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TheLemmaLlama
Karma: 18
This is my first comment here; I do webcomics and a bit of category theory!
I gravitate towards certain aspects of rationality because I have an aesthetic preference for certain things like simplicity and consistency, which gives me a fondness for principles like Occam’s Razor and identifying ways that peope often fail to be consistent, which rationalists tend to talk about afaik.
But I wouldn’t say I’m a truthseeker, just an ‘intellectual hedonist’. I have a sense of ‘curiosity’, but it’s more towards ‘cool stuff’ rather than ‘true stuff’. My sense of what’s ‘cool’ is pretty arbitrary.
Anyone else feels similarly? Would this be a good place for me? My goals might not completely align with yours, but compared to most other places on the Internet, this place has a higher concentration of stuff I find pleasing (or at least not-displeasing) to read :P
Yeah, I think I’m drawn to insight porn because of my intellectual hedonism (which mostly cares about what feels good to read about than what actually improves my ability to have true beliefs and make decisions that result in the attainment of my goals) XD But I’ll be careful!
I think I’ve read one or two AI posts which were surprisingly accessible considering I have no background in AI.
What point do you think the OP is making?
Jargon is useful and natural when it describes distinctions we’re already familiar with, but is cumbersome when it describes distinctions that feel meaningless to us.
As a ‘subpoint’, I felt like the OP was implying that one has no reason to be upset with other people for resisting one’s attempt to push jargon onto them, unless one is trying to hijack their mental software to use them as a tool for one’s own goals and priorities. I could be wrong about OP having this view …
how is this relevant?
… but just in case, I wanted to mention a case where one might be upset with other people for resisting one’s attempt to push jargon onto them, that has nothing to do with trying to control or manipulate them.
(Was that too small of a point in the OP to be worth addressing? I’m new here XD)
Hardest to easiest for me:
- gadgets problem (The wrong answer just pops into my head so quick)
- lilypad problem (I think the phrasing of it makes it not intuitively obvious to me on first glance that the rate of growth increases; my first instinct is to read “it doubles every day” as “it increases every day”)
- bat-and-ball problem (The answer of $10c just feels viscerally repulsive to me in an uncanny valley kind of way)
When I comment on things:
I try to put in the effort to make a guess as to what the thing is saying so people can confirm/deny my interpretation instead of explain it to me from scratch, and
I think I’m being constructive and helping the builder bake their idea properly.
But maybe sometimes I come across as crying ‘food poisoning’? (I can see myself feeling this way if, for instance, I put out an idea I thought was fully baked but a commenter points out it’s not as well-baked as I thought it was, and that might be the case for others as well, but I might also actually come across as accusatory and I’d like to try to avoid doing that :P)
I’ve personally only seen appeals to inner privacy when how the person feels is indeed the subject matter being disputed (e.g. when they’re faced with accusations about their intentions). I’d like to see an example of this being used outside that context, so I better understand how it’s used as a general conversation halter …
I don’t think even the people who feel it’s justified to change the way you think are trying to use you as a tool for their goals and priority; I don’t think it’s that machiavellian. They push the termininology they do because it’s natural for them, because they truly believe their terminology most accurately describes reality.
When you reject their terminology, they don’t see it as you saying ‘my brain isn’t currently running an OS where this language shift is easy and makes sense, and I get to have more of a say on what OS my brain runs on than you do’. They see it as you saying ‘that concept that you’re describing with your jargon DOESN’T EXIST. It’s straight up NOT A THING in REALITY.’ Whereas it’s very much real to them. To them, it’s like you’re about to step on a cat, and they’re trying to point out there’s a cat in front of you, but you’re like ‘oh, that fluffy thing on the ground? We already have a name for those—mats’ and proceed to step on it.
To me, a better answer seems to be:
- (for when someone is trying to push jargon onto you)‘Look, my brain isn’t currently running an OS where this language shift is easy and makes sense. I’m not saying this concept doesn’t describe anything that exists in reality; you’ve probably adopted this concept because it does describe something and you’ve seen it, but it’s not something I feel the need to care about; and no-one can have such a fine-grained vocabulary to describe every nuance in reality when we don’t care about the majority of them. It will be costly for me to adopt your concepts, and it’s ultimately up to me whether I choose to.’
- (for when you’re trying to get someone to adapt your jargon)‘Oh, okay, yeah, your brain isn’t currently running an OS where this language shift is easy and makes sense. I don’t blame you for not immediately seeing it, but I want to give you an update patch that will suddenly make this distinction feel real to you, becauce to me it’s very real and very important, and it makes me feel gaslit to interact with people who think I’m crazy for caring about this distinction and thinking it’s a thing. It’s your choice, of course; I won’t hold it against you if you refuse this update patch; I would just maybe not interact with you as much anymore, purely for my own comfort and not because I think you’re a bad person who isn’t worth interacting with.’
I’m with you on this one; I like feeling like an outlier. It makes me feel special :P
There are some examples there that did grind my gears though, like the pillow-throwing example and the ‘that didn’t hurt’ example. They felt more like ‘I’m going to insist your inner experience isn’t real, to the point where I won’t believe you (even if only in a joking way) if you told me’.
Whereas the ‘no-one does that’ example and the ‘we all love Tom Hanks too much’ example felt more like a metaphorical ‘everyone’ and if you actually said ‘no, I’m not like that’, the response would be ‘oh okay not ~everyone’s~ like that’.
I’d personally feel hurt by the former class of experiences but not the latter, because for me, it’s more about invalidation. It’s less ‘you don’t exist’, but rather ‘you exist in this particular way (that’s contrary to my own experiences and completely alien to what I perceive myself as), AND if you say otherwise you’re lying’.
Similarly, I’d feel hurt by an implication that someone else doesn’t exist, if it’s contrary to my own experiences. For instance, if I’ve argued about X with a lot of people and some of them gave a counterargument Y, and then someone has the counterargument Z. They think I’m strawmanning Z as Y, and they tell me: ‘no-one said Y’. It’s like … someone definitely said Y. I distinctly remember a nonzero number of people explicitly saying Y to my face, and I even made sure they actually meant Y and I wasn’t misinterpreting them.
Even if I know it’s a metaphorical ‘no-one’ and they actually just meant ‘most people who appear to be saying Y actually mean Z’, it still hurts :\