he term I tend to think that one of the biggest problems in politics is that words become shibboleths within subcultures, and people in these communities don’t even know it. I recently had that starkly brought to my attention with the word “hacker”.  My girlfriend was talking about setting up some home automation idea, and I said, “I can do it. I’m a hacker.”

She was confused. To her hacking means software intrusion through exploitation of security vulnerabilities. To me it means repurposing existing systems to do something not originally intended. I tend to think of her definition as “movie-style hackers”, or the white-hat/black-hat hackers. 

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I was one of the fortunate kid’s that had access to computers, and the ability to learn from reading manuals, and my own experimentation. I naturally fell into the, what we might now call the Maker culture. To people like us, (e.g. Adam Savage, and Corey Doctorow), “hacking” is a creative and explorative exercise.

I use like, “I can hack something together,” meaning “I can make it by repurposing some stuff I have laying around.” Or like, “that’s a clever hack,” meaning, “that’s not how things are supposed to work, but you found a clever work-around.” It’s even bled into mainstream US culture with terms like “life-hack” and “hardware-hacker.”

We in the community would call intrusion “cracking.” As in a “safe-cracker” or a “password cracker”. We use other words differently too, like “autodidact” being a term of pride as someone who learns on their own through exploration and research, rather than through formal instruction, which I’ve learned in the research community is a pejorative, ironically in this instance as a synonym for “a hack,” meaning not of professional quality. 

So when my girlfriend and I had this disagreement, we went to several dictionaries. All of them supported her definition, and didn’t even list mine. I didn’t see my usage until I saw the “Hacker Culture” on Wikipedia. That’s when I realized what was going on: I had been using the term as a shibboleth. 

Once I realized that, tabooing the word in our discussion got us back on track, but it really highlighted how invisible subtle differences in definitions can make communication difficult and cause disagreements. I think that most political disagreements suffer from this. I’m really trying to keep an eye out for that feeling of confusion that comes from talking with someone using the same words differently, and the hubris that comes from insisting that my definition is right. 

Well, this comment is long enough. I’m in the weeds with work, and I really need to hack my way out of. 😉 

The modern world does intentional large-scale chemical engineering, and this is meaningfully different in its scale and quickly-shifting nature than nearly anything that came before 1661. You can’t necessarily use the same analogical and cultural reasoning you would have used in 1660 to tell you what’s safe and what isn’t, in a world where everything you touch was chemically engineered.

You should be less confident in your understanding of the long-term consequences of eating Red Dye Number 40 than in your understanding of the long-term consequences of eating non-GMO wheat.

I'm not confident in this. I doubt analogical and cultural reasoning were ever that great. People in 1660 made use of lead and mercury, tobacco and ethanol. 

If something is sufficiently obviously and rapidly poisonous, cultural knowledge will pick that up, but cultural knowledge like this isn't nearly as accurate as modern science. Most of our best knowledge about the health effects of wheat comes from modern science. 

The phenomena of caring a lot about subtle long term health effects is relatively recent, driven in part by increased wealth. 

Medieval peasants ate wheat, not because they had access to some cultural knowledge on wheat not having long term health effects. But because there weren't many other easy sources of calories around. The agricultural calorie economics basically forced them to eat mostly grain, 

And, what was best to eat in a medieval context isn't necessarily what's best to eat now. (Eg ancient traditions about drinking beer because the water wasn't safe. This kind of cultural knowledge can go out of date for reasons other than artificial additives to foods. ) 

The Kikis are, generally speaking, much more knowledgeable about the details of chemistry. They might hang out around chemists, whose intellectual ancestors invented the precise definition of the word “chemical”. 

What does "the precise definition of the word 'chemical'" mean? Are you claiming that there's a single definition that's somehow "the definition"? Different scientific fields that actually do need precise definitions usually do have their own definitions.

We do live a world where Calefornia has a very precise definition of what a fish happens to be that includes bees. Scientists don't have a monopoly on having precise definitions of terms, various fields do define their terms. I don't think you can safely assume that there's nobody that has a precise definition of the term chemical that goes along what the Boubas in your example mean. 

Both the Kikis and the Boubas are not using words according to precise definitions. Kikis have intuitions that definitions that come out of one specific discourse are somehow privileged over definitions that come out of different discourses. They have misconceptions and believe that there aren't competing definitions in every discourse that cares about precisely defining its terms.

The fifth International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM5) with resolution V/1 adopted the Global Framework on Chemicals—For a Planet Free of Harm from Chemicals and Waste. When Kikis's are implying that such policy documents are problematic because they fail to have good definitions, that's usually comes out of ignorance of how regulations work and not of a good understanding of where a regulation might lack a precise regulations. 

If the Boubas have an internally consistent definition then the Kikis are right to make them produce it so that a productive conversation can be had, the Kikis would no doubt readily supply their own if asked. I do not understand the instinct to suggest the Kikis are doing something not on the level here, productive discussions require work and sometimes rigor from both participants. If the Boubas are incapable or unwilling of doing their part it is a bit silly to blame the Kikis for not doing it for them. 

If you are imagining that the Boubas do produce an internally consistent definition and then the conversation devolves into whose is "right" then I would agree that both parties are foolish in that instance. 

The thing is that it's not a matter of different definitions at all. The Boubas don't have a definition, and they are not "internally consistent", not even vaguely so. A "chemical" is "anything that seems weird or artificial", which no two of them will agree on in every case. There is no shared criterion, even among themselves, for deciding what qualifies.

Also, I can pretty much guarantee you that people did some pretty sketchy stuff with food in 1660.

Sorry, no, sometimes people are just wrong.