To put it in terms that engineers are more likely to appreciate, a lot of these terms would be like "man-hours". Man-hours is obviously a useless term because it 1) implies that increasing workers scales production linearly, 2) implies each individual produces at the same rate, 3) inherits from a factory mode of production that engineers typically don't believe fits their situation, and 4) generally results in poor estimations of cost and delivery times. Obviously if you're trying to be productive as an engineer, your managers only using man-hours as a term invites ambiguity and worse working conditions. Same goes for things like the lay understanding of attention vs its specific meaning as an implementation template within deep learning, or even AI more broadly vs specific neural network techniques.

I have not read the entire list. I read a good chunk of it. Almost everything on it is -not- stuff I see among my colleagues, and appears to be how psych stuff is presented /in popular media/ rather than in the profession. Which is fine if one targets this for the science media/science communication types, but it seems very odd to apparently have a target audience of psych professionals. So of course there's a list of 'inaccurate and misleading' terms - you can't simplify something without losing /something/ of its complexity, but it still needs to be communicated.

The other thing to point out is that some of their criticisms are just ... well, outsiders commenting on things they don't know about. It's a team of academic psychologists. Psych PhDs generally don't do frontline stuff - they do targeted 1-on-1 therapy, or group therapy, but they tend to parachute in and out, they're not doing the days-long care-and-feeding of these patients where some of the terminology they're criticizing comes from. For instance, they take issue with the use of splitting, but ... clearly don't work on the unit. Splitting isn't just about wanting to avoid the thoughts of your loved ones being flawed beings; it's about the emotional hyper-sensitivity of a BPD patient resulting in them condemning as awful anyone that is less than entirely positively oriented towards them, because they can't take any negative interaction (see paragraph 1 about "I'm oversimplifying shit to communicate to people outside my profession", so don't come at me to pick nits. I know it's simplified-into-wrongness.) The result is that when they a unit staffer enforces boundaries, they're instantly terrible; as opposed to that "other" staffer that didn't have to enforce boundaries with them, who is wonderful, can I talk to them now please instead of you, you awful monster? And so the psychodynamic 'splitting' leads very quickly into 'pitting staff against each other'. It's not a mis-use of the term, it's a specific manifestation of the term that you deal with on the unit. Which the authors would know, if they were frontline workers rather than consulting therapists.

And the section on pleonasms is just nit picking for the sake of nitpicking.

This article doesn't do anything in the way of making psychology nor psychiatry more precise. This article is a lot of nit picking, in ways that look valid externally but would have anyone familiar with these things wondering why this was worth writing.

Ok, to be fair, I did roll my eyes at a few of their terms. However, you are mostly arguing out of scope/training.

Psychiatrists are not researchers, they are MDs.

They are generally pretty smart people, and I admire their work.

But MDs have next to zero formal training in research, methodology, or statistics, and even fewer have taken courses in the theory or philosophy of science or knowledge.

That's why MD/PhD programs exist, or MPh degrees, so the MDs can learn how to do research properly.

Speaking from my own experience, a lot of the statistical and clichéd methdological phrases also appear in some lower-quality biology papers I've seen, and it's mistakes I see grad students make and even submitters make. The fact that the authors can point to thousands of google scholar hits shows that the paper is addressing a real issue and was a worthwhile endeavor. If anything, this is what I feel more commenters should have criticized. Not that it appears in the paper, but that the state of the field is such that the familiarity with statistics (and I argue math, history, philosophy, etc) is so poor that such inaccurate language is so frequently deployed.

I can't speak to how this relates to practice, especially with regards to psychiatric practice. Quite frankly I was less concerned with that than the obsession with the sign/symptom distinction that's both commonplace and useful, and the weird attempts to preserve phrases like "steep learning curve" when what's being criticized is actually the lack of specificity the phrase encodes.

Great summary. I think the author's real audience is themselves and their real purpose is self-affirmation. Their article became popular on HN is because we (myself included) love to believe we know more than the common folk. A 50+ word list that purports to correct others is too tempting not to agree with. Particularly, when most of us don't have the expertise to know redefining 50+ words is not actually useful for its claimed audience.

I was curious about this one and wondered if you could based on your expertise shed some light on that section and whether it is also off.

Human body is obviously a rather complex piece of machinery, but chemical imbalance can put things in a bad spot ( lets say too much vitamin D ). I get that 'chemical imbalance' is a very simplistic model, but I always thought it describes some of our bodies' interactions with the world rather well ( even if they are still not understood ).

Would you be willing to elaborate on whether ( or maybe how ) chemical imbalance is used/described in psychiatry in your experience?

Yes we can deep into the weeds on how to best estimate a task.. or we can ask "How many man-hours is this going to take roughly?" and you give a number and then WE DO THE THING.

The argument about "man-hours" is bikeshedding.

Language is to be heard and understood. It carries both it's technical meaning and it's subjective meaning. If you're arguing, as the article argues, that words that are subjective have to be removed then you are left without any language at all.

It feels like you didn't read or understand the article.

Techincal fields (other than yours) also have rules for how to use techincal terms.

Arguing for clarity is not a "liberal" point of view (it's actually rather prescriptive, which is associated with more "convervative" viewpoints, but whatever).

