I’m going to come out and say that LW has terrible taste in words. It’s been bothering me for ages. “Secondary stressors” and “tactile ambition”, like much of our jargon, are exactly the kind of thing Orwell made fun of in Politics and the English Language and the kind of thing Churchill was trying to discourage with “Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.” I’m always on the lookout for older, shorter words for any new idea, and usually find that they do the job better than big new words.
For example, take your description of “secondary stressors”:
Their thoughts seem to go to places like, “Can I really do this forever? What about next time I go to a party? Are my friends not going to want to hang out with me any more? I’ve failed when I’ve tried to quit in the past, what if I fail again? That’d feel so terrible, I don’t want to fail, and...”
That’s just worrying. You’re describing the same set of things that “worrying” is describing, and your advice at the end of the section is literally to stop worrying. That’s fine advice, and using big new words for it might make some people more receptive, but to me it feels like inventing words for no reason.
Or about “tactile ambition”:
Now consider a teenager who really wants to make some pocket money, so they aggressively look to arbitrage buying stuff at local auctions that are underpriced and putting it on Ebay. Every day they scout around for stuff to buy and sell, and try to dress up all their sales listings to sound great and sell well.
Did you just come up with a new way to say “motivation”? It’s true that some people might get a quick boost from that. But the problem is that the boost fades away, while the layers of unnecessary jargon keep building up in your mind.
I always feel slightly surreal when meeting LW folks who talk like that in real life. So I try to distract myself by rephrasing what they say into older, shorter words in my mind, and it works better than you’d think. For a quick master class in that, see enye-word’s comment on one of Eliezer’s posts. To me, reading that comment feels like seeing a needle puncture a water balloon.
This isn’t an attack on all of Eliezer’s writing—his skill is off the charts and I’ve learned a lot from him. But this particular habit, where you can’t say “wishful thinking” because “motivated cognition” springs to mind so easily, is something I wish we didn’t learn.
I disagree with both your overall thesis and your specific examples. The reason why we invent so much of our own jargon is because of the jargon we invent, the portion which survives mostly doesn’t have preexisting substitutes, or has substitutes that are inferior enough to matter. The competition between words is mostly controlled by a unconscious processes, but these processes are well connected to words’ actual usefulness.
I wrote the card game Rationality Cardinality because I think learning and using more jargon is vital to being able to think well.
But this particular habit, where you can’t say “wishful thinking” because “motivated cognition” springs to mind so easily, is something I wish we didn’t learn.
These phrases don’t mean the same thing; motivated cognition is a strict superset of wishful thinking, and covers a much larger range of circumstances. Something is motivated cognition but not wishful thinking if it’s motivated by pessimism, or by a status dynamic such as needing to appear consistent. In cases where either term could apply, calling something wishful thinking is making an additional claim beyond that which would be claimed by calling it motivated cognition, and it’s a socially risky claim at that.
is there some process of carefully trawling though mainstream writing to make sure that there is no existing jargon that can do the job? Because LW seems to have reinvented several wheels. Instrumental/terminal is exactly hypothetical/categorical, for instance.
In the essay you linked Orwell states that the problem he has with certain language usage is lack of precision. When we coin a new term on LessWrong instead of using an old and imprecise term for what we want to express we don’t create lack of precision but increase precision.
The problem with most old words is that they are overladen with multiple distinct existing meanings, a lot of existing connotations and emotional valence. When it comes to articulating new knowledge it’s important to be able to state new claims precisely and that’s often easier if one introduces new terms that don’t come with existing baggage.
When it comes to the term worrying, the example the OP brought is worrying but I can also imagine different secondary stressors. As far as I understand the term worrying it’s about feeling fear about possible future outcomes. Emotions like shame or envy can also appear as second-order emotions that might be called secondary stressors.
In the essay you linked Orwell states that the problem he has with certain language usage is lack of precision. When we coin a new term on LessWrong instead of using an old and inprecise term for what we want to express we don’t create lack of precision but increase precision.
