People used to say (maybe still do? I’m not sure) that we should use less jargon to increase accessibility to writings on LW, i.e. make it easier to outsider to read.
I think this is mostly a confused take. The underlying problem is inferential distance. Geting rid of the jargon is actually unhelpful since it hides the fact that there is an inferential distance.
When I want to explain physics to someone and I don’t know what they already know, I start by listing relevant physics jargon and ask them what words they know. This is a super quick way to find out what concepts they already have, and let me know what level I should start on. This work great in Swedish since in Swedish most physics words are distinct from ordinary words, but unfortunately don’t work as well in English, which means I have to probe a bit deeper than just checking if they recognise the words.
Jargon isn’t typically just synonyms to some common word, and when it is, I predict that it didn’t start out that way, but that the real meaning was destroyed by too many people not bothering to learn the word properly. This is because people invent new words (jargon) when they need a new word to point to a new concept that didn’t already have a word.
I seen some post by people who are not native to LW trying to fit in and be accepted by using LW jargon, without bothering to understand the underling concepts or even seem to notice that this is something they’re supposed to do. The result is very jarring and rather than making the post look read like a typical LW post, their misuse of LW jargon makes it extra obvious that they are not a native. Edit to add: This clearly illustrates that the jargon isn’t just synonyms to words/concepts they already know.
The way to make LW more accessible is to embrace jargon, as a clear signal of assumed prior knowledge of some concept, and also have a dictionary, so people can look up words they don’t know. I think this is also more or less what we’re already doing, because it’s kind of the obvious thing to do.
There is basically zero risk that the people wanting less jargon will win this fight, because jargon is just too useful for communication, and humans really like communication, especially nerds. But maybe it would be marginally helpful for more people to have an explicit model of what jargon is and what it’s for, which is my justification for this quick take.
Jargon isn’t typically just synonyms to some common word
Jargon usually serves one of two purposes, either to synthesise a concept that would otherwise require a long-winded turn of phrase and recurs too often to dedicate that much time to it, or to signal that you belong to a certain group that knows the jargon. I think it’s fair to say that the latter should be resisted; it very well brings anything much good, just gate keeping and insularity, with all the resulting outcomes. Or sometimes impacts outside perception for no good reason.
A classic example of a LW-ism falling in that category IMO is “I updated”. Yes, it hints that you’re a Bayesian and think of your own cognitive process in Bayesian terms, but who isn’t around these parts? Other than that, it’s not particularly shorter nor particularly more meaningful than “I changed my mind” or “you convinced me”. I think it’s fair to say we could probably just do without it in most contexts that aren’t actual talk about actual Bayes’ theorem maths and it would make anything we write more legible at zero cost.
I agree with Linda’s reply that “I updated” is somewhat different from “I was convinced” because the former is often used as “I updated somewhat but not completely” with an implicit Bayesian context. “I updated” can be replaced with a whole phrase or sentence, of course, but that’s true for all jargon.
“Sequence” — people have been talking about “essay series”, “book series”, “blog post series” etc. since time immemorial, and then someone (probably Eliezer?) switched from “series” to “sequence” for some reason (joke-y reference to math jargon?), and I think it stuck for in-group signaling reasons
“Upskilling”—I don’t see what it adds over the more-common “learning” or “getting good at” etc.
“Distillation”—it’s not even the right mental image, and I don’t think adds anything over the widespread terms like “pedagogy”, “explainers”, “intro to”, etc.
I’m sure there are others, but alas, I’ve been around long enough that they don’t jump out at me anymore.
TBF I see “sequence” as more of a brand thing. “The sequences” are a specific work of literature at this point. But I suppose it is not necessary to call more series of posts here that way too.
Yeah I was referring to e.g. my own … things that I call “series” and everyone else calls “sequences”.
To be clear, “brand thing” is fine! It’s one of those emotive conjugation things: “I have playful branding and in-jokes, you have pointless jargon for in-group signaling”.
Lesswrong people using “sequence” is not really any different from twitter people using “tweet” and “thread”, or facebook people using “vaguebooking”, etc. You’re trading off a learning curve for newcomers for … playful fun and community! And playful fun and community are worth more than zero. So yeah, I personally opt out of “sequence” and many other unnecessary lesswrong-isms / SF-Bay-area-isms, but I don’t particularly hold it against other people for choosing differently.
I agree that those a better examples, and probably just synonyms.
With the nitpick that it’s not obvious to me how to say “distilling” in one word, in some other way. Although I agree with you that dthe word “distillation” is a bad fit for how we use it.
I’ve updated to think that a diffrent common way jargon happens is that someone temporarley fogett the standard term and grab some other word that is natrual for them and their audience, e.g. sequence instead of series. And sometimes this never gets “corrected”, and instead end up being the new normal in that sub-culture.
