Expressive Vocabulary

Pedantry is like American football. You have to be smart enough to play, but stupid enough to think it worth playing.

Or, pedantry is like bling. To poor people, bling makes you look rich, but to rich people, bling makes you look poor. Even so, to stupid people, pedantry makes you look smart, and to smart people, pedantry makes you look stupid.

Rule of thumb: your grandma is always smart enough to know when you're being stupid.

Thinking a bit more about the times when I nitpick a technicality rather than digging into a real disagreement:

Both of your examples are cases where there's a LOT of subtext (friend implying status and/or attempting to influence my purchase decisions, grandma asserting authority and enforcing her preferences by implying universality), and much of the time I won't want to risk the relationships by directly contradicting or correcting them, _NOR_ by walking away and never seeing them again. And yet, it grates on me to take the option you didn't call out: just meekly accept the underlying disagreement. I totally get that the initial-response mechanism of pointing out that they've used a word in a way that doesn't exactly match a dictionary does not further a rational discussion, but I'm not sure a rational discussion is what these examples are.

Pedantry like this _is_ a way to assert a little bit of independence/disagreement (or, less justifiably, dominance), and to open the concept of disagreement in a way that's deniable, and start a subtle, unacknowledged negotiation which can be de-escalated easily if either party decides it's not worth pursuing.

The technology example reminded me of Darcey Riley's discussion of shattered dichotomies: sometimes people think of things as being either X or Y, and then learn an argument for why this dichotomy doesn't make sense. As a result, they might reject the dichotomy entirely, keep it but conclude that "everything is X" or "everything is Y", or acknowledge the argument but find the dichotomy useful regardless.

For instance, back in high school philosophy class, I used to argue that “all people are selfish”. If you’re hurt, and I go to help you, it’s not because I’m altruistic. It’s because the sight of you in pain causes me to feel pain, and I, selfishly, want to relieve my own pain (or I want to avoid the guilt I’d feel for not helping). Similarly, if I give you a gift, it’s not because I’m altruistic; it’s because I selfishly want the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from gift-giving.

In high school, I thought this was a great argument. As an adult, I roll my eyes. It’s not that the argument is wrong, per se; based on the definition of “selfish”, it really is possible to classify all actions as selfish. I just don’t think it’s useful. Our folk concepts of “selfless” and “selfish” might be fuzzy and imprecise (as all concepts are), but they help us navigate a complicated world. When you realize that your friend Mike is selfish, you might decide to hang out with him less, or to avoid doing him favors because you know they won’t be reciprocated. And when you’re deciding whether to give your friend Steve a ride to the airport, you might agree to do it, because you don’t want him to think you’re selfish.

(Though maybe the shattering of this dichotomy can be useful for some people! If someone suffers from scrupulosity, and is wracked with unnecessary guilt that they’ve chosen the selfish option too often, then completely removing the distinction between “selfish” and “selfless” could be exactly what they need.)

Another shattered dichotomy I’ve encountered is the people who argue “A city is just as natural as a pristine forest, because cities were made by humans, and humans are part of nature. A city is just as much a natural structure as a bird’s nest or an anthill.” I neither agree nor disagree with this argument; it’s really just a matter of what you want the concepts to mean. And that, in turn, will depend on what you’re using them for. A lot of people (myself included) find natural landscapes beautiful, but also find industrial complexes ugly. And, while I’ll always probably find refineries ugly on a visceral level, this argument helps me appreciate them as part of the ecosystem of human activity, which I do in fact find beautiful. So in that particular instance, I appreciate the shattering of the dichotomy. But when someone says “pollution in the Shenandoah river isn’t a big deal, because industrial waste is just as natural as fish poop”, then I’m going to object, because they’re relying on the standard inference “natural => harmless”, and they’re trying to get you to classify pollution as natural so you’ll think of it as harmless as well.

the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say "chemicals"

I honestly don't understand what that thing is, actually.

To use an example from a Facebook post I saw this week:

Is P-Menthane-3,8-diol (PMD) a chemical? What about oil from the lemon eucalyptus tree? Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus is typically refined until it's 70% PMD instead of 2%; does that turn it into a chemical? What if we were to refine it all the way to 100%? What if, now that we've got 100% PMD, we just start using PMD synthesized at a chemical plant instead?

I do like the idea from another comment here that

the motte is "technically, everything is a chemical," and the bailey is "No need to worry about the content of the food you buy."

