Jargon
From Lesswrongwiki
Revision as of 10:45, 1 May 2011 by Vladimir Nesov (talk | contribs) (Undo revision 7056 by David Gerard (talk) citation needed for this being in actual usage)
This is a short list of common terms and phrases used on LessWrong.
See also:
- ADBOC
- Agree Denotationally, But Object Connotatively
- Discussion in When Truth Isn't Enough
- AFAICT
- As Far As I Can Tell
- Affective death spiral
- When positive attributions combine with the halo effect in a positive feedback loop.
- AGI
- Artificial general intelligence
- Anti-epistemology
- Bad rules of thinking itself, constructed to protect a false belief.
- Bayesian
- A codeword cognitive scientists use for "rational". Key concept in understanding LessWrong.
- Beisutsukai
- A fictional secret society of Bayesians.
- Belief update
- What you do to your beliefs, opinions and cognitive structure when new evidence comes along.
- Blues, Greens
- Roman Empire chariot-racing teams that became part of politics. Used in place of real party names.
- See Color politics
- Crisis of faith
- What to have when you may have been quite wrong for a long time.
- Dark arts
- Rhetorical techniques crafted to exploit human cognitive biases. Considered bad behaviour even if the belief you want to communicate is good.
- ETA
- Edited To Add
- FAI
- Friendly AI
- Fully general counterargument
- An argument which can be used to discount any conclusion the arguer does not like.
- Fuzzies
- The desired but less useful counterpart to utilons. They make you feel you're altruistic and socially contributing.
- Hedon
- A unit philosophers use to quantify pleasure. (Note: no actual quantifying is done.)
- Hollywood rationality
- What Spock does, not what actual rationalists do.
- IA
- Intelligence augmentation
- IAWYC
- I Agree With Your Conclusion
- Generally used when nitpicking, to make it clear that the nitpicks are not meant to represent actual disagreement. Discussed in Support That Sounds Like Dissent.
- I don't know
- Something that can't be entirely true if you can even formulate a question.
- ISTM
- It Seems To Me
- LCPW, Least convenient possible world
- To assume that all the specific details will align with the idea against which you are arguing, and that you can't evade a philosophical question by nitpicking details.
- Logical rudeness
- A response to criticism which insulates the responder from having to address the criticism directly, without appearing to be conventional rudeness.
- LW
- Less Wrong
- Mind-killer
- A topic that reliably produces biased discussions, e.g. politics or Pick-Up Artists.
- Motivated cognition
- Reasoning that starts with its conclusion and works backwards.
- OB
- Overcoming Bias
- Omega
- A hypothetical superintelligent being, canonically found in Newcomb's problem.
- Paperclip maximizer
- An AI that has been created to maximise the number of paperclips in the universe. A form of UFAI.
- Paranoid debating
- A group estimation game in which one player, unknown to the others, tries to subvert the group estimate.
- PCT
- Perceptual control theory
- PD
- Prisoner's dilemma
- Philosophical zombie or P-Zombie
- A creature which looks and behaves indistinguishably from a human down to the atomic level, but is not conscious. The concept is not well-respected on LessWrong.
- Priors
- What you update from in Bayesian calculations. In practical terms, everything you think you know now.
- QALY
- Quality-adjusted life year
- Rationalist taboo
- A technique of reducing what you are talking about: taboo the use of a given word or its synonyms. Particularly useful in arguments over definitions.
- Semantic stopsign
- A term that looks like an explanation but, on closer examination, doesn't actually explain anything.
- Shut up and multiply
- How to do a utility calculation without scope insensitivity.
- Teleology
- Discussing an event in a manner that implies it is caused by its future consequences.
- tl;dr
- Too long; didn't read.
- Polite use: one-line summary at top of your long article. Impolite use: dismissive response to another's long piece of writing or unparagraphed slab of text.
- Topic that must not be named
- When LessWrong was started, Eliezer put a temporary moratorium on discussion of the Singularity or AI. You will see this used in old discussions to allude to these topics.
- UFAI
- Unfriendly AI
- Tsuyoku naritai
- Japanese: "I want to become stronger."
- Utilons
- Units of utility. Contrast "Fuzzies".
- YMMV
- Your Mileage May Vary
- see Other-optimizing
