This is a great post! A lot of these points have been addressed, but this is what I wrote while reading this post:
It’s not immediately clear that an ‘appeal to consequences’ is wrong or inappropriate in this case. Scott was explicitly considering the policy of expanding the definition of a word, not just which definition is better.
If the (chief) purpose of ‘categories’ (i.e. words) is to describe reality, then we should only ever invent new words, not modify existing ones. Changing words seems like a strict loss of information.
It also seems pretty evident that there are ulterior motives (e.g. political ones) behind overt or covert attempts to change the common shared meaning of a word. It’s certainly appropriate to object to those motives, and to object to the consequences of the desired changes with respect to those motives. One common reason to make similar changes seems to be to exploit the current valence or ‘mood’ of that word and use it against people that would be otherwise immune based on the current meaning.
Some category boundaries should reflect our psychology and the history of our ideas in the local ‘category space’, and not be constantly revised to be better Bayesian categories. For one, it doesn’t seem likely that Bayesian rationalists will be deciding the optimal category boundaries of words anytime soon.
But if the word “lying” is to actually mean something rather than just being a weapon, then the ingroup and the outgroup can’t both be right.
This is confusing in the sense that it’s obviously wrong but I suspect intended in a much more narrow sense. It’s a demonstrated facts that people assign different meanings to the ‘same words’. Besides otherwise unrelated homonyms, there’s no single unique global community of language users where every word means the same thing for all users. That doesn’t imply that words with multiple meanings don’t “mean something”.
Given my current beliefs about the psychology of deception, I find myself inclined to reach for words like “motivated”, “misleading”, “distorted”, &c., and am more likely to frown at uses of “lie”, “fraud”, “scam”, &c. where intent is hard to establish. But even while frowning internally, I want to avoid tone-policing people whose word-choice procedures are calibrated differently from mine when I think I understand the structure-in-the-world they’re trying to point to.
You’re a filthy fucking liar and you’ve twisted Scott Alexander’s words while knowingly ignoring his larger point; and under cover of valuing ‘epistemic rationality’ while leveraging your privileged command of your cult’s cant.
[The above is my satire against-against tone policing. It’s not possible to maintain valuable communication among a group of people without policing tone. In particular, LessWrong is great in part because of it’s tone.]
Epsilon value maybe?
In a certain sense, this is a trivial claim. Obviously some people are going to have ‘local’ competitive advantages but nothing speaks louder than success so word gets out eventually.
But I’m intrigued, so maybe this is not literally valueless.