I think that “it hints that you’re a Bayesian and think of your own cognitive process in Bayesian terms” is worth the cost in this case.
You say “but who isn’t around these parts?”. We’ll outsiders/newcomers might not, so in this case the implication (when used correctly) have important information. So exactly in the cases where there is a cost, there is also important value.
When talking to LW natives, it’s usually safety to assume a Bayesian mindset, so the information value is approximately zero. But the cost is also approximately zero, since we’re all super familiar with this phrase.
Additionally I do think, that “you changed my mind” indicate a stronger update than the typical “I updated”, and “you convinced me” is even stronger. Caveat that this can be context dependent as is always the case with natural language.
E.g. if someone shows me a math proof that contradict my initial intuition about a math fact, I’d say “you convinced me”, rather than “I updated”. Here this means that I now think of the proven statement as true. Sure there are some non-zero probability that the proof is wrong. But I also have limited cognition, so sometimes it’s reasonable to just treat a statement as 100% true on the object level (while still being open to be convinced this was a mistake), even though this is not how an ideal Bayesian would operate.
I do think that [purely signal that you belong to a certain group] type jargon does exist but that’s it is much rarer than you think. Because I think you mistake information carrying jargon for non-information carrying jargon.
Additionally I do think, that “you changed my mind” indicate a stronger update than the typical “I updated”, and “you convinced me” is even stronger. Caveat that this can be context dependent as is always the case with natural language.
Fair. I made the example but if you don’t mean you updated “all the way” (whcih you’re right ia the more common case) then the correct translation in general speech would be more like “I’ll keep that in mind, though I’m not persuaded just yet”, which starts being a mouthful. I still feel like I tend to avoid the phrase and I’m doing fine, but I can see the practicality.
I think it’s interesting that the phrase “I updated” was also used as a an example of a supposedly non-useful jargon, last time I mentioned my jargon opinions.
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.
The way to make LW more accessible is to embrace jargon, as a clear signal of assumed prior knowledge of some concept, and also have a dictionary, so people can look up words they don’t know. I think this is also more or less what we’re already doing, because it’s kind of the obvious thing to do.
Would a post containing a selection of terms and an explanation of what useful concepts they point to (with links to parts of the sequences and other posts/works) be useful?
I was pretty sure this exist, maybe even built into LW. It seems like an obvious thing, and there are lots of parts of LW that for some reason is hard to find from the fron page. Googleing “lesswrong dictionary” yealded
One problem of jargon proliferation is that two communities may invent different jargon for the same underlying concept. If someone’s in both communities, they can notice, “Hey, when you say fribbling the leap-dog, I think you mean the same thing that those other folks have been calling optimizing for the toenail case since 2005. We don’t need a new expression; we can just steal theirs.”
(And one problem of that, is that there may be a subtle difference between the two concepts...)
I agree that is a problem of jargon, but how would you fix it? If you tell peopel to not come up with new words for their new cocepts… does not work, they will do that anyway. But if some how stop people from crating shorthands for things they talk about a lot, that seems much worse, than the problem you tried to solve.
Although I don’t disagree with you, this is not a crux for me at all.
Well, what I do is try to point out when two communities I’m aware of are coming up with different words for the same thing. Especially when someone is saying “There’s no word for this phenomenon yet, so I’m coining the word X for it,” but in fact there is a word for it in a nearby community.
There’s not a Big Problem here; it’s just ordinary language change. It’s perfectly normal for language communities to invent new words and usages; and if two communities are isolated from one another, there’s no magic process that will cause them to converge on one word or usage over another. Convergence can only happen when people actually talk to each other and explain what their words mean.
A couple of terms that I’ve commented on here recently —
“Delmore effect” (of unclear origin) is the same as the “bikeshed effect” (from open-source software, circa 1999) which was itself a renaming of Parkinson’s “law of triviality” (1957) — meaning that people spend more effort forming (and fighting over) opinions on the less-important parts of a project because they’re easier to understand or lower-stakes.
“Stereotype of the stereotype” (newly coined here on LW last month) is the same as “dead unicorn trope” (from TVTropes) — meaning an idea that people say is an old-fashioned worn-out cliché (a “dead horse” or “stereotype”) but was never actually popular in the first place.
There’s also “Goodhart’s Law” and “Campbell’s Law”, both pointing at the same underlying phenomenon of the distortion of measurement under optimization pressure. Goodhart was writing about British monetary policy, while Campbell was writing about American education policy and “teaching to the test”.
I think “Goodhart” took off around these parts mostly because of the pun. (The policy designers were good-hearted, but the policy ended up Goodharted.)
In Defence of Jargon
People used to say (maybe still do? I’m not sure) that we should use less jargon to increase accessibility to writings on LW, i.e. make it easier to outsider to read.
