Avoid inflationary use of terms

Alicorn and I regret that we have but two upvotes to give this comment.

twitch

This is the most rational post on proper word usage

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Everett branch

Can you give an example of the kind of usage of "Everett branch" that you consider to be inappropriately inflationary? I cannot think of an example. This either means that I have not cached the undesirable usages or that I disagree about when it is appropriate to use the phrase.

A possibility is that I actually think in terms of abstract decision theoretical concerns, Many Worlds and Big Worlds in general more than average. This would make me more likely to use the phrase as a literal description of thoughts about a scenario than as, say, just an attempt to make a preference sound a little bit cooler.

I would add "Prisoner's Dilemma" to the list. I've seen it used to describe basically any game theoretic scenario with payoffs rather than just one example of how (relative) payoffs could be set up in a symmetrical two person game.

I seriously wonder if being the first comment and having it start with the word "Upvoted" caused a massive information cascade that caused people to inflate this post's karma, and then when it was moved to main people didn't change their vote because it represented a commitment in their minds and now it's promoted because of its karma score, even though, at present, 94% of it was earned while it was a discussion post...

I don't know why you think this belongs in discussion. It is a content post, written specifically with main in mind. The title, the fact that it has an attention-getting opening, summary at the end, multiple examples, specific point... I posted to discussion because I wanted feedback and I figured I could keep the karma accumulated (but not get it multiplied by 10, that was news to me -- my expectation was that the post would go back to 0 and people who liked it could upvote it again).

After all the process if unbounded should lead you to associate words with everything right?

Which is probably why we have words that don't add any real meaning, such as the word "that" earlier in this sentence.

I agree, those biology terms are really overused and no longer carry any useful meaning. I regret having used "high throughput" in things I wrote a few years ago...

For the most part "systems biology" is just a less overused euphemism for cybernetics, and we all know what happened to that (as I mentioned in another post in this thread).

I try to do my part by referring to segways as "cybernetic devices".

My mother was taught something about cybernetics in highschool (USSR 1960s). For the past fifteen years, she has remained completely mystified by the "cybernetics" and other "cyber-something" stories in TV news.

All control systems are dynamic and use feedback, and "the study of" is redundant, so you can just talk about "control systems" or "control theory".

Agreed. I didn't know there was a difference until I was 17-18 (possibly because a couple of novels in which I encountered it misused the term.)

Words as mental paintbrush handles nicely complements this post. Human communication consists of trying to paint pictures for each other using words, and we tend to apply words broadly and loosely because narrowness and precision requires effortful scrutiny.

I haven't heard the first one, but the second one is a good example.

I think that may be a different phenomenon, which arises from the serious difficulties involved in categorizing mental illness. After all, even clinical psychologists don't all agree on what constitutes "paranoia", so how should anyone else be expected to?

One data point is that lately I have been trying specifically to react positively to criticism lately.

(A month or so ago as part of a slightly woo-like exercise called EFT that I sometimes do to put myself to sleep or cope with stress, I replaced the words from the setup phrase "completely and deeply love, accept, and forgive myself" with a longer phrase "completely and deeply accept all valid criticism, and honestly and earnestly attempt to learn from, change, and use this information for personal development and self improvement" -- something like that. Followed by imagining tapping the various woo points, er "energy points" on my body. No telling what impact this has or even if it's relevant, but thought I'd mention it.)

Also I was able to change the title fairly quickly and thus de-escalate the situation and switch it to a slightly more academic context rather than taking a purely defensive posture because I happened to be logged into the IRC chatroom where Konkvistador was complaining about it. Since I didn't want to come across as a moron in front of my peers, I asked the channel politely for reasons to change it, then for suggestions as to what to change it to. I don't think anyone there actually said "inflationary use", that's a term I got from a comment by Eugen Leitl and is what my mind filled in the blanks with when searching for an explanation. Apart from the new title "What is the best programming language?" I'm not sure there was any actual information content apart from "some people agree with this", but interacting with the channel calmed me down a bit and put me in a better frame of mind for it.

In any case, I would say the non-antagonistic responses definitely helped. I'm not sure whether they would work on just anybody, one of my mind's specific deviations from the norm is that I am more patient and willing to look for validity in criticisms to begin with. (I'm obsessed with the excluded middle ground, so while I may try very hard to spot a problem in the criticism I rarely reject it whole cloth.) But I think a large proportion of lesswrongers fit the same general profile and/or it is a learnable tendency for people specifically trying to do it. Perhaps a rationality technique centered on pattern-matching one's responses to criticism and/or one's crisis cycle level would be of use.

In some contexts the 'innocent mistake' is dishonest rhetoric in it's most pernicious, reflexive form.

You mean like "freedom" and "job creators"?

For a sufficiently small exponent, I guess.

(Agree, expanding.)

Just use the googlebox here for the phrase "is Bayesian evidence for" to see what I'm talking about. Or Google itself -- there are only 7 hits, three of them to LW.

That phrase makes sense when describing evidence that is not considered evidence according to other standards - such as science or traditional rationalism. For example "Absence of evidence is (Bayesian) evidence of absence".

I think people use "Bayesian evidence" to emphasize the "more likely to occur under one hypothesis than under the other" sense of evidence over other things that people might be tempted to take "evidence" to mean.

I would guess that amateur astronomy is more exciting to you than skateboarding. Do you think this is true for everyone?

I think the problem with over-use of "awesome" is not so much its use for less substantial things, but its use as a generic positive adjective. Awesome has a meaning - it means "inspiring awe". I've seen awesome skateboard tricks, they inspired in me a sense of awe at the skill and athletic ability of the skateboarder. Awesomeness of course is defined in terms of a person's reaction, so it's a subjective thing. I have no problem with people who have awe instilled in them by things I don't find awesome. But some people use 'awesome' to mean 'really good'. As in "I know an awesome mexican restaurant where we can have lunch". Here the speaker isn't talking about awe at all, and that is what dilutes the word.

Same thing with "incredible" and "unbelievable", with "fantastic" and "fabulous". These words don't just mean "really good", they carry specific meanings for why the thing they describe is good. Describing a scientific result as "incredible" means it's bad science, since the result cannot be believed. Describing a business plan as "fantastic" means it's terrible, since it's far removed from reality, a fantasy.

What words should enthusiasts use to describe something they enjoy then? I use awesome and other similar words to describe skilled starcraft players, music, and other things which other people might not care about at all, until someone comes up with a comprehensive list or formula for determining what can be called awesome and what cannot it does not make much sense to tell someone that their usage is incorrect.

As for use of swear words- I will leave this grand task to you. The minor gain of purging the english language of one pointlessly agressive word is not strong enough to make the side effects worthwhile.

This is also why I discourage people from overusing words like "awesome" and "magnificent"; I want to be able to say that about the Horsehead Nebula, but other people keep applying it to skateboard tricks.

Eddie Izzard on "awesome."

I think that this use of "modulo" is close enough to the mathematical reason to allow.

Likewise, “f(x) is O(g(x))” only means that f(x)/g(x) is bounded, not that the bound is small. In particular, O(3^^^3) means the same thing as O(1).

What do you mean by "Faith", and what do you mean by "neurotypical"? (I understand the latter is used mostly to mean "not autistic", sometimes to mean "normal" on some other cognitive metric or set of metrics.)

Hmm. I wonder how many such studies looked at environments where the majority had a reasonable scientific education and there was no pre-existing religion?

(This just might be a trick question.)

The capitalization also make a difference.
"faith" vs. "Faith" are roughly "belief of unproven things" vs. "system of religious belief"