 does something weird and saying “females…” works sometimes.
Alas, you seem to get the evil robot connotation in that case.
Hello, fellow human! I, as a fellow flesh-being, am a tiny bit confused as to what you mean by “valenceful connotations” – ha, ha, we ugly bags of mostly water are so silly!
But certainly not being a superior entity of non-organic structure, I wonder do you mean “valence” out of which definition as per Wikipedia – or perhaps you mean them all, which is a completely ordinary common human method of casual conversation not amongst specialists or amateur experts in a subject!
Hello, ordinary human! “Valence” in this context harks to the term’s original meaning as “weight”: but in this context, we think of “weight” as a metaphor for the positive and negative associations (and possibly the neutral connotations, to a lesser extent) a word has.
Perhaps this blog post ought to be put behind a CAPTCHA.
Robot or simply European? You should have heard me going on about “What the hell is a ‘cross walk’ – oh, they mean a zebra crossing” in the last couple I’ve had to ‘prove you are not a robot’.
These days I always click ‘give me a new one’ if I get a captcha for ‘crosswalk’, ‘store fronts’, ‘fire hydrant’.
Forget bringing about Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, we need the invention of AI to translate between cultures for the purpose of properly filling out captchas!
Also, I love “fire brigade” — it’s much more action-y than whatever we say here in the US. What do we say? The fire department? Way less action-y.
You sent me on a short wikiwalk, Deiseach, that ended with folks dressed in zebra costumes.
When I heard the joke in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of “goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing”, I assumed that it meant “a place where zebras cros” and it never even occurred to me that it was an idiomatic British expression. And the joke works about as well if it’s a literal reference to a place where zebras cross.
Nick, Jiro, it would appear that there is a whole menagerie of pedestrian crossings – I knew about zebra and pelican crossings but had never heard of puffin, toucan or pegasus crossings!
Ironically, it’s where beetles cross.
Captcha needs to die in a fire and I can’t help thinking it would be poetic retribution if the person who came up with that abomination was sentenced to life using a computer that requires Captcha to authorize every request to the Internet.
Says the blind man who’s sick of websites thinking I’m a robot just because I can’t pass their infernal vision tests(and the sites with audio Captcha aren’t much better.
More on topic, I knew there was a lot of Asperger’s self-diagnosis among geeks and nerds(and in general, the line between the mild end of the autism Spectrum and the extreme high intelligence/low emotional intelligence corner of the IQ/EQ plane is kind of blurry), but are there really people using autistic as a synonym for nerdy/geeky to describe themselves? Or is this one of those things common on the mega social sites you seldom, if ever, come across on more traditional social media?
Also, I was under the impression that terms like man, woman, boy, and girl where generally treated as age-specific in a layman’s context(e.g. a man is an adult male, a girl is a female child, etc.) and that male and female were the standard age-inclusive, gender/sex-specific terms. Sure, saying “female child” instead of “girl” does sound overly technical, but saying Men and boys sounds clunky compared to saying just males if you mean to include all ages in your statement.
Though perhaps this is just one of those clunky things about the English language, much as there isn’t an unambiguous, gender neutral animate pronoun(there’s singular they, but that can often be confused for plural they and thus not unambiguous).
Nearly every instance of singular “they” I’ve seen has been completely clear from context. And it’s far from the only ambiguity in the English language–”you” has been both second-person plural and second-person singular for hundreds of years. What’s wrong with a third-person pronoun functioning as both plural and singular?
 Maybe I’m not as good a reader as you, but I’ve been caught confused many a time by people using they as singular. And I suspect many a time I haven’t even noticed but assumed they meant plural and so simply misunderstood the meaning.
I do still get thrown by “they” in reference to a specific person (eg “My friend Gio gets coffee when they walk to class in the morning”), but it’s far less awkward to my ears than constructed alternatives like “ze”. (Up to the particular person to decide what pronouns they prefer, of course, just commenting on how they sound to me).
1. A lot of this post is telling us not to use rationalist-community jargon, which the rationalist community has developed (presumably) in an attempt to raise the logical clarity of discussion. Now you are arguing for the reverse!
2. Speaking of which, you don’t have an alternative for the word “priors”? That seems like the worst style offender of all.
3. Some of your replacements are sloppy. For example “Why do so many males like sports?” includes teenage males, which “men” does not. Or “Will getting more exercise make me better off?” is misleading because “better off” often refers to money specifically. That plays into #1.
4. I think the “real” problem with the word “autistic” is that it can be a slur. Not that it’s weird jargon.
5. Perhaps you are suggesting that we make the changes when talking to the general population, but keep talking as we do amongst ourselves. That sounds like a good ideal. In fact I think most of us strive for that ideal already. But in practice it’s very difficult to switch between two modes like that. So mistakes are made.
The problem is, this jargon does not “raise the logical clarity of discussion”—for the simple reason that, overwhelmingly, “rationalists” do not use it correctly.
Are you going to tell me with a straight face that most uses of the words “utility”, “utility function”, etc., in rationalist circles are correct usage? They’re not—not even close. Most “rationalists” do not even understand what these words mean, and never have. I know; like Sniffnoy, I’ve been trying, utterly in vain, to correct this pervasive misunderstanding (on Less Wrong and elsewhere) whenever I’ve encountered it. I don’t think I’ve made a dent.
Same deal with most of the rest of it. The entire problem is that yes, these terms were (ostensibly) created or chosen in order to “raise logical clarity”—but then they were abused, blatantly and ubiquitously, by being used much more broadly than intended… because they had transformed (and were they ever anything else?) into tribal shibboleths, markers of one’s own intelligence or “rationality” or being “one of the in crowd” or whatever.
—you have it exactly backwards. Yes, it’s important, as Scott says, to not weird out the “normal people” so unnecessarily much. But it is, if anything, even more important to stop corrupting our own thinking, by abuse of the very jargon we invented to improve it. When you talk about “increasing utility” instead of “helping”, or being “rational” instead of being “reasonable”, you are not clarifying your thinking, you are distorting it.
So if this advice seems like a reversal of course, well… for the necessity of that reversal, we “rationalists” have no one to blame but ourselves.
Interesting question. If I were speaking to someone outside the Rationalist community, and were tempted to say something like, “Based on the latest IPCC report, you should update your priors in the direction of less concern about sea level rise and more concern about damage to agriculture, particularly in tropical regions, ” what would be a better alternative?
Perhaps, “Based on the latest IPCC report, you should be less concerned about sea level rise and more concerned about damage to agriculture, particularly in tropical regions.” Here the word just drops away.
And if you must have a substitute for the word, as in the question, “What are your priors on school shootings?”, something like, “What is your current position on shootings?”, seems clear and straightforward.
Stripped of a precise technical definition within the field of [probability theory? statistics? Probability theorists tend to care more about measures and less about division by weird terms, and I think statisticians are trained as frequentists generally], “my priors” seems to refer to “The beliefs I currently hold, especially in contrast to what I might believe if I learned something new.” So the difference between prior and belief seems mostly to be connotation—it suggests where you are taking the conversation.
I’ve seen this sort of “the beliefs I currently hold” usage a lot, and agree that this makes the