Enye-word’s comment is witty, certainly, but “this is going to take a while to explain” and “systematically underestimated inferential distances” aren’t the same thing. Similar yes, but there’s a difference between something taking a while to explain, while addressing X so you can explain Y which is a prerequisite for talking about Z, while your interlocutor may not understand why you’re not just talking about Z, and something just taking a while to explain!
For example, if someone asked me about transhumanism, I might have to explain why immortality looks biologically possible, and how reversal tests work so we’re not just stuck with the “death gives meaning to life” intuition, and the possibility of mind uploading to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe, and the evidence for minds being a function of information such that uploading looks even remotely plausible… Misunderstandings are all but guaranteed. But if someone asked me about the plot of Game of Thrones in detail, there would be far less chance of misunderstanding, even if it took longer to explain.
Also, motivation and “tactile ambition” aren’t the same thing either. Tactile ambition sounds like ambition to do a specific thing, rather than to just “do well” in an ill-defined way. Someone might be very motivated to save money, for instance, and spend a lot of time and energy looking for ways to do so, yet not hit on a specific strategy and thus never develop a related tactile ambition. Or someone might have a specific ambition to save money by eating cheaply, as in the Mr. Money Mustache example, yet find themselves unmotivated and constantly ordering (relatively expensive) pizza.
That said, why “tactile ambition” rather than something like “specific ambition”?
Motivation means the same thing as “tactile ambition”, so using the new phrase is a bad idea.
We hear self-reports—or at least legends—of people “motivated” by far-mode concerns, so I think it can be credibly said that the public conception of “motivation” allows for both the visceral and immediate “motivated not to touch the stove again, lest they get burnt” and the abstract and far-off “motivated to increase revenues in the coming decade”.
Lionhearted’s term expressly forbids far-mode concerns—it picks out a subset of motivation.
However, I cannot endorse the phrase, since it seems that building the concept out as “Near mode motivation(s)” is more expressive (incorporates the entire near/far concept), less jargony, and nearly as short as “tactile ambition” (And probably can be trimmed to “near motivations”—which is shorter than “tactile ambition”—in contexts where it’s used often.)
It seems to me ambition differs slightly from motivation — ambition, I think, often includes some medium-intensity negative emotion with it — but, insightful take here.
You seem to be saying that you prefer general words that encompass many concepts rather than specific and more precise words. EX:
>Did you just come up with a new way to say “motivation”? It’s true that some people might get a quick boost from that.
Are motivation and ambition the same thing? I don’t think so. It seems to me that ambition typically encompasses a certain lack alongside it; it seems to most typically occur with some medium-intensity negative emotion.
It’s very possible to say someone is motivated to throw a birthday party for their son or daughter, but you wouldn’t usually say they’re “ambitious to throw a birthday party” — while ambition in its various forms (abstract or tactile) might be a subset of motivation, maybe, I think there’s a useful distinction there.
Of course, the key is having language that works for you — if it doesn’t work for you, by all means don’t use it.
Yeah, I agree that there are distinctions everywhere, and precision is often a good thing. But the thing that ticks me off isn’t quite precision, it’s something else… Remember the example Orwell gives in his essay:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
vs. the same thing in modernese:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Your argument can also show that the second example is more precise, and thus better, but to me it feels worse somehow.
Going back to your post:
I came to see a pattern where addicts who relapse seem to face not just the primary stressors of withdrawal effects or hardship around behavior change, but they also seem to generate secondary stressors in their own mind.
Can you hear how it sounds like the second of Orwell’s examples? Not all the way there, but maybe like 50% of the way there?
That said, I’m not going for poetics or linguistic beauty — I’m looking for an easily-used technical term.
I’m not particularly attached to “secondary stressors” — I just want a precise phrase for the phenomenon. Other people in the thread proposed other ones, EX “worrying about worrying” (which is close but I think again not as precise).