For example, I was starting to doubt whether anyone realizes that they make a leap whenever they imply physiology/biology is the cause of what happens in our consciousness (or indeed causes consciousness to happen), but entry 29 reassured me not all hope is lost (emphasis mine):

> Nevertheless, conceptualizing biological functioning as inherently more “fundamental” than (that is, causally prior to) psychological functioning, such as cognitive and emotional functioning, is misleading (Miller, 1996). The relation between biological variables and other variables is virtually always bidirectional. For example, although the magnitude of the P300 event-related potential tends to be diminished among individuals with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) compared with other individuals (Costa et al., 2000), this finding does not necessarily mean that the P300 deficit precedes, let alone plays a causal role in, ASPD. It is at least equally plausible that the personality dispositions associated with ASPD, such as inattention, low motivation, and poor impulse control, contribute to smaller P300 magnitudes (Lilienfeld, 2014).

I believe the equal likelihood of such reverse causality and its implications are severely underexplored in modern medicine.

Similarly appreciated the warning against accidentally assuming mind-body dualism (entry 40) and a fundamental point about natural sciences—that there is never definitive proof, only limited to various degrees models (entry 45).

Also known as the scientific method.

I'm relatively new here at HN, but as a psychologist (who also dabbles in hacking) some of the reactions do support, sadly, the stereoytype that computer/engineer-types suffer anoagnosia (the lack of knowledge of what you do not know).

Some engineers do not understand that the world of human behavior is far more complex than the world of atoms, molecules, components, chips, software, etc.

Behavioral and social scientists are, you may be surprised to learn, aware of this fact, and actually lead in scientific investigation of the difficulty, specifically: dealing with constructs, and figure out how to define and measure them.

"Soft sciences" actually are much harder than "hard sciences" in many ways.

To be in psychology requires you to accept the ideas and culture of the "soft sciences". The system of universities and higher education, largely aligning with political and financial interests. One cannot be against it and be apart of it. That is the grand filter that removes dissent.

In current day all any diagnosis requires is a few 30 minute meetings and the right words in accordance with the dsm5. They'll get a diagnosis that's wrong, and be on their way with medications not proven effective. Ask me how I know. That's not science, it's a paycheck.

Because of that complexity, the methodologies used in those fields can’t be called “science.”

I assume people do it to sound knowledgeable or to make it sound like their ideas are backed by science, but neurotransmitters are vastly more complicated and subtle in their effects than is implied by these kinds of usages, and emotions and behaviors are tremendously more complex than the "my neurotransmitters made me do it/feel it" narrative would suggest.

Why, say, describe fond feelings or affection as “oxytocin”? Do you know anything about this neurotransmitter? Or are you just using it as a fancy synonym for love and affection? Is the vernacular English language—but I guess pop-neurotransmitters are vernacular now—too impoverished to talk about love and affection?

Same thing goes for “dopamine”. Did reading a factually wrong comment make you angry, or did you get a “dopamine hit” that motivated you to reply to it? Were you validated by the upvotes, or did you get a “dopamine hit”? Why describe pleasure, anger, comfort, etc. etc. as just “dopamine”?

It seems to me that fetishizing things by pinning pleasure on something ostensibly tangible like dopamine is just too irresistible. Now we can pretend that we actually know ourselves in the ancient Greek self by talking about our indulgent and sinful behavior as just “dopamine”.

For similar reasons I don’t like when people in meditation circles obsess over “the ego”. Every little mind-wandering and slip-up becomes the fault of the fetish that is “the ego”.

Edit: Of course this is how laypeople relate to neurotransmitters while the submission is about psychologists. So this is a side-topic.

Ironically, you’ve here used “fetish” in a way that the article explicitly admonishes, opting instead for the vernacular definition. And I think that’s okay! Language is about communication, if when you say fetish I know what you mean, and when other people say dopamine I know what they mean, who cares what the diction police say?

Second of all, my attempt (butchered or not) at using this word has no relation to the field of psychology at all since it is inspired by Marx’s use, who probably got it from Hegel (predates professional psychology, does it not?). The vernacular meaning (apparently, according to MW) means to be very fond of something. But what I mean in this context has got nothing to do with being in love with some inanimate object (in a non-sexual way); it means to use some object (although in this case an abstract one) as something to fixate on in lieu of appreciating and understanding wholly non-tangible things that may only be fully understood as relations. In this case, instead of trying to comprehend the mind as more of a web of associations, of cause and effect, you/they invent the fetish of the very animated “ego” which is trying to sabotage your every effort to achieve mindfulness, perform better in your corporate job, or what have you.

For example, dopamine-related drugs relatively consistently lower ADHD symptoms.

A given example that serotonin-reducing drugs can alleviate depression hardly makes the point.

One common (and false) belief is that "depression is caused by low serotonin". It is certainly way more complicated than that; otherwise, SSRIs would be as effective for depression as dopamine-increasing drugs work for ADHD.

and 7 families of Serotonin receptors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT_receptor

and many of them have orthogonal effects.

When I teach abnormal psychology, I like to ask my students "If Prozac is an SSRI, it increases Serotonin receptor activity. However, LSD is a Sertonin agonist, so it also increases Serotonin receptor activity. Why therefore do Prozac and LSD not give the same experience?"

The relation with addiction.

Having a mental model of why something works for me at least is a big motivator. The laws of thermodynamics don’t help you lose weight but they sure make it clear it is possible (or if your body absolutely cannot burn fat, you die).

