I’m sympathetic to your comment, but let me add some additional perspective.
While using (IMO) imprecise or misleading language doesn’t guarantee you’re reasoning improperly, it is evidence from my perspective. As you say, that doesn’t mean one should “act” on that evidence by “correcting” the person, and often I don’t. Just the other day I had a long conversation where I and the other person both talked about the geometry of the mapping from reward functions to optimal policies in MDPs.
I think I do generally only criticize terminology when I perceive an actual reasoning mistake. This might be surprising, but that’s probably because I perceive reasoning mistakes all over the place in ways which seem tightly intertwined with language and word-games.
Exception: if someone has signed up to be mentored by me, I will mention “BTW I find it to help my thinking to use word X instead of Y, do what you want.”
You might have glossed over the part where I tried to emphasize “at least try to do this in the privacy of your own mind, even if you use these terms to communicate with other people.” This part interfaces with your “eggshells” concern.
It’s important to realize that such language creates a hostile environment for reasoning, especially for new researchers. Statistically, some people will be misled, and the costs can be great. To be concrete, I probably wasted about 3,000 hours of my life due to these “word games.”
Nearly all language has undue technical connotations. For example, “reinforcement” is not a perfectly neutral technical word, but it sure is better than “reward.” Furthermore, I think that we can definitely do better than using extremely loaded terms like “saints.”
But until you’ve seen them use it to reason poorly, perhaps it’s a good norm to assume they’re not confused about things, even if the terminology feels like it has misleading connotations to you.
Well, not quite what I was trying to advocate. I didn’t conclude that many people are confused about things because I saw their words and thought they were bad. I concluded that many people are confused about things because I repeatedly:
saw their words,
thought the words were bad,
talked with the person and perceived reasoning mistakes mirroring the badness in their words,
I’m sympathetic to your comment, but let me add some additional perspective.
While using (IMO) imprecise or misleading language doesn’t guarantee you’re reasoning improperly, it is evidence from my perspective. As you say, that doesn’t mean one should “act” on that evidence by “correcting” the person, and often I don’t. Just the other day I had a long conversation where I and the other person both talked about the geometry of the mapping from reward functions to optimal policies in MDPs.
I think I do generally only criticize terminology when I perceive an actual reasoning mistake. This might be surprising, but that’s probably because I perceive reasoning mistakes all over the place in ways which seem tightly intertwined with language and word-games.
Exception: if someone has signed up to be mentored by me, I will mention “BTW I find it to help my thinking to use word X instead of Y, do what you want.”
You might have glossed over the part where I tried to emphasize “at least try to do this in the privacy of your own mind, even if you use these terms to communicate with other people.” This part interfaces with your “eggshells” concern.
It’s important to realize that such language creates a hostile environment for reasoning, especially for new researchers. Statistically, some people will be misled, and the costs can be great. To be concrete, I probably wasted about 3,000 hours of my life due to these “word games.”
Nearly all language has undue technical connotations. For example, “reinforcement” is not a perfectly neutral technical word, but it sure is better than “reward.” Furthermore, I think that we can definitely do better than using extremely loaded terms like “saints.”
Well, not quite what I was trying to advocate. I didn’t conclude that many people are confused about things because I saw their words and thought they were bad. I concluded that many people are confused about things because I repeatedly:
saw their words,
thought the words were bad,
talked with the person and perceived reasoning mistakes mirroring the badness in their words,
and then concluded they are confused!