I think this is mostly a confused take. The underlying problem is inferential distance. Geting rid of the jargon is actually unhelpful since it hides the fact that there is an inferential distance.
When I want to explain physics to someone and I don’t know what they already know, I start by listing relevant physics jargon and ask them what words they know. This is a super quick way to find out what concepts they already have, and let me know what level I should start on. This work great in Swedish since in Swedish most physics words are distinct from ordinary words, but unfortunately don’t work as well in English, which means I have to probe a bit deeper than just checking if they recognise the words.
Jargon isn’t typically just synonyms to some common word, and when it is, I predict that it didn’t start out that way, but that the real meaning was destroyed by too many people not bothering to learn the word properly. This is because people invent new words (jargon) when they need a new word to point to a new concept that didn’t already have a word.
I seen some post by people who are not native to LW trying to fit in and be accepted by using LW jargon, without bothering to understand the underling concepts or even seem to notice that this is something they’re supposed to do. The result is very jarring and rather than making the post look read like a typical LW post, their misuse of LW jargon makes it extra obvious that they are not a native. Edit to add: This clearly illustrates that the jargon isn’t just synonyms to words/concepts they already know.
The way to make LW more accessible is to embrace jargon, as a clear signal of assumed prior knowledge of some concept, and also have a dictionary, so people can look up words they don’t know. I think this is also more or less what we’re already doing, because it’s kind of the obvious thing to do.
There is basically zero risk that the people wanting less jargon will win this fight, because jargon is just too useful for communication, and humans really like communication, especially nerds. But maybe it would be marginally helpful for more people to have an explicit model of what jargon is and what it’s for, which is my justification for this quick take.
Jargon usually serves one of two purposes, either to synthesise a concept that would otherwise require a long-winded turn of phrase and recurs too often to dedicate that much time to it, or to signal that you belong to a certain group that knows the jargon. I think it’s fair to say that the latter should be resisted; it very well brings anything much good, just gate keeping and insularity, with all the resulting outcomes. Or sometimes impacts outside perception for no good reason.
A classic example of a LW-ism falling in that category IMO is “I updated”. Yes, it hints that you’re a Bayesian and think of your own cognitive process in Bayesian terms, but who isn’t around these parts? Other than that, it’s not particularly shorter nor particularly more meaningful than “I changed my mind” or “you convinced me”. I think it’s fair to say we could probably just do without it in most contexts that aren’t actual talk about actual Bayes’ theorem maths and it would make anything we write more legible at zero cost.
I agree with Linda’s reply that “I updated” is somewhat different from “I was convinced” because the former is often used as “I updated somewhat but not completely” with an implicit Bayesian context. “I updated” can be replaced with a whole phrase or sentence, of course, but that’s true for all jargon.
So what are better examples? I was trying to think of some for a joke on X a few years ago, and came up with:
“Sequence” — people have been talking about “essay series”, “book series”, “blog post series” etc. since time immemorial, and then someone (probably Eliezer?) switched from “series” to “sequence” for some reason (joke-y reference to math jargon?), and I think it stuck for in-group signaling reasons
“Upskilling”—I don’t see what it adds over the more-common “learning” or “getting good at” etc.
“Distillation”—it’s not even the right mental image, and I don’t think adds anything over the widespread terms like “pedagogy”, “explainers”, “intro to”, etc.
I’m sure there are others, but alas, I’ve been around long enough that they don’t jump out at me anymore.
TBF I see “sequence” as more of a brand thing. “The sequences” are a specific work of literature at this point. But I suppose it is not necessary to call more series of posts here that way too.
Yeah I was referring to e.g. my own … things that I call “series” and everyone else calls “sequences”.
To be clear, “brand thing” is fine! It’s one of those emotive conjugation things: “I have playful branding and in-jokes, you have pointless jargon for in-group signaling”.
Lesswrong people using “sequence” is not really any different from twitter people using “tweet” and “thread”, or facebook people using “vaguebooking”, etc. You’re trading off a learning curve for newcomers for … playful fun and community! And playful fun and community are worth more than zero. So yeah, I personally opt out of “sequence” and many other unnecessary lesswrong-isms / SF-Bay-area-isms, but I don’t particularly hold it against other people for choosing differently.
I agree that those a better examples, and probably just synonyms.
With the nitpick that it’s not obvious to me how to say “distilling” in one word, in some other way. Although I agree with you that dthe word “distillation” is a bad fit for how we use it.
I’ve updated to think that a diffrent common way jargon happens is that someone temporarley fogett the standard term and grab some other word that is natrual for them and their audience, e.g. sequence instead of series. And sometimes this never gets “corrected”, and instead end up being the new normal in that sub-culture.
I think that “it hints that you’re a Bayesian and think of your own cognitive process in Bayesian terms” is worth the cost in this case.
