Avoiding Jargon Confusion

Most people don't learn jargon by reading the original source for a term or phrase, they learn it from other people. Therefore one of the best ways to stop your jargon from being misused is to coin it in such a way that the jargon is a compressed representation of the concept it refers to. Authors in this milieu tend to be really bad at this. You yourself wrote about the concept of a 'demon thread' [LW · GW], which I would like to (playfully) nominate for worst jargon ever coined on LessWrong. Its communicated meaning without the original thread boils down to 'bad thread' or 'unholy thread', which means that preserving the meaning you wanted it to have is a multi-front uphill battle in snow.

Another awful example from the CFAR handbook is the concept of 'turbocharging', which is a very specific thing but the concept handle just means 'fast electricity' or 'speedy movement'. Were it not for the context, I wouldn't know it was about learning at all. Even when I do have that context, it isn't clear what makes it 'turbo'. If it were more commonly used it would be almost instantly diluted without constant reference back to the original source.

For a non-LessWrong example, consider the academic social justice concept of 'privilege', which has (or had) a particular meaning that was useful to have a word for. However mainstream political commentary has diluted this phrase almost to the point of uselessness, making it a synonym for 'inequality'.

It'd be interesting to do a study of say, 20-50 jargon terms and see how much level of dilution corresponds to degree-of-self-containment. In any case I suspect that trying to make jargon more self contained in its meaning would reduce misuse. "Costly Signaling" is harder to misinterpret than "Signaling", for example.

So I've run into this issue myself because sometimes you need to put a name to a concept that no one ever seems to have bothered to name before, or maybe someone did name the concept in the past but in a way that it got confused by processes described in the post and comments such that in the current context a new term is needed, and my general preference is to yank in a foreign word with no currency in modern English. Usually I do this by finding some handy Greek or Latin word since those have extra gravitas among certain circles, but any language will do. I like this because the word has a meaning already that is close to what I want, but also has no meaning at first to your reader so you get to set that up as you wish and avoids being misunderstood out of context since it will instead generate a "what?" response.

Since usually I'm doing this because I need to make a more precise category than any that is handy in the service of philosophy I avoid some of the other ways new jargon fails, although given time all jargon may rot it seems, so it seems we must forever refresh our jargon on some cycle as its meaning drifts through usage.

Context is everything. You can use precise words (including topic-domain jargon) when talking with people who have some expertise in the topic, and who know the jargon in that technical meaning. EVEN WHILE laypeople are expanding and drifting it's use into something much less precise, useful, or even meaningful.

And then people started just using it to mean any random thing, and it got harder to tell who actually knew what "Schelling Point" meant.

Who cares? You can still use "schelling point" to discuss coordination by unstated shared background knowledge, even if it's ALSO used to mean any piece of common knowledge.

Language drift can introduce confusions but it also has advantages. The original definition of a concept is unlikely to be the most useful definition. It is good if words shift to the definitions that the community finds useful. Let me give an example.

Bostrom’s original defintion of ‘infohazard’ includes information that is dangerous in the wrong hands: “a risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm.” However most people use infohazard to mean something like “information that is intrinsically harmful to those who have it or will cause them to do harm to others” (this is how it used in the SCP stories for example). As Taymon points out Bostrom didn’t distinguish between “things you don’t want to know” and “things you don’t want other people to know”.

I think the SCP definition is more useful. It’s probably actively good that the definition of infohazard has shifted over time. Insisting on Bostrom’s definition is usually just confusing things.

I'm not sure you can do much about this. But if you're introducing a new concept that's especially "powerful sounding", maybe

Was there supposed to be more text here?

I suspect the majority of drift in concepts comes from simple misunderstandings/playing a game of telephone and memetic selection. This leads to more politically charged and simple definitions, without any need for negative intent. I suspect providing other related concepts won't help with this besides maybe delaying the drift by a few weeks, but it at least seems worth trying.

However, when actually trying to put your suggestions into practice I'm at a loss as to how to do that. For instance, I'm writing a post naming and explaining different types of risk. It's not clear to me how to make a type of risk sound good. I'm also unsure how to go about introducing other words that are clearly bad in the same post that are more general, without having the post become completely off-topic and rambling.

Edit: I mis-remembered something, so I won't leave false info up. Comment re-written.

I think there's a related way jargon can get confused, which is where the central example used to convey it is selected for controversy, not accuracy. I have an example, but I'm not sure of it.

Claim: 'Nudge' is a fairly general idea, but the most common example used is one that has been selected for controversy rather than centrality to the concept.

I remember once seeing a talk by Cass Sunstein where he expressed irritation with the fact that everyone thinks of 'nudge' as the thing where you change organ donation from opt-in to opt-out. I recall him being quite irritated that it is the central example used, and wishing he'd never used it, though I don't remember precisely what reason he gave at the time.

I looked around, and there's a post by him here expressing that he prefers 'mandated choice' for organ donation, where you don't opt-in or opt-out, you're just forced to explicitly make the decision (i.e. it's a required question when you renew your drivers license).

Another example Sunstein uses is 'putting fruit at eye level' in a store, or adding the image of a housefly to men's urinals to 'improve aim'. I think the issue with the opt-in / opt-out example is that it's strongly trying to route around your agency to get you to make a choice that isn't obviously what you want. And the opt-in/opt-out example has been fairly controversial (Muslim groups opposed it in the UK) which I can image contributing to it being the most widespread example.

Regarding routing around agency: I know that every time I get an 'opt-out of this newsletter' box when signing up on a website, I feel like they're acting adversarially, in a way I wouldn't if they'd said "choose from the drop-down whether you'd like our newsletter".

Can anyone whose looked into this with depth confirm the above account of 'nudge' and whether opt-in / opt-out is non-central and has been selected for non-epistemic reasons?

Some people try to fight this sort of thing by punishing people whenever they misuse words, and... I dunno man I just don't think that fight is winnable. Or at least, it seems like we should aim to things up so that we have to spend less energy on that fight in the first place.

I agree that it's good to avoid fights by making good behaviour more easy and natural, but man, I feel very depressed by the idea that the rationality community can't coordinate on the norm that one should use words precisely and clearly to preserve useful meanings. Which is to say, I think that the fight could maybe be winnable (at least in certain contexts), but also that if it isn't it's worth spending more time thinking about how we could have failed so badly.