Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Sapir-Whorf for Rationalists, published by Duncan Sabien on January 25, 2023 on LessWrong.

Casus Belli: As I was scanning over my (rather long) list of essays-to-write, I realized that roughly a fifth of them were of the form "here's a useful standalone concept I'd like to reify," à la cup-stacking skills, fabricated options, split and commit, setting the zero point, and sazen. Some notable entries on that list (which I name here mostly in the hope of someday coming back and turning them into links) include: red vs. white, walking with three, seeding vs. weeding, hidden hinges, reality distortion fields, and something-about-layers-though-that-one-obviously-needs-a-better-word.

While it's still worthwhile to motivate/justify each individual new conceptual handle (and the planned essays will do so), I found myself imagining a general objection of the form "this is just making up terms for things," or perhaps "this is too many new terms, for too many new things." I realized that there was a chunk of argument, repeated across all of the planned essays, that I could factor out, and that (to the best of my knowledge) there was no single essay aimed directly at the question "why new words/phrases/conceptual handles at all?"

So ... voilà.

(Note that there is some excellent pushback + clarification + expansion to be found in the comments.)

Core claims/tl;dr

New conceptual distinctions naturally beget new terminology.Generally speaking, as soon as humans identify a new Thing, or realize that what they previously thought was a single Thing is actually two Things, they attempt to cache/codify this knowledge in language. Subclaim: this is a good thing; humanity is not, in fact, near the practical limits of its ability to incorporate and effectively wield new conceptual handles.

New terminology naturally begets new conceptual distinctions.Alexis makes a new distinction, and stores it in language; Blake, via encountering Alexis's language, often becomes capable of making the same distinction, as a result. In particular, this process is often not instantaneous—it's not (always) as simple as just listening to a definition. Actual practice, often fumbling and stilted at first, leads to increased ability-to-perceive-and-distinguish; the verbal categories lay the groundwork for the perceptual/conceptual ones.

These two dynamics can productively combine within a culture.Cameron, Dallas, and Elliot each go their separate ways and discover new conceptual distinctions not typical of their shared culture. Cameron, Dallas, and Elliot each return, and each teach the other two (a process generally much quicker and easier than the original discovery). Now Cameron, Dallas, and Elliot are each "three concepts ahead" in the game of seeing reality ever more finely and clearly, at a cost of something like only one-point-five concept-discovery's worth of work.(This is not a metaphor; this is in fact straightforwardly what has happened with the collection of lessons learned from famine, disaster, war, politics, and science, which have been turned into words and phrases and aphorisms that can be successfully communicated to a single human over the course of mere decades.)

That which is not tracked in language will be lost.This is Orwell's thesis—that in order to preserve one's ability to make distinctions, one needs conceptual tools capable of capturing the difference between (e.g.) whispers, murmurs, mumbles, and mutters. Without such tools, it becomes more difficult for an individual, and much more difficult for a culture or subculture, to continue to attend to, care about, and take into account the distinction in question.

The reification of new distinctions is one of the most productive frontiers of human rationality.It is not the only frontier, by a long shot. But both [the literal development of n...