Maybe the term "dopamine hit" is fine when it's just that, but people base their whole understanding of their brain based on dopamine does this, seratonin does that, etc.

> We also do not address problematic terms that are restricted primarily to popular (“pop”) psychology, such as “codependency,” “dysfunctional,” “toxic,” “inner child,” and “boundaries,” as our principal focus is on questionable terminology in the academic literature. Nevertheless, we touch on a handful of pop psychology terms (e.g., closure, splitting) that have migrated into at least some academic domains.

I’m not aware that “dopamine hit” has migrated into some academic domains as it is kind of a slang among laypeople with the meaning of indulging in an activity they like. So I think “dopamine hit” specifically is out of scope for this article. “Chemical imbalance” on the other hand is a problematic term that has been used historically to promote inaccurate—and thoroughly disproved—models of mental illness. I guess the term is—somewhat worryingly—still being used among academics in the literature, and that’s why it was granted a place on this list.

Much better words than "jingle jangle fallacy" are "ambiguous" (for one word that has multiple meanings) and "redundant" (for multiple words that have the same meaning) terminology.

(I find it supremely ironic that this needs to be pointed out in an article whose central thesis is that wise choice of terminology is important.)

Symptom: (under Oxymorons) (41) Observable symptom. This term, which appears in nearly 700 manuscripts according to Google Scholar, conflates signs with symptoms. Signs are observable features of a disorder; symptoms are unobservable features of a disorder that can only be reported by patients (Lilienfeld et al., 2013; Kraft and Keeley, 2015). Symptoms are by definition unobservable.

I am surprised that English medicine seems to differentiate observability here since I never heard it expressed in that way. Seems to make sense to differentiate though, psychologists probably know best why this data maybe needs a different evaluation.

> Symptoms cannot be seen and do not show up on medical tests. Some examples of symptoms are headache, fatigue, nausea, and pain.

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...

It has nothing to do with the original meanings of the words "symptom" and "sign" in English and other languages (where "symptom" is any sign of a disease, while "sign" is any sign of anything).

The standard medical terminology in other languages is "subjective symptoms" and "objective symptoms".

In my opinion, whoever has chosen these artificial and arbitrary meanings for the words "symptom" and "sign", both words being widespread in many European languages, where they are used with their old meanings, has made a very bad choice. Someone who wants new words should invent them, not change the traditional meanings of other words.

I wonder if this "sign" and "symptom" terminology is common for British English and American English, or it is used only in American English.

> Symptoms of coronavirus (COVID-19) in adults can include:

> - a high temperature or shivering (chills) – a high temperature means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature)

As do, slightly implicitly, all four of the UK chief medical officers [2]:

> The individual’s households should also self-isolate for 14 days as per the current guidelines and the individual should stay at home for 7 days, or longer if they still have symptoms other than cough or loss of sense of smell.

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/symptoms/...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-from-the-uk-chi...

> The standard medical terminology in other languages is "subjective symptoms" and "objective symptoms".

Brazilian here. We use the term sinais e sintomas, meaning signs and symptoms. Doctors learn these signs in medical semiology classes and through practice in hospitals.

Then they must have spread in USA, and then in some other countries, like Brazil and Norway, which have been mentioned here.

At least France and Germany seem to be among the countries that have kept the traditional terms "objective symptoms" and "subjective symptoms".

Another poster said that "language changes" and this must be accepted. While there are many people who believe this, I do not agree with it. When language changes in order to speak about new things, that is obviously fine. When language changes because someone thinks that the traditional words are not cool any more and they make arbitrary changes in the meanings of the words, that, in my opinion, is lazy and stupid. Every such change in the meaning of the words makes more difficult both the communication with people from distant places, where the meaning changes have not arrived yet, and the understanding of the older writings accumulated during the last centuries, many of which are much more valuable than it is expected by those who read only what was published last year, thinking that the older publications are obsolete. In fact too many recent research papers reinvent things that are decades old, because their authors have not read the old literature.

This change in terminology has been completely random, one could have equally well chosen to use "signs" instead of "subjective symptoms" and "symptoms" instead of "objective symptoms".

So there is no way for someone who has not studied the recent medical terminology to guess what medical doctors mean when they speak about "signs" and "symptoms".

If the author of this terminology would have invented some new words, e.g. "obsyms" and "subsyms", then at least their use would not have caused confusions. Any listeners would have recognized them as unknown words and would have asked for their meaning.

In truth, "language change" (which is in fact language corruption) if often a necessary evil when a mass of "lazy and stupid" people desperately tries to learn something. The net outcome of all that is good, or has been so far.

But it's a different pair of shoes when supposed experts decide to change dictionary definitions on the fly, and in such a confusing manner. They should have known better.

So that's fine. Medical experts can use the technical meanings in expert discourse, and the vernacular meanings in vernacular discourse.

If you say the meaning of these words are different in other languages, then aren't you translating them incorrectly?

> Someone who wants new words should invent them, not change the traditional meanings of other words.

Language changes over time. The meaning of words can change. Definitions aren't etched into stone.

From what I see from quick search word "symptom" as written here is also present in Czech, Danish, German, Norwegian, Polish and Swedish.

Many other languages has variations (e.g. French's "symptôme" or Latvian's "simptoms").

