Title Terms and Prologue Waffling
I’ve called myself a “splitter”1 here in the past, and I expect to do so again in the future. There are a lot of words and phrases that I use in weird ways or have just plain made up to refer to things that, well, I want a way to refer to. Furthermore, while I don’t have a lot of respect for, well, anybody,2 but in this specific instance for Eliezer Yudkowski, there are a lot of ideas and terms that I picked up from his works3 that I still find useful, even if his conclusions are generally contrarian science-hero nonsense.
In any case: here, I want to explain some of the terms and idioms that I’m likely to use in the future. I also have some issues with how certain words and phrases are typically used, but this is meant to be an explanation of how I speak and not a complaint about how others do, so I’ll try to keep those out of this essay for the most part.
First up, splitters and groupers4. I use these terms to describe how one might approach word choice, and conceptual boundaries more broadly. A splitter’s approach is to exclude, broadly speaking. Not to exclude in a social sense, but in a descriptive sense: they care most about ensuring that their audience understands what they’re not referring to, and are willing to miss some edge cases that might bear some similarity to the central examples of whatever they’re talking about. A grouper does the opposite. They want to include, and are ok sweeping up some broadly similar things that might theoretically be separated from their central examples. Neither of these approaches is “right” or “wrong”, but it can be very useful to identify when one person is using one approach and another is taking the opposite. Tends to cut down on “belligerent agreement”, so to speak.
There’s a spectrum here, of course, and it’s usually easier to think of things in relative terms. I call myself a splitter because I generally find myself to be further in that direction than other people I talk to, not because I never group things together or use general terminology. Less charitably, you could call me a pedantic nit-picker and you wouldn’t really be wrong; I prefer to use this concept of splitters and groupers to emphasize that this is a matter of how I think, not some kind of rhetorical tool for arguing against ideas I don’t like. That’s further down this post.
The Rationalist Influence
You might recognize this thinking style from the Rationalist community5 that accumulated around Yudkowski around the back half of the Obama administration. Indeed, as I said above, while I disagree with many Rationalist framings and conclusions and don’t consider myself to be one, I do think that Yudkowski had some useful ideas, and it’s impossible to deny that he’s influenced my thinking in important ways.
First, the one sort of “mantra” that I’ve actually picked up from him, which remains an important insight to this day: “reversed stupidity is not intelligence”. Remembering this is the key to avoiding a pair of fallacies that I’ve talked about on Notes but not had cause to mention on the main blog yet: the Fallacy of Doing Something6 and the Fallacy of Impotence. These fallacies operate by conflating a single response to a particular issue with all possible responses. As a result, you get millions of dollars spent arguing over whether we should take some random, simple, likely ineffective action, or whether there is actually no problem at all and no action is needed. See, for example, Supreme Court reform.
Now I’d like to highlight a pair of linked phrases related to how we understand the world. One is the idea that a term or phrase should “cut reality at the joint”7 - that is, for any sort of “thing”, we should have a clear idea of what does and doesn’t fit into that category, and we should be able to identify and explain the nature of the distinction we’re making. It’s fine and natural for things to be fuzzy at the boundaries, since that is the nature of the world we live in, but we shouldn’t be gerrymandering our terminology either. If biological classifications are based on cladistics, for example, then the category of “reptiles” must either include birds or exclude crocodiles. To hold otherwise is to create confusion and obscure reality.8
On the other side of the “cutting reality at the joint” coin, we have the idea of “dissolving the question”. This suggests that if we discover a term or phrase fails to cut reality at the joint, we should endeavor to determine why and how it fails. That process will in itself suggest better definitions and boundaries, so that our thinking ends up better conforming to reality. By the time it ends, the structures around the flaw should have been so thoroughly reworked that it would no longer make sense for anyone to make the error that prompted the rework. In this way, mistakes become not merely pitfalls to avoid, but pitfalls to fill in.
My Special Snowflake Salt
Those two linked ideas bring me to another idea of my own that I’m likely to refer to quite a lot: the notion of “concepts” (you may note I’ve done my best to avoid using that word up above; I’m sure that helped with readability) on the one hand, and, more importantly, “noncepts” on the other. Now this is a tool for dismissing ideas I don’t like.9
A concept is a definition or idea or some such that successfully cuts reality at the joint - it describes a group of things that are actually related to each other without missing key examples or including other, actually distinct things. Take “chairs”, for instance. We might quibble over whether an ottoman or a couch counts in a generic sense, but we all basically know what is meant when the host tells us to “grab a chair” so we can watch the night’s movie.