You seem to be saying that you prefer general words that encompass many concepts rather than specific and more precise words.
I can believe that you meant something more specific and precise than “worrying sometimes makes things worse” when you said “secondary stressors”, but your post failed to get any more precise distinction across, and if people used the term as jargon they wouldn’t be using it for anything more precise than “worrying making things worse”. (Less sure about the motivation vs “tactile ambition” example since I don’t know of any decent framework for thinking about motivation.)
I’m going to come out and say that LW has terrible taste in words. It’s been bothering me for ages. “Secondary stressors” and “tactile ambition”, like much of our jargon, are exactly the kind of thing Orwell made fun of in Politics and the English Language and the kind of thing Churchill was trying to discourage with “Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.” I’m always on the lookout for older, shorter words for any new idea, and usually find that they do the job better than big new words.
For example, take your description of “secondary stressors”:
That’s just worrying. You’re describing the same set of things that “worrying” is describing, and your advice at the end of the section is literally to stop worrying. That’s fine advice, and using big new words for it might make some people more receptive, but to me it feels like inventing words for no reason.
Or about “tactile ambition”:
Did you just come up with a new way to say “motivation”? It’s true that some people might get a quick boost from that. But the problem is that the boost fades away, while the layers of unnecessary jargon keep building up in your mind.
I always feel slightly surreal when meeting LW folks who talk like that in real life. So I try to distract myself by rephrasing what they say into older, shorter words in my mind, and it works better than you’d think. For a quick master class in that, see enye-word’s comment on one of Eliezer’s posts. To me, reading that comment feels like seeing a needle puncture a water balloon.
This isn’t an attack on all of Eliezer’s writing—his skill is off the charts and I’ve learned a lot from him. But this particular habit, where you can’t say “wishful thinking” because “motivated cognition” springs to mind so easily, is something I wish we didn’t learn.
(Also, LW uses italics way too much.)
I disagree with both your overall thesis and your specific examples. The reason why we invent so much of our own jargon is because of the jargon we invent, the portion which survives mostly doesn’t have preexisting substitutes, or has substitutes that are inferior enough to matter. The competition between words is mostly controlled by a unconscious processes, but these processes are well connected to words’ actual usefulness.
I wrote the card game Rationality Cardinality because I think learning and using more jargon is vital to being able to think well.
These phrases don’t mean the same thing; motivated cognition is a strict superset of wishful thinking, and covers a much larger range of circumstances. Something is motivated cognition but not wishful thinking if it’s motivated by pessimism, or by a status dynamic such as needing to appear consistent. In cases where either term could apply, calling something wishful thinking is making an additional claim beyond that which would be claimed by calling it motivated cognition, and it’s a socially risky claim at that.
This was my favorite disagreeing comment on this thread, and insightful.
is there some process of carefully trawling though mainstream writing to make sure that there is no existing jargon that can do the job? Because LW seems to have reinvented several wheels. Instrumental/terminal is exactly hypothetical/categorical, for instance.
In the essay you linked Orwell states that the problem he has with certain language usage is lack of precision. When we coin a new term on LessWrong instead of using an old and imprecise term for what we want to express we don’t create lack of precision but increase precision.
The problem with most old words is that they are overladen with multiple distinct existing meanings, a lot of existing connotations and emotional valence. When it comes to articulating new knowledge it’s important to be able to state new claims precisely and that’s often easier if one introduces new terms that don’t come with existing baggage.
When it comes to the term worrying, the example the OP brought is worrying but I can also imagine different secondary stressors. As far as I understand the term worrying it’s about feeling fear about possible future outcomes. Emotions like shame or envy can also appear as second-order emotions that might be called secondary stressors.
In the essay you linked Orwell states that the problem he has with certain language usage is lack of precision. When we coin a new term on LessWrong instead of using an old and inprecise term for what we want to express we don’t create lack of precision but increase precision.
