Although linguistic
prescriptivism
is technically a cardinal sin, I sometimes make exceptions if a word
particularly annoys me. This is a list of such words and suggestions
for better naming of the concepts they describe.
The name is already occupied by a philosophical tradition called
"rationalism" which has very
little relation to the collection of people on the internet usually called
"rationalists". Also, the name seems to be quite pretentious to outsiders.
Alternatives:
"Mapmaking": Using "The map is not the territory.", related to
practicality. Downside: also already taken.
The word "Anarchism" is strongly connected with left libertarian
anti-capitalist thought (such as described by Bakunin, Kropotkin and
Proudhon) throughout most of history and most of the world. Radical
supporters of capitalism describing themselves as anarchists seems to
be a historical anomaly, and they might want to find a name that clashes
less with already existing trains of political thought.
On the other hand, there has been a lot of debate about this perceived
clash of terminology and it seems quite unlikely to change in the
near future.
From a consequentialist perspective, rights are usually seen as
instrumental heuristics and not as terminal values. When people talk about
animal rights, they usually mean leaving animals alone in the context of
factory farming and opposing interventions in nature. However, Tomasik
2017
makes a striking case for intervening in nature due to the prevalence of
extreme suffering, usually including highly invasive measures which would
violate a naive concept of "animals rights". However, these interventions
would be designed to increase total animal welfare.
Some feminists today claim that the patriarchy hurts both men and
women. However, the
word "patriarchy" strongly carries the connotation that men are solely
responsible for this, which seems not entirely clear.
Most people understand an opposition "value drift" as a rejection of
moral development, and it's not clear where the difference between the
two lies. Perhaps there are different kinds of such drifts: "value
drift", "motivation drift", "discipline drift" etc.
Alternatives:
"Motivation Drift": This makes a clearer distinction between
motivation and the values motivated about
Strictly speaking, the word "art" is generally overused and defiled by
using it to describe kitsch, skill or practice. I personally would prefer
it if people stopped using the word "art" to describe banal and common
things. "Pick-Up Artistry" falls into this category. It is a skill that
requires sometimes years of practice, but it is a fundamentally practical
and goal-oriented activity, unlike most (if not all) art.
In the philosophy of
consciousness,
sentience can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective
perceptual experiences, or as some philosophers refer to them,
"qualia". […]
In the philosophies of animal welfare and rights, sentience implies the
ability to experience pleasure
and pain.
Very often, the word "sentience" is used to refer to the ability to
feel pleasure or pain, or, to be more general, have experiences with a
valence. However,
the strict philosophical definition of "sentience" does not necessarily
entail the ability to feel pleasure or pain, just that some qualia
can be experienced. Although it is very often assumed that sentience
necessarily entails pleasure and pain, it might still be worthwhile
making a distinction between the two.
"Sentients" is usually defined as beings that are capable of
subjectively perceiving or feeling by means of the senses. This includes
not only beings capable of the feeling of being happy and/or unhappy,
but also includes beings just capable of perceiving things without having
any affective feeling. In principle, it is possible for some sentients
to be capable of perceiving the external world but without feeling
happy or unhappy. One could have sensations of perceiving different
colours without enjoying or disliking seeing them; one could have the
sensation of being touched or even being squeezed without feeling pain or
pleasure. Such non-affective sentients really do not have any positive
or negative welfare. Their welfare is necessarily zero, just like non-
sentients. Hence, for the purpose here, the important dividing line is
not between sentients and non-sentients, but between affective sentients
and non-affective beings (sentient or non-sentient).
Thus, it seems desirable to differentiate between the ability to have
subjective experiences ("sentience") and the ability to have affective
subjective experiences.
Alternatives:
"Affective sentience"
Personal proposals:
"Valience" (the ability to have experiences with a valence component)
Programmers often have to use the ASCII special characters
!"#\|%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_{|}~ and `. However,
pronouncing/spelling out "exclamation mark" is cumbersome, which
made programmers introduce (or use) their own names for these
characters. Urbit,
as always, drives the idea to its logical
conclusion.
