Personally, when I see someone using the sorts of terms Turner is complaining about, I mentally flag it (and sometimes verbally flag it, saying something like “Not sure if it’s relevant yet, but I want to flag that we’re using <phrase> loosely here, we might have to come back to that later”). Then I mentally track both my optimistic-guess at what the person is saying, and the thing I would mean if I used the same words internally. If and when one of those mental pictures throws an error in the person’s argument, I’ll verbally express confusion and unroll the stack.
A major problem with this strategy is that it taxes working memory heavily. If I’m tired, I basically can’t do it. I would guess that people with less baseline working memory to spare just wouldn’t be able to do it at all, typically. Skill can help somewhat: it helps to be familiar with an argument already, it helps to have the general-purpose skill of keeping at least one concrete example in one’s head, it helps to ask for examples… but even with the skills, working memory is a pretty important limiting factor.
So if I’m unable to do the first-best thing at the moment, what should I fall back on? In practice I just don’t do a very good job following arguments when tired, but if I were optimizing for that… I’d probably fall back on asking for a concrete example every time someone uses one of the words Turner is complaining about. Wording would be something like “Ok pause, people use ‘optimizer’ to mean different things, can you please give a prototypical example of the sort of thing you mean so I know what we’re talking about?”.
… and of course when reading something, even that strategy is a pain in the ass, because I have to e.g. leave a comment asking for clarification and then the turn time is very slow.
There’s a difficult problem here.
Personally, when I see someone using the sorts of terms Turner is complaining about, I mentally flag it (and sometimes verbally flag it, saying something like “Not sure if it’s relevant yet, but I want to flag that we’re using <phrase> loosely here, we might have to come back to that later”). Then I mentally track both my optimistic-guess at what the person is saying, and the thing I would mean if I used the same words internally. If and when one of those mental pictures throws an error in the person’s argument, I’ll verbally express confusion and unroll the stack.
A major problem with this strategy is that it taxes working memory heavily. If I’m tired, I basically can’t do it. I would guess that people with less baseline working memory to spare just wouldn’t be able to do it at all, typically. Skill can help somewhat: it helps to be familiar with an argument already, it helps to have the general-purpose skill of keeping at least one concrete example in one’s head, it helps to ask for examples… but even with the skills, working memory is a pretty important limiting factor.
So if I’m unable to do the first-best thing at the moment, what should I fall back on? In practice I just don’t do a very good job following arguments when tired, but if I were optimizing for that… I’d probably fall back on asking for a concrete example every time someone uses one of the words Turner is complaining about. Wording would be something like “Ok pause, people use ‘optimizer’ to mean different things, can you please give a prototypical example of the sort of thing you mean so I know what we’re talking about?”.
… and of course when reading something, even that strategy is a pain in the ass, because I have to e.g. leave a comment asking for clarification and then the turn time is very slow.