I agree jargon is useful. And I think you missed one of the biggest reasons it is useful, which is to allow you to do more complicated mental operations now that your concepts take up less working memory. (I think cognitive psychologists refer to this as “chunking”. Chunking is covered in this Coursera class.)
However, I think in some cases, people in the LW community may be too eager to create new jargon for stuff that can already be described using existing jargon. Using existing jargon leaves your conceptual map more compact and better connected. It’s easier to see if two phenomena are two sides of the same coin, and it’s easier to see if you are compartmentalizing/not propagating beliefs. (Example: I’d argue that Scott Alexander would benefit from uniting his thinking on “motte and bailey” and “dog whistles” in to a single conceptual handle. Or if not a single conceptual handle, an orthogonal basis for the subspace spanned by those two concepts.) And if the existing jargon is in common use, or the total jargon load is kept small, it becomes easier to make connections to insights outside the community/communicate with outsiders.
There’s an analogy to computer programming here: it’s not good to write new methods that do almost the same thing that existing methods do, or new, rarely-used methods which only consist of a few lines of code that call existing methods. It’s not good to write your own method that duplicates functionality you could import via a library call. And of course you should give your new method a good name!
I would not go so far as to say that every new term that someone proposes should receive the same level of scrutiny that additional lines of code receive. I think in practice, people will probably not adopt new terms if they aren’t actually useful. (Although they might do this as a way to do ingroup signalling—I’m still not clear on what “Ra” adds over existing concepts such as “status” and “prestige”.) But anyway, my intent is more to encourage paying off the ontological equivalent of “technical debt” vs discourage greenfield ontologizing.
I agree with basically all of this. I disagree with the claim that I missed that reason, though? But that’s a not-very-useful disagreement outside of point-scoring, so whatev. =)
(considered deleting/not making this comment, but left it for people’s models of my brain’s process)
I agree jargon is useful. And I think you missed one of the biggest reasons it is useful, which is to allow you to do more complicated mental operations now that your concepts take up less working memory. (I think cognitive psychologists refer to this as “chunking”. Chunking is covered in this Coursera class.)
However, I think in some cases, people in the LW community may be too eager to create new jargon for stuff that can already be described using existing jargon. Using existing jargon leaves your conceptual map more compact and better connected. It’s easier to see if two phenomena are two sides of the same coin, and it’s easier to see if you are compartmentalizing/not propagating beliefs. (Example: I’d argue that Scott Alexander would benefit from uniting his thinking on “motte and bailey” and “dog whistles” in to a single conceptual handle. Or if not a single conceptual handle, an orthogonal basis for the subspace spanned by those two concepts.) And if the existing jargon is in common use, or the total jargon load is kept small, it becomes easier to make connections to insights outside the community/communicate with outsiders.
There’s an analogy to computer programming here: it’s not good to write new methods that do almost the same thing that existing methods do, or new, rarely-used methods which only consist of a few lines of code that call existing methods. It’s not good to write your own method that duplicates functionality you could import via a library call. And of course you should give your new method a good name!
I would not go so far as to say that every new term that someone proposes should receive the same level of scrutiny that additional lines of code receive. I think in practice, people will probably not adopt new terms if they aren’t actually useful. (Although they might do this as a way to do ingroup signalling—I’m still not clear on what “Ra” adds over existing concepts such as “status” and “prestige”.) But anyway, my intent is more to encourage paying off the ontological equivalent of “technical debt” vs discourage greenfield ontologizing.
I agree with basically all of this. I disagree with the claim that I missed that reason, though? But that’s a not-very-useful disagreement outside of point-scoring, so whatev. =)
(considered deleting/not making this comment, but left it for people’s models of my brain’s process)