This also allows us to Use intentionally ambiguous naming to avoid restricting growing or uncertain ideas.

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

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Relevant for Use intentionally ambiguous naming to avoid restricting growing or uncertain ideas

Use intentionally ambiguous naming to avoid restricting growing or uncertain ideas

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

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Relevant for Use intentionally ambiguous naming to avoid restricting growing or uncertain ideas

When discussing a potentially difficult topic, it can be easy to have an idea be a poorly defined pointer to Concept-space. This is inevitable, and why we Use intentionally ambiguous naming to avoid restricting growing or uncertain ideas, for example.

There may be some nuance lost in the process of writing down ideas rather than keeping them in their abstract, nebulous form in the mind. For this reason, I think it’s valuable to Use intentionally ambiguous naming to avoid restricting growing or uncertain ideas).

Andy Matuschak describes a related problem in Conversation with others often emphasizes the most well-understood elements of an idea. A possible solution to this is to Use intentionally ambiguous naming to avoid restricting growing or uncertain ideas.