I don’t know how to put this delicately: this sentence is written from a position so deep up one’s own ass that a proctologist wouldn’t dare venture near.
This is a satisfying quip and also, as others have expressed, not something I’d like to see on LW. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to post snark like this—I’ll leave decisions like that to people who are more active in the community and have thought about the details more than I have—but I expect this kind of post does substantial harm to the discourse norms here.
But I also think my opposition to this kind of snark depends on how much I agree with it. Following the rule that a post should satisfy at least two of the three criteria {true, kind, relevant}, I see your comment above as neither true nor kind. The lack of kindness isn’t really debatable, but clearly people disagree on its truth value. I think posting things that a substantial fraction of the community will deem as failing the two-out-of-three test is a bad idea if we want to avoid demon threads and related discourse disasters (although the civility in the comments I’ve read so far suggests that demon threads are not as inevitable for posts like these as I thought).
I don’t want to get into a point by point discussion of everything I disagreed with in this post (because demon threads) but I would like to ask you one q: if you think Ezra is up his own ass claiming that social justice issues (race, gender, identity, etc.) are the most important dividing lines in 2018 US politics, then what do think the most important ones are? Obviously there is not one topic that will cleanly divide everyone in the US into two categories, but if you wanted to partition the population into two clusters as cleanly as possible, what would that topic or set of topics be? Or do you think the set would have to be so large that it wouldn’t be useful to even consider? Or, and I suspect this might be the case, do you think the question is not precise/coherent enough to have a meaningful answer?
I definitely agree with the general principle of this post and the “technology” example made the principle clear and useful to me, but something feels off about applying this principle to the “chemicals” example. I think it’s because most of the time, when someone says that something has “chemicals”, what they mean is that it contains ingredients that aren’t “natural”, which is a term I’ve always found very confusing. There are plenty of technically false dichotomies that are nevertheless useful approximations, e.g. I’m sure there are edge cases between deciduous and evergreen trees, but it’s an obviously useful label when discussing whether or not you expect a tree to have leaves in the winter.
But I genuinely don’t know what “natural” is supposed to (approximately) carve up, especially in the realm of foods. If you boil tea leaves, are the resulting compounds natural? If yes, then at what point do things become unnatural? If no, then is anything that’s not raw and unprocessed unnatural, including e.g. cooked meat or boiled potatoes? There is clearly a spectrum between “raw and unprocessed” and “industrially engineered” but I don’t see any reasonable place to draw the line. And this makes the word “natural” in the context of foods too vague to be useful—every time someone uses it, you have to ask a series of followup questions to figure out where they (arbitrarily) draw the line.
And so I think a reasonable followup to “this food contains chemicals” is “virtually everything is chemicals—what do you mean it contains chemicals?” This is essentially a less snarky version of your “no” example, but I don’t think it’s stripping from someone a word we don’t have an optimal replacement for—it’s stripping from someone a word that is not clear enough to have any substantial meaning without further clarification. That is, it’s stripping from someone a word that wastes everyone else’s time.
This makes me want to slightly amend your rule: “Thou shalt not strike a term from others’ expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement unless the term invariably requires thou to ask for a clarifying definition.”—someone who gets really annoyed when people assume their arbitrary threshold in (un)natural-space is everyone else’s.