In Norway, doctors will distinguish between (subjective) "symptomer" and (more objective) "tegn" (and "tegn" can be directly translated to "sign") whereas laymen will use "symptomer" for everything

E.g., https://sml.snl.no/tegn_-_medisin

The definition you link is interesting, I'll quote it:

>symptom >(SIMP-tum) >A physical or mental problem that a person experiences that may indicate a disease or condition. Symptoms cannot be seen and do not show up on medical tests. Some examples of symptoms are headache, fatigue, nausea, and pain.

There seems to be an internal inconsistency in defining a symptom as physical if it's not objectively discernible; in what way is it physical? If you know it's a physical aspect of a patient then isn't it objectively observable and and so not a 'symptom' under this narrow definition?

We're going to tie ourselves in knots here for sure.

I have always understood symptoms to be the patient's reported experience; and signs to be observable manifestations of a condition. So yes, a symptom is by definition not observable, and therefore "oxymoron" is correct.

     (47) Empirical data. “Empirical” means based on observation or experience. As a consequence, with the possible exception of information derived from archival sources, all psychological data are empirical (what would “non-empirical” psychological data look like?). Some of the confusion probably stems from the erroneous equation of “empirical” with “experimental” or “quantitative.” Data derived from informal observations, such as non-quantified impressions collected during a psychotherapy session, are also empirical. If writers wish to distinguish numerical data from other sources of data, they should simply call them “quantified data.”

Empirical makes more sense when you contrast empiricism with rationalism. It's a split between things you observe and things you think. If you're doing chemistry calculations, that's not empirical but it is quantitative. If you're pouring stuff into beakers and writing down what you see, it is empirical and quantitative.

Theory driven: "I think anxiety and depression are fundamentaly different, because of writings of Freud, Foo, and Bar"

Empirical: factor analysis of test data suggests anxiety and depression may actually be a single factor, perhaps there is a single biological mechanism underlying both?"

Also, have you ever met anyone who thought "steep learning curve" was ambiguous? This seems like a controversy invented by some really literal-minded people who are not representative of the general population.

Yep, that’s me. When I first encountered this expression it seemed very strange to me (not exactly ambiguous since I guessed the meaning). I envisioned a plot, with a steep curve: x is time, but what’s on y? You see, there are no mountains where I’ve grown up…

Eventually I’ve come to think of it: x is pleasure that you will be able to extract from the game, y is amount you have to learn to extract that pleasure.

But now I do not think much when I hear the expression. “Steep learning curve?” - ok, I know what you mean. Changing the meaning to its opposite would cause me a great confusion, bigger than the first one.

This question really got me thinking, because I've always envisioned a plot as well, but the phrase always made sense to me.

I realized that I think of x being "mastery" and y being "knowledge required". On such a plot, you'd see a steep curve if one needs a relatively large amount of knowledge to progress to the next level of mastery.

I've never thought of it differently, and so never realized that the phrase is ambiguous until reading the article. Upon reflection, it makes much more sense plotting time on x and mastery on y when talking about learning.

> The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science

How many published papers, or even undergraduate essays contain such simplifications and misunderstandings?

I rather think the piece is aimed elsewhere, to the press, science jornalists, politicians, mid-ranking deciders, mass media, and pundits whose language is awash with this stuff.

main use is to mislead self an dothers

This person needs to look at interviews of mk-ultra experiment survivors. Brainwashing is very real and permanent.

No one is disputing that subjecting someone to drugs will permanently alter their beliefs, anyone who has come in contact with an alcoholic or a heavy drug addict knows this but that's not what brainwashing is. Brainwashing is ability to control someone's thoughts often with the goal of inducing specific beliefs and ideas. While there is plenty of evidence that MKUltra damaged people psychologically and forever changed their personality, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it managed to change their personality in a controlled manner.

Not only did mkultra brainwash people but some survivors forgot everything about their life before the experiment.

I often wonder whether the neurological algorithm that underlies this got into so many minds purely organically or if it was put there somehow.

You've met people in the military, CMU students and religions of all stripes who were subject to MKUltra and had their minds controlled?

Indoctrination is not forced on a person by a specific agent but rather is the result of passive exposure over long periods of time. As a social species we are all indoctrinated to some degree by our culture, our parents, friends, profession etc... but that is not the same as a specific person having significant control over our beliefs or actions.

I do not think that indoctrination is being done by passive exposure only. This 1970 book: https://www.amazon.com/Canvassing-Peace-manual-volunteers-pa... (and yes, this is the Zimbardo of Stanford experiment) describes the tactic that was successful in starting the piece movement. The first step Zimbardo recommends when going from home to home - is to ask to sign some document that almost nobody will refuse to sign. Not “Stop the war now”, but more like “Investigate reports of war crimes”. Who will refuse to sign under such a noble request? What? Do you support war crimes?? A lot of signatures was collected.

But there was no need to send these collective signatures anywhere. Zimbardo states (as a scientific fact, lol) that after a person signed something in support of some (anti-war in this case) position - the person’s perception changes. He will become a little bit more receptive to anti-war arguments than to pro-war ones. (Other purpose of this first canvassing was to find people who already are passionate about your cause and sign them on as volunteers).

As I can see this tactic - not passive indoctrination, but active involvement via small first steps - is used rather widely on our planet these days. The most cynical variant is “give some little money to our noble cause!” - those being indoctrinated are financing the indoctrination campaign themselves. That is, if Zimbardo is right.

Mmmh is this Psychology opting out of the scientific method?