A noncept does the opposite. It insists that two things are fundamentally distinct, or fundamentally similar, based purely on abstract definitions, regardless of what effect those things have on the world. Underlying a noncept is almost always a false equivalence or a false distinction. “Reptile”, up above, is arguably a noncept, but more often I find myself referring to political terms as such. “Demotism”10 is pretty much a pure example; the term was created by monarchists to insist that democracies and non-hereditary authoritarian governance schemes somehow belong in the same category. Other classic noncepts in modern political rhetoric include socialism, Marxism, globalism, capitalism, and so on. I am not quite willing to call fascism a noncept, but it’s a close thing. For that reason, I generally prefer to use the term “reactionary” to capture the confluence of authoritarian and bigotted tendencies. As alluded to in Yudkowski’s post on dissolving the question, AI discourse is also full of noncepts, though as usual this doesn’t stop Yudkowski himself from latching on to a few of them. I’ll get to AI hysteria in due course.
Finally, just because I brought up political rhetoric in my discussion of the noncept, it’s probably worth saying that I consider myself to be a pragmatic consensualist. From that discussion, you can probably see the general shape of the “pragmatic” part of that phrase; I’ll likely elaborate on the “consensualist” bit in future posts but for now I’ll just say that there is an implicit egalitarian individualism to a lot of my political thinking.
There are other weird made up terms that I use sometimes, and some common terms that I’m likely to use in weird ways, but I think those are more appropriately saved for topical posts. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to eat those waffles.
In that linked post I suggested the term “devictimization” to capture certain behaviours that are in the same general category as what is commonly called “victim blaming”, but aren’t quite captured by that term. While I stand by devictimization as a useful term, I no longer think it’s correct to say that devictimization and victim blaming are two separate things, as implied by the way I talked about them there. Rather, victim blaming is a type of devictimization, which also includes things like denial and attempts to reconstruct a negative experience as positive.
When I was a teenager, the administrative staff at my high school demanded all of my respect. Ever since, I have felt the need to be stingy about giving it out.
I read the Sequences around 2015-2016, after they were (I think) mostly complete. I had bumped into their predecessor, HPMOR, in places like TvTropes, but never read it because fanfic isn’t generally my vibe.
The second term here used to be “lumpers”, but I decided that was pejorative-sounding and went for the fish instead.
Some people have referred to Rationalism as a cult. I don’t think this is quite correct, though it’s hard to articulate why. My best evidence is that (1) while there are certain revered figures, they aren’t treated as infallible or singular sources of doctrine (for the most part), just people whose thoughts are worth engaging with, and (2) Rationalists are among the most likely people to refer to Rationalism as a cult. I would generally call Rationalism a fertile breeding ground for intellectually oriented cults, rather than itself a cult. While we’re taking digs at the Rationalist movement, we might as well also note that as atheist communities go, it’s produced a remarkable number of Catholics.
Apparently called “the Politician’s Syllogism” by paid philosophers.
I could have sworn that there was a post in the Sequences that clearly explained the phrase, but that’s the best I can find, unfortunately.
Some asshole is almost certainly going to take this sentence and use it to argue that trans people are all whiny attention seekers, the vanguard of the onrushing gendarchy, or class traitors to the reproductive proletariat, so let’s just cut that off at the knees. There are nits that could be picked with prevailing trans narratives and terminology, but the basic idea - that some people have preferences that are at odds with the expected growth patterns or associated behavioral norms of their native hormone balance, that these preferences are as valid as any other, and that those people deserve respect and support - is fundamentally beyond dispute as far as I am concerned. To hold otherwise is to reject, on some level, the concept of privacy.
Not strictly. Dissolve the question and all that. Still, sometimes you run into character limits, publication deadlines, or you just want to avoid a tangent.
A term that I think was coined by Curtis “straight as an iron spear” Yarvin in his Mencius Moldbug days, back before “neoreaction” made its way off the internet and fused with other odds and ends to become the “alt-right”.