seems to be that those who haven’t actually studied varieties of Buddhism but are somehow aware of the word “koan” might be confused—but the word is clearly defined before its first use in this sequence:
When I google “koan”, the first result is Wikipedia which says a koan is “a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen practice to provoke the “great-doubt”, and test the students progress in Zen practice”. Very Zen, that supports my side. The second result is Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, which says a koan is “a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason”. My side. The third result is for a page titled “101 Zen Koans”, which again supports my belief.
Eliezer has a history of associating mysticism with rationality, as well.
My personal concern is that using words wrong is annoying because I don’t like people mucking up my conceptual spaces. I can’t disassociate koans from mysticism and riddles, which makes it awkward and aesthetically unpleasing for me to approach problems of rationality from a “koan”.
That said, it’s probably too late to change the format of the problems in this current sequence. But I’d like it to never happen again after this gets done.
I suspect it will continue to happen. Invoking the cultural trappings of a certain kind of mysticism while discussing traditionally “rational” topics is, as you note, a popular practice… and not only of Eliezer’s.
I recommend treating the word “koan” as used here as a fancy way of saying “exercise”.
And then we realize that the use of the word ‘koan’ was not entirely serious, and get on with the sequence.
Also, note the side-effect of that karma penalty—responding to things without organizing the post appropriately. Whee.
(note to self: check when I loaded the page before commenting)