The high-effort piece of writing adds citation-based examples of semi-specialist wording.. like someone that is a credentialed school counselor, but is not in the health professions per-se. Well guess what, you now have religious schools and also splinter educational environments to deal with as your audience.. good luck with that, Science is not going to settle cultural commitments in all cases. nor should it, I will argue.

Psychology has always been seen as a pseudo-science in some corners, unlike hard sciences backed by math. This well-intentioned and somewhat urgent writing tries to corral the "three pillars of communication" listed above, and as usual, will only get so far IMHO ..

Most 'psychological disorders' today are not diagnosed based on specific physical-chemical tests, i.e. one can say with high certainty that a patient has drug-resistant tuberculosis using a PCR test. In contrast, there are no definitive tests for everything from ADHD to schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to depression, although more diagnoses lead to more pharma drug sales...

I'm not sure how much real science they have in psychology in particular. I'm sure there's some, like I've heard they can use fMRI to analyze the language region of the brain to identify what kind of speech disorder you have. But certainly a lot of publications cross the line.

We can still be fair and say they do help a lot of people with therapy, even if they don't really understand why. Historically craftsmen were ahead of scientists in making working technologies. They weren't necessarily peddling in scams and nonsense, they were just not backed by real science.

A persistent is always claimed but my experience is very much to the contrary, both personal and observed in others.

...and my experience as a varyingly persistent introvert :-)

Academic psychological research has been making great attempts to remove biased / inaccurate terms from the lexicon, and I encourage you to find a cite from the last 10 years that uses this term, other than in a historical sense. (Not saying it's impossible, just unlikely)

Is there a reason you believe people have this unintuitive plot in mind, rather than simply conflating with the difficulty of physically scaling a steep slope?

> a reason you believe people have this [...] plot in mind

Sample size N += 1, HTH, HAND.

So a "learning curve" that is "steep" implies that learning occurs rapidly; a "forgetting curve" that is "steep" would be "in one ear and out the other".

Super pedantic and I don't plan to change my use of steep learning curve, but I get where the intention is coming from.

[1] https://www.psychestudy.com/cognitive/memory/ebbinghaus-forg...

I imagine that one could spend a long time learning the fundamentals before getting to a stage where the proficiency escalates quickly i.e. where the steepness occurs. But the long time getting there is what the term "steep learning curve" is about. Like the opposite of taking a long run at jumping off a cliff. I'm sure that this is easier to show with a graph.

"Moreover, some authors argue that these medications are considerably less efficacious than commonly claimed, and are beneficial for only severe, but not mild or moderate, depression, rendering the label of “antidepressant” potentially misleading"

Love it!

(7) Chemical imbalance.

Hate it!

Of course there is such a thing as a chemical imbalance. I would say serotonin syndrome is a good example. That is way too much serotonin. And when I am manic, I am sure I have a chemical imbalance (glutamate).

However maybe that is an outdated term, and a better one exists. It has been a minute since I read up on the literature.

But OCD is a diagnosis, abusing it do describe a personality trait doesn't serve the many many people impacted by the disorder.

-- From someone with an affected loved one.

For more established conditions, we don't really feel that way, e.g. like, how:

"Turn the flashlight off, I'm going blind!"

"This jump scare gave me a heart attack!"

"Monday's make me depressed"

Are not really considered an insult to the blind, people with heart conditions, and the clinically depressed...

These things are not the same as misunderstood conditions suffered by a small minority.

If your discipline cannot clearly define things in a reasonably concrete and provable way, such that it is readily apparent to the patients and the public at large, and also such that the language effectively clarifies itself out of necessity, then much of what you do needs to be strongly questioned -- and often not taken too seriously.

I'm reminded of e.g. the term "neurodivergent." It's a good thing to look at, but how do you falsify it? Who can stand up and say "I'm definitely not neurodivergent?" If you can't do that, the term is not very helpful.

Compare that to signs, where you can see that a patient has say, a lesion or is clearly coughing.

I think you're confusing a definition being easy to understand with it being well-defined. Mathematical definitions are often hard to grasp exactly because they are so well-defined. If you want something to be easily understandable by a lot of people (especially outside the discipline), you'll usually have to sacrifice rigor.

For example, most people would consider a contract to be something written down that says ‘contract’. A few know it can be verbal too.

When really, it could be verbal, video, scrawled in blood on the side of a fence, or any number of other forms, and really covers any agreement that meets certain criteria (generally that there is some form of payment or consideration, an offer, and an acceptance - think ‘quid pro quo’ or something for something).

99% of the time, the public is right. The other times, something went really wrong somewhere and someone did something pretty weird and dumb for it to matter.

In engineering, physics, math, it’s not uncommon to need SOME unique identifier for the thing, and there are very specific technical needs for it to even have a conversation on the topic - and often we’ve run out of pronounceable or recognizable symbols, alternative alphabets, etc.

So down spin quark it is.

The thing that is called a "Smart contract" has literally no overlap with a legal contract; because a legal contract is the "separate human statements of agreement that are associated with the action/performance and usually only needed when the performance goes wrong,"

The "smart contract" is the actual performance.

Pain is not observable. It's reported. Loss of vision or hearing isn't observable, it's reported.

You can run tests to get an idea of whether any of these are happening. But you are not observing any of these symptoms. You're observing behavior and inferring what kinds of symptoms the person is experiencing and what degree.