You say “but who isn’t around these parts?”. We’ll outsiders/newcomers might not, so in this case the implication (when used correctly) have important information. So exactly in the cases where there is a cost, there is also important value.
When talking to LW natives, it’s usually safety to assume a Bayesian mindset, so the information value is approximately zero. But the cost is also approximately zero, since we’re all super familiar with this phrase.
Additionally I do think, that “you changed my mind” indicate a stronger update than the typical “I updated”, and “you convinced me” is even stronger. Caveat that this can be context dependent as is always the case with natural language.
E.g. if someone shows me a math proof that contradict my initial intuition about a math fact, I’d say “you convinced me”, rather than “I updated”. Here this means that I now think of the proven statement as true. Sure there are some non-zero probability that the proof is wrong. But I also have limited cognition, so sometimes it’s reasonable to just treat a statement as 100% true on the object level (while still being open to be convinced this was a mistake), even though this is not how an ideal Bayesian would operate.
I do think that [purely signal that you belong to a certain group] type jargon does exist but that’s it is much rarer than you think. Because I think you mistake information carrying jargon for non-information carrying jargon.
Fair. I made the example but if you don’t mean you updated “all the way” (whcih you’re right ia the more common case) then the correct translation in general speech would be more like “I’ll keep that in mind, though I’m not persuaded just yet”, which starts being a mouthful. I still feel like I tend to avoid the phrase and I’m doing fine, but I can see the practicality.
I think it’s interesting that the phrase “I updated” was also used as a an example of a supposedly non-useful jargon, last time I mentioned my jargon opinions.
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.
And this is what the auto-generated glossary should be super useful for.
Would a post containing a selection of terms and an explanation of what useful concepts they point to (with links to parts of the sequences and other posts/works) be useful?
I was pretty sure this exist, maybe even built into LW. It seems like an obvious thing, and there are lots of parts of LW that for some reason is hard to find from the fron page. Googleing “lesswrong dictionary” yealded
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/lesswrong-jargon
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/r-a-z-glossary
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fbv9FWss6ScDMJiAx/appendix-jargon-dictionary
Although non of them seem to have “distillation”, or “reserach debt” so there seems to be room for imporvement.
“distilation” do have an explanation in this tag though
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/distillation-and-pedagogy
I think the Wiki Tags are ment to be used as both tags and dictionary, however these two purpuses don’t cleanly line up.
One problem of jargon proliferation is that two communities may invent different jargon for the same underlying concept. If someone’s in both communities, they can notice, “Hey, when you say fribbling the leap-dog, I think you mean the same thing that those other folks have been calling optimizing for the toenail case since 2005. We don’t need a new expression; we can just steal theirs.”
(And one problem of that, is that there may be a subtle difference between the two concepts...)
I agree that is a problem of jargon, but how would you fix it? If you tell peopel to not come up with new words for their new cocepts… does not work, they will do that anyway. But if some how stop people from crating shorthands for things they talk about a lot, that seems much worse, than the problem you tried to solve.
Although I don’t disagree with you, this is not a crux for me at all.
Well, what I do is try to point out when two communities I’m aware of are coming up with different words for the same thing. Especially when someone is saying “There’s no word for this phenomenon yet, so I’m coining the word X for it,” but in fact there is a word for it in a nearby community.
There’s not a Big Problem here; it’s just ordinary language change. It’s perfectly normal for language communities to invent new words and usages; and if two communities are isolated from one another, there’s no magic process that will cause them to converge on one word or usage over another. Convergence can only happen when people actually talk to each other and explain what their words mean.
I think it’s great that you point this out when you see it!
I’ve seen that in physics vs chemistry vs engineering (I even made a translation guide for some niche topic way back when) but can’t immediately think of good examples related to rationalism or AI alignment.
A couple of terms that I’ve commented on here recently —
“Delmore effect” (of unclear origin) is the same as the “bikeshed effect” (from open-source software, circa 1999) which was itself a renaming of Parkinson’s “law of triviality” (1957) — meaning that people spend more effort forming (and fighting over) opinions on the less-important parts of a project because they’re easier to understand or lower-stakes.
“Stereotype of the stereotype” (newly coined here on LW last month) is the same as “dead unicorn trope” (from TVTropes) — meaning an idea that people say is an old-fashioned worn-out cliché (a “dead horse” or “stereotype”) but was never actually popular in the first place.
There’s also “Goodhart’s Law” and “Campbell’s Law”, both pointing at the same underlying phenomenon of the distortion of measurement under optimization pressure. Goodhart was writing about British monetary policy, while Campbell was writing about American education policy and “teaching to the test”.
I think “Goodhart” took off around these parts mostly because of the pun. (The policy designers were good-hearted, but the policy ended up Goodharted.)