But even that can be inverted. People buy "no nitrites added" bacon to try to avoid a dangerous chemical, and they end up getting the result of (all natural! organic!) celery-juice and celery-powder processes. At best, the nitrates in the celery still end up getting converted to nitrites during curing, except that now there's another loose variable in the production so a balance between "cardiac/cancer risk from high nitrite levels" versus "botulism risk from low nitrite levels" is even harder to achieve. At worst, the consumer falsely believes they've no further need to worry about the content of the food they buy, and so they don't moderate consumption of it they way they would have moderated consumption of "chemicals".

What if the thing you're trying to say is "I think the categorization scheme implied by your use of <word> is wrong, and will cause you to make wrong predictions?" This was the first thing that came to mind when I read your example about "chemicals" -- I objected to my dad's use of "chemicals" a few years ago, and it led to us discussing how that term conflates "has a scary-sounding name" with "has any evidence of being harmful at all". My dad previously thought that willowbark extract might be healthier/less harmful than aspirin, despite them both having the same active ingredient (salicylic acid).

I agree that people don't always want to debate about whether they're making a category error; if someone says they want to avoid food with chemicals and I object to their categorization scheme and they say "I'm not interested in debating that, please respect my food preferences so we can finish this shopping trip", then I should definitely drop the issue. But are your preferences that I shouldn't even bring it up?

(I might be typical minding somewhat here; I've gotten a lot of mileage from various rationalist friends asking me to taboo certain words in discussion, which forces me to think more carefully and often causes me to notice distinctions that I was eliding. So I like the tool of striking words from my vocabulary!)

What is the rubric that marks the difference between a good semantic argument/point/question, and a bad semantic argument/point/question.

I would say there must be some rubric that marks the difference between "seeking clarity and understanding" and "seeking ambiguity and confusion".

Sometimes it is the person saying "I would like to mention this other definition of the word" who is seeking clarity.

Sometimes it is the person saying "Oh, come on, you know what I mean." who is seeking clarity.

And sometimes it's not necessarily about facts... It's about who get's to decide what is proper, and what is not. In each of the examples, "chemicals in food", "technology at the dinner table." one can legitimately ask--what concerns you about the chemicals in the food? What concerns you about the technology at the dinner table?

For the chemicals in the food example, what is probably a concern that they must rely on their own knowledge to decide whether each of the ingredients in the package is safe, and a lack of trust in the systems government and business have worked out to assure that foods are safe. That's actually a reasonable conversation to have, but not necessarily one you want to have before you leave the grocery store.

For "technology at the dinner table" one can probably reasonably assume that this is a question about propriety... Namely whether eating together at a dinner table constitutes a shared family experience, or if it is a multiplayer solitaire experience. Of course, one might note that the table and chairs are, in some sense, simple technology designed to support this shared family experience.

This post is an eloquent defense of the skillful wielding of the power of language against the forces of blandness [LW · GW], pedantry, and cowardice that every day threaten to degrade our cognition and thereby consume us all.

When it comes to the issue of "chemicals" in food, it's a well-defined term in the EU. It also makes a lot of sense to legislate different substances differently.

It would be madness to say that everyone who sells an apple has to list the thousand of different proteins that are in the apple on the ingredients list in a way that it isn't to tell food produces to list added substances that normally aren't found in apples.

On the same token, there's an argument to be made for the EU policy of saying that when somebody decides to add a new "chemical" to food that wasn't used before, they have to do toxicity tests in a way that the farmer who's wheat naturally evolves to express a new protein doesn't (there are huge problems with even requiring the farmer to know every protein in his wheat).

Somewhat of the topic of accurate labels: This reminds me of Scott A's old posts on the Non-central Example Fallacy and Motte-and-Bailey: A statement starting with " Technically, ..." is designed to pick out a non-central example, like that from the post, the motte of, say, "Technically, MLK was a criminal," to justify the bailey of, say, "Shoplifing is no big deal, even though it is against the law." Or, in your example, the motte is "technically, everything is a chemical," and the bailey is "No need to worry about the content of the food you buy."

As for the term for your first example, it is something like an industrial synthetic compounds never found in a home cooking recipe.

I agree with this argument in general but not for slurs. I think it's appropriate to exert social pressure to prevent those.

I’d submit this post for curation if that feature was working, but since it’s not, I’m saying it in a comment. This is excellent.

Considering the fact that 80% of people think that food containing DNA should be labeled maybe pedantry in cases similar to the first one is actually the correct response (depending on who you talk to of course).

Relevant Tumblr post (not mine)

Basic politeness rules, explained well for people who don't find them obvious, yay!