If that's how medicine actually uses the term, okay, sometimes terms of art clash with the plain meaning, but damn that is a pretty weird distinction, as a layman.

It's a very useful distinction between things that only the patient can tell you versus things that can be observes and tested for. How do you run a test to determine if a patient is "really" experiencing chest pain? You cannot. You can run tests to try and determine an obvious cause for that symptom, but there is no test to tell you if say perhaps the patient is lying about having chest pain.

Precisely, it feels like there's a lot of "activity" and "named ideas" chasing things that may not meaningfully exist? This is of course symptomatic of "publish or perish" et al, but I suppose one of the difficulties here is that the paper is like "here are some bad ideas and trends (fair) so here are some more to counteract that."

It really just gives the impression of "wow, these people are wasting time if they can't even decide on what relatively accessible words even mean?"

E.g. The bit on "symptoms" is crazy sounding.

Your example of “neyrodivergent” is a really bad example for your case. This term is a laypeople term that captures the notion that there is a variety in the way people think and behave, and as a society we tend to accommodate only a subset of this variety, leaving the rest (the neurodiverce individuals) in a harder then necessary situations. You don’t need to falsify it because it is not a scientific term. But if you wanted to disproof it, you would need to show that cognitive behavior doesn’t vary nearly as much as observable behavior, the very fact that autism exists should be evidence enough to justify this term.

I think you might be misunderstanding what falsifiability means for psychology or other social science (or any science that uses probability or population statistics in its theories for that matter). When you have a term that distinguishes a subgroup from a population, you don’t try to disprove it by looking at an individual, you look at the variance and compare it with the greater population. If there is no difference in the variance, then most likely you are using an unhelpful term.

More or less this position: nothing worthwhile from Wittgenstein beyond the Tractatus and specifically, forget about the Philosophical Investigations.

It's not an indictment of a field that the subject matter is not susceptible to description in terms that are definitely falsifiable. Of course, definite terminology can be very helpful where it does apply, but it can also be used to oversimplify complex questions in a way that obfuscates them. But there's no law that nature must always be subject to description in a "concrete and provable way", especially not by human languages. By not taking seriously anything but disciplines that can be boiled down to true-false propositions, we'd miss huge amounts of knowledge that are useful and helpful.

Especially fields like psychology where so many important observations simply cannot be broken down into concrete statements or provable propositions in the way you seem to mean those words.

On the other hand, it's also very important to be careful of misuse of terms such as "true" and "false", for example, they can have very different meanings when we're talking about logic or observation, answers to examination questions, romance or religion. In this particular exchange, by true do we mean scientifically true or logically true?

Or, how indeed would anyone stand up and say whether something is "definitely not damning" or "definitely not unintentional" actually?

The problem is that in a research paper you do have to have operational definitions, P values, etc. it’s not that these things are bad but they are not particularly well-suited to such an ambiguous problem as attempting to explore the human condition.

To bring the point back to Wittgenstein, we are forcing students to talk about “the unspeakable” in scientific terminology. Bringing in his viewpoint from the investigations, it feels to me like in the mental health field we need to be playing a different game than the scientific research game. Professionals on-the-ground are doing this, but how to bring that back into the academic sphere, I don’t know what the best solution is.

I mean, that's not a diagnosis. If you mean just generally and not psychology specific then you are going to have to throw out most english adjectives. Like you can't falsify "im hungry", "im smart", "im dumb".

I can't easily identify whether or not I'm neurodivergent, because I'm not sure what it means or what the opposite would look like. Does anybody know?

The people who are claiming to be neruodivergent would say its quite obvious to themselves (FWIW, the general definition is roughly ADHD or Autism, both of which have more concrete definitions). I was assuming the statement was about other people verifying the veracity of the statement not yourself.

Of course, i don't know how you can easily identify if you are actually hungry, when you can't even tell if you actually have a stomach or are just a brain in a vat/plugged into the matrix.

But I'm not a brain in a vat that thinks it's neurodivergent or not neurodivergent because it doesn't know what that would mean in the first place, and it's not sure anybody else (assuming other brains in other vats exist) does either.

This means that not only can "your neurodivergent status" change (say, a non-autistic person in a group of autistic people would be neurodivergent), but it is a spectrum. You might be divergent from the typical in certain domains (say, you are very sensitive to certain sounds), while being typical in others (say, your way of using body language matches the way most people use it around you).

Bringing up neurodivergence makes only sense when you do notice that there is something different about how you perceive the world or act, vs what everybody else seems to be doing.

Specific conditions lead to neurodivergence, say ADHD or neurological disorders or mood disorders, while others might be attributed to upbringing or nationality.

Ok, let me get this straight. You openly admit that brainwashing techniques are now routinely and knowingly used in "casual" settings, but you want me to stop using the term, because it's so routine and because it never was never long-term effective. Faulty reasoning at best, manipulative bullshit at worst.

* Depressed -> struggling (places focus on society instead of individual)

* Burned out -> exploited (places focus on employer instead of employee)

The current era is much more difficult to survive in than when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Because wealth inequality (high housing/healthcare/education costs, low wages) has come to dominate our lives. We're working twice as many hours for half as much buying power. We may not see it as much with our 6 figure incomes, but at least half the US is basically living hand to mouth in dead end jobs. No help is coming from the top, so until people wake up and realize that the power is in their labor and organizing power, nothing will change. That's why I think that framing and terminology are so important for progress.