Enye-word’s comment is witty, certainly, but “this is going to take a while to explain” and “systematically underestimated inferential distances” aren’t the same thing. Similar yes, but there’s a difference between something taking a while to explain, while addressing X so you can explain Y which is a prerequisite for talking about Z, while your interlocutor may not understand why you’re not just talking about Z, and something just taking a while to explain!
For example, if someone asked me about transhumanism, I might have to explain why immortality looks biologically possible, and how reversal tests work so we’re not just stuck with the “death gives meaning to life” intuition, and the possibility of mind uploading to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe, and the evidence for minds being a function of information such that uploading looks even remotely plausible… Misunderstandings are all but guaranteed. But if someone asked me about the plot of Game of Thrones in detail, there would be far less chance of misunderstanding, even if it took longer to explain.
Also, motivation and “tactile ambition” aren’t the same thing either. Tactile ambition sounds like ambition to do a specific thing, rather than to just “do well” in an ill-defined way. Someone might be very motivated to save money, for instance, and spend a lot of time and energy looking for ways to do so, yet not hit on a specific strategy and thus never develop a related tactile ambition. Or someone might have a specific ambition to save money by eating cheaply, as in the Mr. Money Mustache example, yet find themselves unmotivated and constantly ordering (relatively expensive) pizza.
That said, why “tactile ambition” rather than something like “specific ambition”?
We hear self-reports—or at least legends—of people “motivated” by far-mode concerns, so I think it can be credibly said that the public conception of “motivation” allows for both the visceral and immediate “motivated not to touch the stove again, lest they get burnt” and the abstract and far-off “motivated to increase revenues in the coming decade”.
Lionhearted’s term expressly forbids far-mode concerns—it picks out a subset of motivation.
However, I cannot endorse the phrase, since it seems that building the concept out as “Near mode motivation(s)” is more expressive (incorporates the entire near/far concept), less jargony, and nearly as short as “tactile ambition” (And probably can be trimmed to “near motivations”—which is shorter than “tactile ambition”—in contexts where it’s used often.)
Interesting way of putting it.
It seems to me ambition differs slightly from motivation — ambition, I think, often includes some medium-intensity negative emotion with it — but, insightful take here.
I respectfully disagree.
You seem to be saying that you prefer general words that encompass many concepts rather than specific and more precise words. EX:
>Did you just come up with a new way to say “motivation”? It’s true that some people might get a quick boost from that.
Are motivation and ambition the same thing? I don’t think so. It seems to me that ambition typically encompasses a certain lack alongside it; it seems to most typically occur with some medium-intensity negative emotion.
It’s very possible to say someone is motivated to throw a birthday party for their son or daughter, but you wouldn’t usually say they’re “ambitious to throw a birthday party” — while ambition in its various forms (abstract or tactile) might be a subset of motivation, maybe, I think there’s a useful distinction there.
Of course, the key is having language that works for you — if it doesn’t work for you, by all means don’t use it.
Yeah, I agree that there are distinctions everywhere, and precision is often a good thing. But the thing that ticks me off isn’t quite precision, it’s something else… Remember the example Orwell gives in his essay:
vs. the same thing in modernese:
Your argument can also show that the second example is more precise, and thus better, but to me it feels worse somehow.
Going back to your post:
Can you hear how it sounds like the second of Orwell’s examples? Not all the way there, but maybe like 50% of the way there?
That’s one of my favorite essays, incidentally.
That said, I’m not going for poetics or linguistic beauty — I’m looking for an easily-used technical term.
I’m not particularly attached to “secondary stressors” — I just want a precise phrase for the phenomenon. Other people in the thread proposed other ones, EX “worrying about worrying” (which is close but I think again not as precise).
I can believe that you meant something more specific and precise than “worrying sometimes makes things worse” when you said “secondary stressors”, but your post failed to get any more precise distinction across, and if people used the term as jargon they wouldn’t be using it for anything more precise than “worrying making things worse”. (Less sure about the motivation vs “tactile ambition” example since I don’t know of any decent framework for thinking about motivation.)