It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness. 

…

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 

-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language^[1]

I will begin with admission, one could certainly find ready-made examples of hypocrisy on my own part—I would welcome it as a constructive critique—but it seems to me that much of ‘rationalist’ literature and writing conventions is plagued by harmful conventions, jargon and cliches. I may seem overly harsh in some places, for that I would offer a pre-emptive apology: these are by no means mortal foibles.

1. A Case Study on Jargon

The most prominent example, featured on Scott Alexander’s wiki page, that particularly bothers me^[2] is that of the ‘lizardman constant’--not only is it an unhelpful jargon but it is foundationally wrong. Imagine one is not a rationalist, and totally unfamiliar with Scott’s writing, and you read something like “1.8% of 25-45 year olds with covid [develop] long covid that affects their daily life, which is well within the Lizardman Constant”.^[3] Are you likely to know what that means? Compare instead reading an academic article that says: “[t]his makes the samples vulnerable to fake or bogus respondents.” I think most people would readily understand the latter—a fake or bogus respondent is someone that responds in a false or ‘bogus’ way, if a study is ‘vulnerable’ to that, it means that the apparent effects may be the result of bogus respondents. But “Lizardman constant” is not readily understandable to the lay person; it describes the same thing but uses an obscure jargon term instead.

On its own, I would find this a somewhat forgivable fault of in-culture terminology (like using ‘grok’ to mean ‘understand’), but more egregiously it is wrong! It isn’t a constant and writers using the jargon are led to at best misleading conclusions. The prior example continues: “The Lizardman Constant doesn’t mean prevalences below 4% don’t exist, it means they’re impossible to measure using naive tools.” This is just wrong, prevalence of under 4% can be measured and the tools being used here are fit for purpose! If one engaged with the literature on bogus respondents this would become clear.

Research on non-probabilistic, online polls commonly finds rates of bogus respondents between 4-7%, but this is highly variable and can be mitigated.^[4] Probabilistic sampling, and using verified data can help manage the risks.^[5] How you write a questionnaire, how you solicit respondents, and numerous other factors can greatly increase or decrease the rates of bogus respondents. If you want to assess the risk of bogus respondents to a result just going ‘oh it’s 4%, Scott Alexander said ‘the Lizardman constant is 4%’ so we can assume this result could be explained by the Lizardman constant’ is just wrong.

As a case example, let’s look at the particular study being referenced.^[6] It is a UK metareview of 10 longitudinal studies using in-patient and primary care diagnosis data along with patient self-reported information. If it is answering a poll on twitter, the rate of people pressing a random answer here or there, or just choosing whatever they think is funniest, may be very high. But what is the risk of bogus respondents of patients filling out surveys including their symptoms—at repeated intervals—with the patients matched against diagnosis records? The risk there is negligible—people are incentivized to report honestly and are not taken at random but verified using medical records. There are a host of other problems that might result in false positives (e.g., nocebo effects), but the risk of bogus respondents is incredibly low.

There are plenty of other cases of jargon, which I would classify more as an issue of over-pretentious speech and writing. These are more typical foibles and hardly unique to rationalists. To give but one minor example, using “Pons Asinorum” in place of “foundational challenge”. Using jargon and scientific language that serves to further clarity is fine, but should be avoided in cases where plain English is both clearer and more accessible.

2. Glamor, obfuscating and dressing up unpopular views:

What I describe are extremely common tactics in politics, but one I think should have no place in rational discourse. When writing or speaking (excluding purely artistic endeavors) conveying meaning clearly in ways that can be readily understood as you mean them should be one’s priority. Of course, it is impossible to remove ambiguity, but answering questions with long tangents, moving between unrelated technical fields, and filling your communication with superfluous words and unclear terminology are habits that may serve you well in parliaments and congressional halls, but should be avoided if you actually care about transmitting sincere meaning with your words.

Compare Clinton’s often mocked response on being asked about the Lewinsky affair:

QUESTION: Your -- that statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?

CLINTON: It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' means…

With Yudkowsky being asked on some of his transhumanist views: 

Horgan: Do you think you have a shot at becoming a superintelligent cyborg?

Yudkowsky: The conjunction law of probability theory says that P(A&B) <= P(A) - the probability of both A and B happening is less than the probability of A alone happening...

These aren’t helpful answers, they are intended to shield the speaker from their own statements rather than elucidating listeners to their thoughts and views. It also develops bad habits that result in comically obtuse statements full of verbose pretentious phrases like: “statistically liable to end in victimful (sic) harm.”^[7]

3. A Final Note on Cliches and Parables:

Many have noted a tendency (particularly of Yudkowsky) to make use of cliched parables to make points. I do quite like some parables, they can be useful as moral lessons or posing thought experiments, but they are poor replacement for actual rational argumentation and reasoning. Consider this exchange, for example. When opposing the position that (to paraphrase) “intelligence is multimodal and AI, despite improvements, might not universally outdo humans” there are plenty of arguments and rationales one might offer for why you could expect AI to outcompete humans across diverse fields. One might offer evidence of how models are increasingly becoming competent across many domains, or make a more fundamental argument about how AI models function to justify the view that their capabilities are incredibly broad.

There are plenty of valid cases one might make to refute the argument presented in the ~150 word paragraph in the example. But none that I can think of would include a 10k word (deliberately, I assume) cliche piece of fictional narrative that has a “midwit” espouse a view somewhat similar (but notably distinct from) the view being refuted, just so they can be torn down in your fictional conceit, is no more compelling than a man from Nazareth declaring that “everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand” (Matt. 7:12). You cannot expect readers, particularly those of an opposing view, to grant you authority as a sage able to elucidate both sides of an argument with great cunning.

1. ^{^}

   Anyone who has not read Orwell’s essay, would be well advised to do so. It is a foundational, if imperfect, text in English style and warrants reading by anyone interested in English communication, particularly of the polemic sort.

2. ^{^}

   In my professional life, I often work with survey data and extensive critiques of their usage.

3. ^{^}

   I do not mean to pick on anyone, but I am choosing this older essay as it is particularly illustrative of how some major errors occur, which I expand on.

4. ^{^}

   Edit: Indeed, in some survey designs, it is non existent. As the same Pew Research results indicate, for matched panel-data, the bogus respondent rate is zero.

5. ^{^}

   There are a bunch of nuances to how/when and what risks these can mitigate

6. ^{^}

   It was not at the LessWrong post published in Nature Communications, but the full text, and supplemental material, covered everything I am going to discuss.

7. ^{^}

   Rendered in plain English, it is simply “likely to cause harm”; the words, “statistically” and “victimful” add no meaning