Also I define exploitation as receiving less than the lion's share of any income generated by a worker. So if a business bills someone out at $50/hr and pays them $15/hr, that's exploitive. Very few businesses bill less than that, but a huge number pay less than that. So exploitation has become the way that business is done in the US and any countries we exploit for our manufacturing needs. Selling shoes for $100 made by workers who are paid $1/hr, etc.

I'm in small business so I'm offering no comment on larger companies, but often here, I think an employee paid $x is expected to produce $3x as an old rule of thumb to cover overheads, taxes, etc. And I have sympathy for the brutal world of small business ownership: if an employee detests that $15/hr, go freelance at $40/hr and wear the downsides that come with it. Almost every business owner has taken a risk at some point to work unpaid or underpaid while getting off the ground, has covered wages during slow periods, etc. It's not always glamorous. An idea I find intriguing is in government or enterprise providing small businesses with as much boilerplate/scaffolding as possible to minimise the impact of wage theft or rostering struggles or anything else in that painful interface between the employer and employee. Without it, an employee is at the mercy of the foibles of the smalltime employer.

This is terrible advice. To the public, and often even to experts, "significant" doesn't mean "statistically significant" it means "big". We need to abolish this use of "significant" not promote it. Way too many papers show "significant" (statistically significant) results that are not significant (so minor as to be irrelevant). This is the #1 source of misleading headlines.

"Moving to a World Beyond “p < 0.05”" Ronald L. Wasserstein, Allen L. Schirm, & Nicole A. Lazar. Pages 1-19 | Published online: 20 Mar 2019

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2019.1...

"Statistically measurable" or "statistically determinable" come to mind though I can't find a cite.

The originally intended ... significance ... of the term was that a difference was capable of being shown using statistical methods. Not that its size or context was itself significant in some semantic, practical, or other sense.

The main issue is that the word "significance" is overloaded with two meanings in research & stats:

"Large and important" (e.g. "clinical significance", often given as an effect size, or some benefit/cost tradeoff)

"P value below alpha" (e.g "statistical significance", Probabilty of rejecting H0, which is roughly equivalent to "if the true effect size were zero, what's the chance I could see this effect size in my data given random fluctuactions [and a bunch of other assumptions]"

I said "No it's not! Which part of what he's doing is passive?"

He agreed with me when I pointed it out.

Bookmarked it to have it available the next time someone talks about 'cults' who 'brainwash' their members.

Have a nice day, dear members of this cult :-)

https://youtu.be/lp2vGAD-BGw

Nonsense. There are plenty of types of data that are not empirical. For example, data from simulations is not empirical data.

For nstance, IPV usually doesn’t involve “violence” or at least what normal people consider violence (ie Punchin, kicking, slapping, etc…). IPV is more often financial or mental abuse.

Some things have benign usage that is not harming anyone or any group of people and convey the intended meaning better than alternative words.

Most misunderstandings arise from people having different understanding of same words - so approaching agreement on the meaning of words is important to reduce misunderstandings. The problem is the language is self-manifesting - the word gains the meaning from the way people use it, even when the meaning differs from the original (perhaps academic or technical) meaning.

So one side has to stand back - either academia (in this case, psychiatry), or the general population. Since academia largely relies on solid, defined meanings of words, while the general population relies on "how other people are currently using it", it's supposed to be easier to change the usage by the general population. Although it's pretty hard to do both ways.

Otherwise, we end up with words having two distinct meanings, one professional, and other layman.

It also was a good article about the problems behind the mental model.

But I also do not write academic / published papers.

> (22) p = 0.000. Even though this statistical expression, used in over 97,000 manuscripts according to Google Scholar, makes regular cameo appearances in our computer printouts, we should assiduously avoid inserting it in our Results sections. This expression implies erroneously that there is a zero probability that the investigators have committed a Type I error

Oh no. Big bad PC culture is stopping us from stating fallacious statistical conclusions.

Please don't dilute the quality of discussions on this site by posting reactionary nonsense before even reading something to which you're responding.

While indeed HSP is not a psychological term, it makes sense for self-description.

Unless you are a kind of person that cringes at people saying they are "coffee lovers" or "morning persons" with "it is not a proper psychological term!". :)

You, clearly, are signalling yourself as one of those people. And that's your right! That was your choice to make.

But maybe stop and think about why you think it's so important to you to tell people to shut up about something that bothers them, and if you want to be seen as someone who's deliberately and wilfully causing harm when there exist other ways to phrase the same concept.

But this:

> using this particular form of speech is harmful to certain people

... are a few bridges too far in my mind. Who are these certain people? What do they think, not you? For instance, I'm gay, and homophobic slurs happen all the time in my life, whether coded or overt. But they don't harm me in any reasonable sense of the word.

I mean, should we not distinguish between physical harm, mental abuse, and discomfort with words?

To put a fine point on it, equating "discomfort" and "harm" is flawed.

