DanielW

> 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 ‘un