I don't know perfectly well what someone means when they say the dip is full of chemicals. I know roughly what they mean, but I can't figure out exactly what they mean, or even know if they have a consistent or thought out definition at all.

When telling them that the dip contains dihydrogen monoxide, I am not being pedantic; I am saying "the plain meaning of what you are saying doesn't make sense. And any not-plain meanings are beyond my ability to guess, so could you please tell me what you're really trying to say?"

You can solve this by adding scare quotes or the phrase "so to speak". E.g., "That brand of dip is full of 'chemicals', so to speak." That way, you're safe from pedants without intruding on the existing meaning of the word "chemicals".

I have to say that I'm guilty of such pedantry (playfully, in my mind. perhaps not to the recipient, and I'll examine more closely next time it comes up), especially to break the ice when I don't think the reasonable but non-compliant response will be well-received.

I do think that language and communication _is_ personal and idiosyncratic, and a demand that I provide a single word for a concept that can be used in other contexts is somewhere between onerous and just unlikely. Clarification using many words is often perfectly reasonable. If you also want to agree that "in this context only, X is shorthand for 'the thing we've just spent 3 minutes defining'", that can make some further conversations easier.

I fully share and support at least one motivation behind this peeve: spending time arguing about definitions should take up very little of your cruxing effort. Agree on concepts, then identify the actual disagreements.

This post helped me understand why something was bothering me, then provided additional insight. Thank you!

I feel like this post is missing an important piece.

When people say "chemicals" or "technology" they are very often not talking about the term in question, but communicating an emotional fact about themselves. "I am disgusted by foods that feel artificially produced", "I want you not to be distracted by devices during dinner". Coming up with better and more precise terms won't help at all, since the thing is being communicated has little to do with the referent of the imprecise term.

You can notice this when the conversation switches from personal experience to a more general and technical discussion. If someone proposes a "ban on technology use in school", everyone will be quick to focus on what is actually in the category.

This is now my go-to post to point to when people are rules lawyering words. Really useful resource.

Seconding Zack (and see my earlier comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]).

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.

Unfortunately, this is incredibly hard to do. It's much easier to notice patterns than identify the relevant property.

Noticing patterns is all that there is to do. There is no magic word that means exactly what you want to say. But some patterns are better at identifying the relevant properties than others. And I believe that pushing people to use more accurate words has some value.

Nearly all ecosystems have been heavily modified by human presence since 10 thousand years ago.

Yes, they have. And those modifications could be said to be unnatural. E.g. the fact that there aren't as many forests is unnatural, and there were more 10k years ago. But also many things stayed the same. E.g. the fact that squirrels still live in those forests is natural, and there were also squirrels 10k years ago.

Do you have a specific example where you could say "X is natural", but not "X was common 10k years ago"?

Of course, ideally we'd say something is natural if it would have happened anyway if humans had never had any influence on it, but that's hard to say, and looking at 10k years ago is a good-enough approximation.

Also, there is the issue of what is natural for humans. I don't think the common usage of "natural" says anything about that, and I guess the 10k year rule doesn't work here.

I don't think the long term problems caused by natural ingredients are that well known. Nutrition is hard.

I'm all for less pedantry, but

there doesn't seem to actually exist a word in English for the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say "chemicals".

Maybe that's because "chemicals" isn't a natural category? I don't really know what is meant by that word. It could be something about the manufacturing process. But possibly it just means "complicated words listed on the packaging" and nothing more.

I am not saying: you, yes you, have to talk to people who use words you can't stand or in ways you can't stand

Yes. And if I don't want to talk to people who use those words, and someone says those words to me, then I'm going to reply with something like your "No" replies. Thus, saying "Technically, everything is chemicals", is, in fact, very reasonable.

A major (attempted and ongoing) transition in my conversational approach is to try and focus on the prediction at hand, as explicitly as possible, as often as possible. Especially when there is a disagreement. It might help avoid this kind of pedantic behavior (if I can remind myself to stick to the predictions at hand).

Speaking of being pedantic, I don't like some of the writing style you used here. I know, an old complaint about this site; here it is anyway:

Use your own words, ask your own questions, but don't enforce an inadequate prescriptivism with feigned incomprehension while your interlocutor only wants you to pass the peas.

I was fine with most of this sentence, but using "interlocutor" broke the camel's back for me. Why not say "the other person" or something? Could've given the same information, with a lower barrier to entry and less mental energy required. You want as many potential readers to get it, right? I predict it would've gone better worded another way. Try to write like Paul Graham.