That's fair! Negative impacts certainly exist on a continuum! I felt like "harm" was a reasonable synonym for "negatively impact", but you're right that it carries a stronger connotation than "mildly inconvenience"; and it also has a more direct connotation than "perpetuate negative stereotypes in listeners" (using homophobic slurs has negative impact _even if no homosexual people are around to hear them_, because it emboldens homophobes and normalizes homophobia)

So let me loosen my original statement to "using this particular form of speech will negatively impact (whether directly or indirectly) certain people, ...etc.". And please do notice that I didn't describe the outcome as "then you are a bad person"! It's reasonable and justifiable to pick a point on that spectrum and say "you know what - negative impacts that are weaker than this just really don't matter to me. There's a certain level of tip-toeing around that just isn't worth it for the miniscule risk". Hell, I do it too. There's a tiny chance that my use of "hell" as a casual interjection might offend a religious reader - but in my determination, that offence is less important to me than that particular form of speech. There are probably a ton of other words or phrases I use for which I've made a similar (conscious or unconscious) determination.

My point is - speech has an impact. Indeed, if it didn't, it would be pointless. The point of speech is to communicate. Communication distributes ideas, concepts, thoughts from one brain to others. Those ideas will not just be the ones that are directly communicated in the speech, but also "meta-ideas" communicated by the form of speech. Meta-communication, more often than not, is about the speaker rather than just the content. If I hear someone teaching a complicated topic, I will assume (rightly or wrongly!) something about their level of intelligence and knowledge. If I hear someone speaking clearly and convincingly, I will assume that they've taken the time to prepare and research - and vice versa. If I hear someone using an obscure word, I'll assume they have an interest in vocabulary (and/or are involved in the field in which that term is common). If I hear someone using a well-known slur, I'll assume that they have made the deliberate choice to do so in the knowledge that it _is_ a slur. It's a form of social signalling.

So, y'know - if you believe that forms of speech that do cause "discomfort" are acceptable, and ones that cause "harm" are not (based on your own determination of the likelihood of those impacts, hopefully informed by the people who are actually impacted), _that's justifiable_. I'm not saying that words should be banned. I'm asking for a recognition that the use of a word - _any_ word - is a signal; that some signals are more distinct than others; and that that signal will be interpreted by listeners as reflecting something about the speaker's value system. That's not policing - it's a recognition of personal choice.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33648904

False dichotomy. We all (you included) already spend plenty of time thinking about "minor bs". A discussion about language will probably use up less time in your week than you spent deciding what to get for lunch.

Personally I don't have any problem with the word "crazy"... but I don't mind thinking about it for a minute.

Someone who runs around the office and complains about everything being 'so crazy' is genuinely not articulating anything meaningful but just ranting. And it's quite amazing how many people can't tell the difference between a rant and a productive argument. Perceiving this as 'policing' is just an excuse to not putting an effort into what you think and say.

The arguments to replace certain words would do the opposite though.

On the other hand, sometimes expression is not too important to transport a point.

80s Commercial | Crazy Eddie | 1985 | 1986 | 1987

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml6S2yiuSWE

The Biggest Retail Fraud In American History - Masterminds - Crazy Eddie - Eddie Antar Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws9PGROHZzg

I don't look forward to prescriptive definitions, grammars and usage. I will use those for technical writing and use "style guides" but not for casual communication and conversation.

Absurd or ridiculous both capture the same meaning without losing precision. And at this point, we can look at it more as a function of deprecated terminology - people don't listen to you and think you're a bad person if you use said terminology, they just think you're old.

However, to be clear, this is off-topic for the article at hand.

I, for one, am overall skeptical that being very concerned about people using any term relating to a human malady or misfortune figuratively is a trend that will continue to flourish even to the extent that it has so far.

But... it's a dumb and unnecessary word, in the contexts you mention. When I'm at a meeting and someone says "I'm going to propose a crazy idea" I always think "Just get on with it, man, no need to tamp down expectations."

I think once you know something might accidentally upset someone it's up to you to decide whether you want to take that chance. I try to avoid taking that chance where possible, I really don't like the idea of accidentally hurting someone.

I can also see why people are upset about their language being policed. I imagine every generation feels this way as society changes around them. I'm sure there are lots of examples of probably silly things we've policed ourselves out of saying that probably didn't amount to much, but I'm also happy we mostly don't use the pervasive casual racism of the 50's, or the pervasive casual homophobia of when I was kid.

Saying that "something is crazy" doesn't really victimize anybody. Intention should matter much more than it currently does. I really hope we are at the point where the pendulum swings back to the place where people understand that again.

Antidepressant medication Chemical imbalance Genetically determined

The DSM 5 provides Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD, not to he confused as ASD which is autism). It's more commonly referred to as Sociopathy. Psychopathy is not an 'official' condition

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission (an independent government agency) [0]:

> Racism takes many forms and can happen in many places. It includes prejudice, discrimination or hatred directed at someone because of their colour, ethnicity or national origin

So, even if a difference is "ethnic" rather than "racial", it can still be "racism" (at least by that definition of "racism"), since "racism" can be based on "ethnicity" or "national origin" rather than "race".

Contemporary science does not support any distinction between "race" and "ethnicity": the distinction is just a cultural construct specific to certain societies. So culturally-specific, in fact, that it even differs between different countries in the English-speaking world: US government publications officially acknowledge a distinction between "race" (e.g. African-American) and "ethnicity" (e.g. Hispanic) – even while admitting the distinction is grounded in the particularities of US culture and history rather than anything scientific or universal. By contrast, Australian government publications studiously avoid making any official distinction between them, and in practice treat the two concepts as interchangeable.

[0] https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/ahrc_sr_2021_... PDF page 8

I'm in my 30s and this is a little fact I just learned today.