I point this out merely because I realized, when you brought up the spiritual example, that I wasn’t given a full account of what’s different about rationalists, maybe, in that there’s a tendency to make new jargon even when a literature search would reveal existing jargon exists.
I don’t think this is different for STEM, or cognitive science, or self-help. After having studied both CS and Math and studied some physics in my off-time, everyone constantly invents new names for all the things. To give you a taste, the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Tikhonov regularization:
Tikhonov regularization, named for Andrey Tikhonov, is the most commonly used method of regularization of ill-posed problems. In statistics, the method is known as ridge regression, in machine learning it is known as weight decay, and with multiple independent discoveries, it is also variously known as the Tikhonov–Miller method, the Phillips–Twomey method, the constrained linear inversion method, and the method of linear regularization. It is related to the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm for non-linear least-squares problems.
You will find the same pattern of lots of different names for the exact same thing in almost all statistical concepts in the Wikipedia series on statistics.
I don’t think this is different for STEM, or cognitive science, or self-help. After having studied both CS and Math and studied some physics in my off-time, everyone constantly invents new names for all the things. To give you a taste, the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Tikhonov regularization:
You will find the same pattern of lots of different names for the exact same thing in almost all statistical concepts in the Wikipedia series on statistics.