When to join a respectability cascade

post by B Jacobs (Bob Jacobs) · 2024-09-24T07:54:16.051Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/when-to-join-a-respectability-cascade

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This is a response to Scott Alexanders Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade. Maybe read that post first.


I think it becomes more important to struggle against a cascade the more annoying the new word is. There are a variety of factors that contribute how annoying it is, here are five of them:

  1. Is the new word longer? (Because we want to waste less time)
  2. Is it easier to pronounce/type? (Because we care about ease of use)
  3. Is it less descriptive? (Because we care about people quickly grasping the concept)
  4. Is it dissimilar to the old word? (Because we want to minimize transaction costs)
  5. Is it likely to cause another cascade? (Because we dislike cascades)

If tomorrow people say that "black people" is bad but "black peoples" is good, I would jump on board once 60% of the population is on board, because it scores well in all aspects (except 5). If however people want to replace it with "abcedifoguhajekilomun" that's worse in all aspects (except 5) so I would strongly push against it (maybe only jump on board at 95%).

Conversely if people want to reclaim a word and start a respectability cascade I would jump on board rather quickly (I like having the freedom to use a lot of words), but I would jump on board even more quickly the better it scores on those different aspects.

For example, I'm on board with trying to reclaim "queer" because lgbt is longer and more annoying to say, requires an explanation for a new user, and quickly causes another cascade (what about intersex? Okay we'll say lgbti. What about asexuals? Okay we'll say lgbtia etc).
Queer on the other hand scores well on all aspects (even transaction cost since we still have a lot of books lying around about "queer theory" etc).

I don't think we should be trying to put a number on this (e.g. I add 10% to my 70% for every negative aspect it has) because a lot of it depends on social context. With rarely used jargon I value descriptiveness over brevity, with words I use in everyday life it's the other way around. Let's all agree we jump onboard a disrespectability cascade at more than 50% and onboard a respectability cascade at less than 50%. How much more or less we'll change depending on a lot of hard to quantify social factors.

Note that this is just a heuristic and moral reasoning obviously takes priority. Queer people wanting to make "queer" a respectable synonym of "lgbt" is fine. But if the nazi-party wants to start a respectability cascade to make "holocaust" a respectable synonym of "morality" you should probably resist jumping on board even once the majority of the population has.

This heuristic can be adapted/used for other respectability cascades too (like clothing, tattoos, style guides etc).

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comment by momom2 (amaury-lorin) · 2024-09-25T13:50:51.622Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree with the broad idea, but I'm going to need a better implementation.
In particular, the 5 criteria you give are insufficient because the example you give scores well on them, and is still atrocious: if we decreed that "black people" was unacceptable and should be replaced by "black peoples", it would cause a lot of confusion on account of how similar the two terms are and how ineffective the change is.

The cascade happens because of a specific reason, and the change aims at resolving that reason. For example, "Jap" is used as a slur, and not saying it shows you don't mean to use a slur. For black people/s, I guess the reason would be something like not implying that there is a single black people, which only makes sense in the context of a specialized discussion.

I can't adhere to the criteria you proposed because they don't work, and I don't want to bother thinking that deep about every change of term on an everyday basis, so I'll keep on using intuition to choose when to solve respectability cascades for now.
For deciding when to trigger a respectability cascade, your criteria are interesting for having any sort of principled approach, but I'm still not sure they outperform unconstrained discussion on the subject (which I assume is the default alternative for anyone who cares enough about deliberately triggering respectability cascades to have read your post in the first place).