In my experience, people saying they “updated” did not literally change a percentage or propagate a specific fact through their model. Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect it to be so granular, but to me it devalues the phrase and so I try to avoid it unless I can point to a somewhat specific change in my model. Whereas usually my model (e.g. of a subset of AI risks) is not really detailed enough to actually perform a Bayesian update, but more to just generally change my mind or learn something new and maybe gradually/subconsciously rethink my position.
Maybe I have too high bar for what counts as a bayesian updates—not sure? But if not, then I think “I updated” would count more often as social signaling or as appropriation of a technical term to a non-technical usage. Which is fine, but seems less than ideal for LW/AI Safety people.
So I would say that jargon has this problem (of being used too casually/technically imprecise) sometimes, even if I agree with your inferential distance point.
As far as LW jargon being interchangeable with existing language—one case I can think of is “murphyjitsu”, which is basically exactly a “premortem” (existing term) - so maybe there’s a bit of over-eagerness to invent a new term instead of looking for an existing one.
I use my the prhase “I’ve updated” even when not having a number in my head. When I do say it, it’s motly a signal to myself to notice my feeling of how strongly I belive something and deliberatly push that feeling a bit to one side or another, especially when the evindence is week and should not change my mind very much.
I belive the human brain is acctually pretty good at aproximating basian updating, if one pays attention to facts in the right way. Part of this practice, for me, is to sometimes state out lound that I’ve encountered evidence that should influence my belifs, especially in cases where I’m in risk of confirmation bias.
My guess is that the people inveting the term “murphyjitsu” did not know of the term “premortem”. If anyone want to check this, look in the CFAR handbook and see if there are any citations in that section. CFAR was decent at citing when they took ideas from other places.
Independent invesion is another way to get synonyms. I concidered including this in the original comment, but didn’t seem central enough for my main point.
But diffrent academic fields having diffrent jargon for the same thing because of independent invention of ideas, is a common thing.
Related rant: Another indpendent invetion (invented many times) is the multi agent mind method for therapy (and similar). It seems like various people have converged on calling all of it Interla Famaly System, which I dislike, because IFS is much more specific than that.
CFAR handbook, p. 43 (“further resources” section of the “inner simulator” chapter, which the “murphyjitsu” unit is a part of):
Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington (1989) developed the technique which they called “prospective hindsight.” They found that people who imagined themselves in a future world where an outcome had already occurred were able to think of more plausible paths by which it could occur, compared with people who merely considered the outcome as something that might occur. Decision making researcher Gary Klein has used this technique when consulting with organizations to run “premortems” on projects under consideration: assume that the project has already happened and failed; why did it fail? Klein’s (2007) two-page article provides a useful summary of this technique, and his (2004) book The Power of Intuition includes several case studies.
Mitchell, D., Russo, J., & Pennington, N. (1989). Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2, 25-38. http://goo.gl/GYW6hg
“Murphyjitsu” is equivalent to “premortem” rather than “postmortem”; and the word “premortem” is much less common. I worked in a field where everyone does postmortems all the time (Site Reliability Engineering); only a few people even talked about premortems and even fewer did them.
The first I heard of the multi-agent model of the mind was Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1986) which was based on work going back to the ’70s. My impression is that IFS was being developed around the same time but I don’t know the timeline there.
Yeah, I agree premotrem is not super commonly used. Not sure where I learned it, maybe an org design course. I mainly gave that as an example of over-eagerness to name existing things—perhaps there aren’t that many examples which are as clear cut, maybe in many of them the new term is actually subtly different from the existing term.
But I would guess that a quick Google search could have found the “premortem” term, and reduced one piece of jargon.
Now days you can descripe the concept you want and have a LLM tell you the common term, but this tech is super new. Most of our jargon in from a time when you could only Google things you already know the name for.
In my experience, people saying they “updated” did not literally change a percentage or propagate a specific fact through their model. Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect it to be so granular, but to me it devalues the phrase and so I try to avoid it unless I can point to a somewhat specific change in my model. Whereas usually my model (e.g. of a subset of AI risks) is not really detailed enough to actually perform a Bayesian update, but more to just generally change my mind or learn something new and maybe gradually/subconsciously rethink my position.
Maybe I have too high bar for what counts as a bayesian updates—not sure? But if not, then I think “I updated” would count more often as social signaling or as appropriation of a technical term to a non-technical usage. Which is fine, but seems less than ideal for LW/AI Safety people.
So I would say that jargon has this problem (of being used too casually/technically imprecise) sometimes, even if I agree with your inferential distance point.
As far as LW jargon being interchangeable with existing language—one case I can think of is “murphyjitsu”, which is basically exactly a “premortem” (existing term) - so maybe there’s a bit of over-eagerness to invent a new term instead of looking for an existing one.
I use my the prhase “I’ve updated” even when not having a number in my head. When I do say it, it’s motly a signal to myself to notice my feeling of how strongly I belive something and deliberatly push that feeling a bit to one side or another, especially when the evindence is week and should not change my mind very much.
I belive the human brain is acctually pretty good at aproximating basian updating, if one pays attention to facts in the right way. Part of this practice, for me, is to sometimes state out lound that I’ve encountered evidence that should influence my belifs, especially in cases where I’m in risk of confirmation bias.
My guess is that the people inveting the term “murphyjitsu” did not know of the term “premortem”. If anyone want to check this, look in the CFAR handbook and see if there are any citations in that section. CFAR was decent at citing when they took ideas from other places.
Independent invesion is another way to get synonyms. I concidered including this in the original comment, but didn’t seem central enough for my main point.
But diffrent academic fields having diffrent jargon for the same thing because of independent invention of ideas, is a common thing.
Related rant: Another indpendent invetion (invented many times) is the multi agent mind method for therapy (and similar). It seems like various people have converged on calling all of it Interla Famaly System, which I dislike, because IFS is much more specific than that.
I think when you wrote postmortem you meant to write premortem?
Yes, thanks. I’ve fixdd it now.
(reacted to my own post to test something about reactions, and now I don’t knwo how to remove it)
CFAR handbook, p. 43 (“further resources” section of the “inner simulator” chapter, which the “murphyjitsu” unit is a part of):
Hm, this does not rule out independent discovery, but is evidence against it.
I notice that I’m confused why they would re-name it if it isn’t independent discovery.
“Murphyjitsu” is equivalent to “premortem” rather than “postmortem”; and the word “premortem” is much less common. I worked in a field where everyone does postmortems all the time (Site Reliability Engineering); only a few people even talked about premortems and even fewer did them.
The first I heard of the multi-agent model of the mind was Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1986) which was based on work going back to the ’70s. My impression is that IFS was being developed around the same time but I don’t know the timeline there.
Yeah, I agree premotrem is not super commonly used. Not sure where I learned it, maybe an org design course. I mainly gave that as an example of over-eagerness to name existing things—perhaps there aren’t that many examples which are as clear cut, maybe in many of them the new term is actually subtly different from the existing term.
But I would guess that a quick Google search could have found the “premortem” term, and reduced one piece of jargon.
Now days you can descripe the concept you want and have a LLM tell you the common term, but this tech is super new. Most of our jargon in from a time when you could only Google things you already know the name for.