Let me propose some names, with the goal of selecting the most common
name for the character that is only one syllable long:
German distinguishes between structural "same" ("das gleiche") and indexcial "same" (dasselbe")
Wenn man das weibliche Gegenstück zum "Patriarchen" benennen will, welches Wort verwendet man? Üblicherweise ist die Antwort "die Matriarchin", aber das Wort ist redundant: das Geschlecht wird sowohl durch das "-in" Postfix als auch das Präfix "Matr-" signalisiert — aber das Wort "Matriarch" klingt bestenfalls merkwürdig. Was tun?
Wenn man "0,5 Eier" sagt, ist "Eier" im Plural, aber bei "½ Ei" ist "Ei" im Singular. Wieso?
Man kann zwischen "keine Pferde" und "kein Pferd" unterscheiden (Žižek approves), aber nicht zwischen "null Pferde" und "null Pferd".
Placebo works
Placebo works even if you know it's placebo
Placebo works even if you know that placebo works even if you know it's placebo
Placebo works even if you know that placebo works even if you know that placebo work even if you know it's placebo
[…]
Kirby Dick directed a documentary about the age rating system for movies, "The MPAA gave the original cut an NC-17 rating for “some graphic sexual conten” – scenes that illustrated the content a film could include to garner such a rating. Dick appealed, and descriptions of the ratings deliberations and appeal were included in the documentary."
"The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was voted the best film of all time by over 250,000 readers of the Empire film magazine in 2015." (List of films considered the best)
Robert Fludd: "Fludd's own theory on the origin of all things posited that, instead of the Tria Prima, all species and things stemmed from first, dark Chaos, then divine Light which acted upon the Chaos, which finally brought forth the waters. This last element was also called the Spirit of the Lord" (emphasis mine)
Hilary Paynter: "Hilary Paynter, Hon. RBSA, RE, FRSA, SWE (born 1943) is a British wood engraver and printmaker."
dist(s): 8 syllables saved compared to "probability distribution(s)"
prob(s): 4 syllables saved over "probabilit{y,ies}", closest colliding word is prop, which is not particularly common
vopi: 10 syllables saved over "expected value of perfect information", alternative spellings could be "evopi" or "evoi" or "voi" (removing perfection or expectation)
batna: 13 syllables saved over "Best alternative to a negotiated agreement", perhaps acustically too close to "batman"
botec: 8 syllables saved over "back-of-the-envelope calculation"
exval: 3 syllables saved compared to "expected value"
"deinforce": There is no great value-neutral & mechanistic alternative to "penalize" or "punish" as an antonym for "reinforce", so I propose the term "deinforce".
"library" in English is "biblioteko" in Esperanto, which is infuriating: "-aro" is the suffix for group, and "libr-" is the root for book, so "libraro" would be "group of/collection of books"; what else is a library‽
Niplav Yushtun™: Calibration of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will
Niplav Yushtun™: Mostly a Reputation Hazard
Niplav Yushtun™: Midwit With High Need for Cognition
Niplav Yushtun™: Can It Export the Data to CSV?
Niplav Yushtun™: High Quality Human Thoughts
O man, whoever you are and wherever you come from, for I know you will come, I am Niplav who wrote this site. Do not therefore begrudge me this bit of earth that covers my bones.
Zeynep's razor: "first-order effects are rarely outweighed by rebound effects"
Guzey's law (or, less politely, Guzey's disease): Good hobbyist internet science writers & scientists are afflicted by a peculiar disease: they produce some (or a lot of) good output, and then someone gives them enough money to start an organization, and they never write anything interesting again.
Comparing girls with musical instruments sounds like a pretty good opener in general (viola, violin, saxophone, definitely stirs the imagination)
Pointed out contradictions in their style
Telling one girl that she looked like she was going to a cocktail party on a mountain
Openly insulted their clothes
Told a girl her shoes looked old, asking her whether she was on the way to buy new ones on a nearby market
I am not sure, but I think this one was actually harmful
I have been told that I'm creative, but I have never observed any
correlation with how well the approach goes and the opener, except for
very boring openers and insults.