You seem to be alluding to the sort of things George Lakoff explores with the idea of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
Lakoff views political ideology in the US as fundamentally a “family metaphor”, with conservatives espousing a “strict father” model and liberals a “nurturing parent” model. Whether or not that’s the case could use much more research, but the core idea of metaphor as the structure upon which other thought builds is compatible with your appeal to more connotation-aware discourse.
Perhaps a way to address what you’re getting at would be to portray Transhumanism within the family metaphor; children growing up seems particularly fitting to me. What do you think?
An additional benefit of this framing would be to move the locus of attention away from the human-nonhuman issue, as the family metaphor would put connotations firmly within the “human” realm.
Have been a long time reader of Overcoming Bias, but haven’t gone over to LW after the split.
I’ve been a rationalist as far back as I can remember, but I really became serious when I was 12. I grew up in Israel, and I was being prepared for my Bar Mitzvah by a Hasidic Rabbi. As Hasidim are prone to do he was telling me some mystical story, wherein he mentioned that the Sun orbits the Earth. I correct him offhand that this must be wrong. He countered with what I now know to be a classic “Have you ever been to space yourself?” followed by the even more classic “Maimonides said so, you’re not saying you know better than the Rambam, are you?”. I knew so clearly he was wrong, I could explain roughly how it wouldn’t really make sense given what we know about gravity, etc., but I couldn’t really even convince myself how one might reach that conclusion from scratch. As a 12 year old I vowed to never be in such a position again. (Although my Bar Mitzvah went off flawlessly, I’m now an avowed non-theist in the presence of religious folks, atheist otherwise)
My academic training was in Linguistics and Computer Science, and I’m currently working on a startup in Silicon Valley.