So, a few thoughts on the example of "theodicy", about which I'm afraid I feel roughly as Raemon does though not necessarily for the same reasons.

For me, "theodicy" already has a meaning firmly attached, and it does kinda map to part of what you're describing in your post with "theodicy" in the title. Unfortunately, that part -- so it seems to me -- already has a perfectly good name: "the principle of charity". PoC says to interpret what people say or do in the way that puts them in the best light, and that's exactly what you're describing.

The extra thing you're adding to that already-existing concept, the thing that (if I understand right) you want the name "theodicy" attached to, is a particular notion of what counts as putting someone in the best light: treat them as (in order of priority) good, smart, perceptive, currently-competent, and put all those ahead of assuming your observations were accurate and representative. And the only connection between this "hierarchy of innocuousness" and the concept usually known as "theodicy" is that there's this one post where you talk about being charitable to people and analogizes it to theodicy, and in that post you propose this specific hierarchy of innocuousness.

So I think this is the thing that bugs me: your post is about three different things: (1) the general idea of making benign assumptions about others, contra the fundamental attribution error; (2) the idea of doing so according to a "hierarchy of innocuousness"; (3) the specific hierarchy of innocuousness you proposed. Of these, the proposed name "theodicy" is a decent match for #1, but (a) we don't need a new name for #1 because we already have "principle of charity" and (b) you're trying to attach it to (I think) #1, #2 and #3 all together.

For me, (b) makes "theodicy" a positively bad name for the concept -- because there's another concept in the same vicinity that it wants to attach itself to. The term "wants" to match to just #1, at least in my head, and trying to use it for all three feels like you're trying to make your preferred form of being-charitable-about-people be correct by definition. As if I wrote a post called "Having good taste" and it turned out that I wanted to define "good taste" to mean liking Bach, dark chocolate and pizza more than Eraserhead, milk chocolate and caviar.

Now, if I'm drawing the right inferences from your response when Raemon suggested "Theodicy and the hierarchy of charity", what looks to me like a bug looks to you like a feature: you don't like Raemon's proposal because it separates these two things, and you want to keep them together. I think that's an error. They are conceptually separate because one can have either without the other; you could try to think well of people without having a prioritized list of kinds-of-merit, and you could (less plausibly) have a prioritized list of kinds-of-merit but hold that it's only rarely that there's any point trying to think well of people. (I guess you could use the list as a guide to how much any given person sucks, by finding the highest level at which you think they fail.) But in practice, saying "Conor's hierarchy of charity" (or whatever) will not only convey the idea of a prioritized list of kinds-of-merit and your particular suggestion for what that list should be, but also (via the term "charity", if nothing else) remind readers/listeners of the context for that list, namely as a thing to use when applying the principle of charity to avoid the fundamental attribution error.

Related thoughts on naming things:

Use unique, non-obvious terms for nuanced concepts by malcolmocean

Nonfiction Writing Advice by Scott Alexander (especially "9. Use strong concept handles")

I think I also disagree with something about the Moloch comparison. Like, I agree that the distinction you draw is important. But, something something... feels like there just can't be too many Molochs? If that was a common way-of-naming, it'd quickly become too overwhelming.

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.

Curious how long you spent attempting to name the thing?

You have (in the past) persuaded me that Jargon is sufficiently important that we should err more (or at least as much) on the side of having more.

But my current thought it something like "I do not know anyone in the rationalsphere who has made much deliberate study of how to name things well, and this probably means we could be much better at naming things than we are." Not sure how long you tried with the theodicy post, but for the average LW-writer-that-I-assume-probably-doesn't-think-enough about naming, I think:

1. It's worth spending 5 minutes coming up with names for the pure value of "getting the best name in 5 minutes"

2. It's even more worthwhile to spend extra time thinking of names so that you can improve at doing it so that it can take less time later.

FYI, this is what I output in about 3 minutes.

• Theodicy and the Hierarchy of Charity
  
  (for blogposts, I think "Catchy-name plus short sentence-fragment" is a pretty good compromise. In conversation people can say "you're not doing theodicy" and when they go look it up, the post title will help remind them wtf that means. I think, at the very least, this'd have been strictly better)
  
  Variations:

  • Theodicy and the Hierarchy of Good Faith

  • Operationalizing Good Faith

  • Hierarchy of Good Faith

  • Hierarchy of Charity

• Avoiding the "Bad Bucket"
  
  Variations:

  • Bad-Bucketing

  • Badsplaining

  • Sorting the "Bad Bucket"

  • Just-How-They-Are-ism

  • Theodicy, and Sorting the Bad Bucket (I think this is my favorite)

  • (For someone who hates the term "Bucket Errors" I apparently like it as the name for this thing")

Aside: I think "The Fundamental Attribution Error" is one of the worst named things that the LW-o-sphere has tried to popularize, and it could use some kind of better name.

The technical definition of Fundamental Attribution Error is subtly different from the implied definition of "don't just put people in the Bad Bucket", but I think it is easier to say/work-with. ("Just-how-they-are-ism" was an attempt to name the FAE in particular, as opposed to name the post)

This model predicts that e.g. Zvi's current frontpage post "The Fish-Head Monk" is well-named if and only if there's no resonant, tropey analogy name for what he's trying to say, and also a longer, phrase-based or sentence-based title would be accurate but too slow to say and too unlikely to stick.