We should not bend over backwards to use language the way anally retentive people demand we do.

Problem is that in some fields of study / work, and in some other situations absolute clarity and accuracy are super important to avoid dangerous or harmful mistakes. Many of the sciences are that way, and A.I. is absolutely one of those sciences where communicating accurately can matter quite a lot. Otherwise you end up with massive misunderstandings about the technology being spread around as gospel truth by people who are quite simply mis-informed (like you see happening right now with all the A.I. hype).

Ignorance clusters easily. You’ll have no problem finding alike.

> Ignorance clusters easily.

So does pedantry and prickliness.

Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. It's fine to want to do your part to steer language, but this is not one of those cases where it's important enough for anyone to be an asshole about it.

It also becomes apparent that ignorance leads to a weird aggressive asshole fetish.

Sure bud.

Just in case you're talking about descriptivism vs. prescriptivism.

I'm a descriptivist. I don't believe language should have arbitrary rules, like which kinds of words you're allowed to end a sentence with.

However, to be an honest descriptivist, you must acknowledge that words are used in certain ways more frequently than others. Definitions attempt to capture the canonical usage of a word.

Therefore, if you want to communicate clearly, you should use words the way they are commonly understood to be used.

> However, to be an honest descriptivist, you must acknowledge that words are used in certain ways more frequently than others. Definitions attempt to capture the canonical usage of a word.

True. And that's generally how they order the definitions in the dictionary, in order of usage.

For example, "an unfounded or mistaken impression or notion" is indeed the 2nd definition in M-W for "hallucination", not the first.

A dictionary entry's second definition isn't necessarily an uncommonly used one. It could be up to 49% of the word's usage (assuming the dictionary has such precise statistics).

I like communicating with people using a shared understanding of the words being used, even if I have an additional, different understanding of the words, which I can use with other people.

That's what words are, anyway.

Ignorance is easy to hide behind many words.

I like calling it bullshit[0] because it's the most accurate, most understandable, and the most fun to use with a footnote

0 (featured previously on HN) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

I'm glad we can agree. I also like communicating with people using a shared understanding of the words being used, i.e. their definitions.

You might be interested to learn that the people who write down the definitions in dictionaries consider themselves to be in the business of documenting usage, not bringing commandments on stone tablets down from the mountain.

Lol. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44091037

"Bending over backwards" is a pretty ignorant metaphor for this situation, it describes explicit activity whereas letting people use metaphor loosely only requires passivity.