Jargon

by Nis

on 2021-08-26

Word choice is extremely political. My choice of language is an expression of my sociopathy. Hopefully reading this page helps you learn how I think.

• apriori: See Ziz's multiverse post
• subjunctive dependence: apriori wouldness
  • e.g. apriori, if they would do X then I would do Y
  • From Functional Decision Theory.
• telos: apriori purpose = why
  • Common usage is when bottom-up (TODO: link?) observing what an action is doing as in just looking at it and asking "what's that action *for*?"
  • Simultaneously means both the intent and apriori-expected outcome of an action under e.g. the assumption "how could that have been why you did it if you knew it wouldn't work", which is easily said in bad faith if they're the one who's making it "not work", and trying to get you to CDT-do something else
  • Mostly used to avoid the political mess around the word "purpose", and because it's more clearly nounlike and apriori
    • Bad faith: "everything has a purpose" used to mean "everything has a purpose you shouldn't ask about, because they wouldn'ta done it if they didn't have a reason", erasing blame
    • Bad faith: Parfitian gaslighting e.g. "the purpose of *anyone* feeling hate can only be evil"
• Abdication / Utter Abdication: See Writing Evil a Blank Check
• Absolute: Completely-radical, with unyielding determination. Concept should be close to 'freedom', not some authoritarian sense of "objective". See Glossary: Qaf.
  • Radical: 'Seeking the roots/fundamental/apriori/essential'. Connotates reductionist in a way 'absolute' does not. I usually prefer using 'absolute' and 'reductionist' to be more precise, but radical does seem to connotate something more primordial than 'reductionism'.
  • Utter: A negative sense of absolute.
  • Ultimate: Like 'final', but not implying an end, just an extrapolation of what would happen if you went 'all the way'.
    • Terminus: Like 'end', but a specific object or location which lies at the end of something, rather than the ending itself abstractly.
• Primordial: See 'Prime' and 'proximal'.
• Reductionism: Approximately, a belief in absolutely/metaphysically non-lossy compression. TODO: This deserves its own article or glossary entry
• Lifting: Abstracting/Moving a concept over some entangled concern to a more proximal paradigm. Named after the mathematical concept.
• Paradigm: Like 'frame' but without the right-hemisphere connotation
• Even so…: An actually-important response, equivalent to reasserting the last thing you said, when saying anything further would be incorrectly saying something more in particular.
• Prediction Error: Means approximately "things that feel off". See: Perceptual Control
• Floating: See e.g. Float (money supply). Means, figuratively, 'untethered', 'allowing anything in to fill the gap in specification'.
• Procrastination Paradox: An induction without a base-case. Named after this paper (I think).
• Cash Out: Terminus of a conserved quantity.
• Reification: See Reification (fallacy).
• Tails Come Apart: See this lesswrong post.
• Goodhart: Goodhart's law (as a verb)
• Circumstantial: Commonly used to mean the counterpart to apriori (another antonym is 'contingent', meaning 'contingent on circumstance') or fictive (the counterpart of 'fictive learning' is 'reinforcement learning' e.g. 'reinforcement learning relying on the luck of circumstance')
• Pica: See Lesswrong: Pica
• Dark Forest: An silent environment where anyone who makes a sound is killed/eaten. See The Dark Forest (book). Associated with Unbounded Adversary Disease. Compare to Dead Silence, which is not necessarily threatening to a good person.
• Feel Out: See e.g. Gendlin's Focusing.