Personal examples of semantic stopsigns

Note: In the long run it can be confusing if you give your post the exact same title as a previous post.

This article lists should, just, soon, very, only, anything, all as "lullaby words", words that lull your mind into a false sense of security when negotiating with people. You hear one of them, and you think that things are being taken care of, when they probably aren't.

Excerpt:

"Penny looked thoughtful. “I know another Lullaby Word that got us into trouble.”

“What’s that?” Jeff asked.

“You remember when we didn’t have the prices ready on February first, and you asked me when we would have them?”

“Sure, but I can’t remember what your answer was.”

“That’s because it was a Lullaby. I said, ‘Soon.’ And what that means is…” She looked at me, and I nodded.

“I think it meant, ‘I don’t know, but don’t keep bothering me.’”

“That’s usually a pretty good translation,” I confirmed.

"There's no accounting for taste" is one that is often used to avoid analysis of art.

Downvoted, not because the content of the post is bad, but because it encourages people to list polite ways to get out of annoying conversations, decide they don't count as polite anymore, and throw hissy fits when people won't discuss their pet topic.

You are right, I should eat less chocolate

In this particular case, I think the use of "should" is more an implicit dismissal than a semantic stopsign (but there may be an overlap between the two concepts). What I mean is that it's usually clear to both the participants of the conversation that you have acknowledged the problem but do not intend to implement a solution yet. More explicitely, the meaning of the phrase sounds like: "I know that I should eat less chocolate, but this is not a priority for me now.". It stops the conversation by stating your full position regarding the subjet, even if not explicitely.

Back on the main topic, one of the most powerful semantic stopsigns is probably "It's complicated". It's so powerful that even PUAs encourage to exploit it as a relationship weapon. I'm guilty of using it myself very often, even though I hate to hear those words uttered to me.

"It compiles", or "it doesn't break immediately anymore".

LW-specific: "probability epsilon" when one cannot or doesn't want to estimate more accurately, but wants to avoid using "zero", because "zero is not a probability".

I have noticed a common semantic stop-sign in physics: "But it doesn't predict anything."

This is often used whenever discussions of the foundations of a subject come up. I'm not saying that it's always bad to use this stop-sign; searching for predictive theories is definitely the most useful exercise in science.

But, thinking about the foundations of a subject can also be a very fruitful enterprise, even though you can't immediately see how it leads to predictive models. For example, Bell inequalities and quantum computing owe their origin, in part, to people debating the foundations of quantum mechanics. Also, the mathematical field of ergodic theory owes its origin to people thinking about the foundations of statistical mechanics.

Instead of saying "It doesn't predict anything" and then proceeding to ignore it, a more productive attitude would be to ask questions like: "So can we think of some kind of consequences that different foundational pictures point to?" or ask: "Can we build a nice mathematical framework in which we can talk about these questions?" or ask: "Do different pictures help me solve different kinds of problems?".

"Should" in my experience means: "probably won't."

As in "This should work," which I no longer dare say.

"Heart."

As an example, used in this type of context:

Me: gazing at my wife.

Wife: What's up?

Me: Oh, you were being cute tucked under the covers.

Wife: Why I am cute when I'm tucked under the covers?

Me: Um, I guess because I can only see your head.

Wife: Why I am cute when you can only see my head?

Me: Uhhh... Heart?

Wife: Heart Back.

Alternatively, it can go the other way around, and I can attempt to continue coming up with more explanations until my Wife thinks they are getting kind of silly, and she's the one that says "Heart."

Sometimes legitimate, oftentimes not: "coincidence", "good/bad", "fair/unfair", "value", "intrinsic value", "prior", "Occam's razor". Seeing "universal prior" used as a semantic stop sign makes me especially disgusted. "Disgust".

In academic context, especially physics: "It is obvious" and "handwaving"

The first silences any dissent by implicitly marking anyone doubting the intuition as stupid. The second marks the argument as imprecise and thus implicitly worthless though the "handwaved" argument might be a nice idea with the need to be enhanced.

"Problematic" is a word that sees a lot of action when referring to socially-questionable implications. Some of us may remember it from the discussions on (HP:MoR spoiler) Urezvbar'f 'Sevqtvat'. While it has a lot of legitimate function, it's also a very effective way of saying "I don't really like this, but don't want to examine why, just in case my dislike isn't as well-founded as I want it to be".

Ones I've noticed are "lazy" or "stupid" or other words that are used to describe people. Sure, it can be good to have such models so that one can predict the behavior of a person, like "This person isn't likely to do his work." or "She might have trouble understanding that." The thing is, these are often treated as fundamental properties of an ontologically fundamental thing, which the human mind is not.

Why is this person lazy? Do they fall victim to hyperbolic discounting? Is there an ugh field related to their work? Do they not know what to do? Maybe they simply don't have good reason to work? Why is this person "stupid?" Do they lack the prerequisite knowledge to understand what you're saying? Are they interested in learning it? Do they have any experience with it?

Another reason to taboo the word "should" -- sometimes if there are a bunch of things you think you "should do", it will stress you out. In these situations, I try to taboo "should" and perhaps replace it with "want to".

I want to taboo the word "should" more often.

Downvoting without leaving any comments. Or are we only supposed to be listing unintentional semantic stop signs?

If you and I have a discussing about how I eat too much chocolate, and I say, "You are right, I should eat less chocolate," the conversation will basically end there. But 99 times out of a 100 nothing will actually come out of it. I try to taboo the word "should" from my vocabulary, so instead I will say something like, "You are right, I will not purchase any chocolate this month." This is a concrete actionable statement.

I expected you would suggest listing a reason why you shouldn't eat chocolate (one step before doing something about it). I was just surprised. Is there a specific reason you went with the actionable statement?

Beside the stop signs, the detour signs are also very popular and widely used.

Maybe even more.

A: I hear, supernovae are not extreme enough environment to produce gold. Neutron stars collisions are required.

B: What's the recent gold price? Is it going up or down?

When an event happens and someone begins trying to explain its occurrence, someone else may say that that event doesn't need to be explained, or doesn't merit further attention. I'm not sure these fit under the label of semantic stop signs, because they can be useful, but they deter further inquiry similarly.

Words the second person might use include "luck, chance, coincidence, quirk, circumstance, miracle", and for excusing bad performance "fluke, accident, slip, glitch, error, mistake".

"It was just a chance. Don't read into it. No trend here. Stop and turn around. Direct your attention elsewhere."

There is an opposite form of this attention deterring advice which I don't have many examples for. Instead of saying an event is singular and shouldn't contribute much evidence to your estimation of a trend, the second party says that the event is already explained by a trend that is familiar the second party, and perhaps also familiar to the first. "Yes, that's just the way it is," the second party says. "It's just like that. Boys will be themselves."

On writing that I notice that my examples for both templates of semantic stop sign use the word "just", and aren't as persuasive without it. Perhaps "just" is the real stop sign, and puts the listener in a mindset of dismissal, or explaining away, or reducing priorities. Other adverbs of focus like "only, merely, simply", probably do the same duty.