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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

The non aggression principle cannot work without a shared definition of aggression.

And, 9/10 times between mutually aggrieved parties there is no shared definition of aggression.

So, no, it's not that easy.

This is actually where a shitload of disagreement and misunderstanding comes from. Due to peoples different perspectives, people have varying definitions of various terms. This makes discussing heated topics like politics super difficult because the people with different perspectives fundamentally generally don't understand the definitions used by the other and assumptions are made leading to disagreement

This is also why defining terms is so important in a conversation. "Robber baron" and "job creator" refer to roughly the same set of people, but have wildly different connotations. Whoever sets the definitions gets to set the framing of the entire conversation that follows. Sometimes, this means that even using the name of a group lean a conversation one way or another. (e.g. The term "Objectivism", Ayn Rand's name for her own philosophy, is accepting that there is something objective about it.)

To paraphrase Fred Brooks: "Show me your arguments and conceal your definitions, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your definitions, and I usually won't need your arguments; they'll be obvious." (s/flowcharts/arguments/ and s/tables/definitions/ from the original.)

That's a great quote from Fred Brooks, thank you for sharing! Do you happen to know where its from?

According to wikiquote[0], it is from The Mythical Man-Month. Also, just to be clear, this is a paraphrasing of the original with the substitutions as mentioned in the original comment. The initial context was of software data structures and software algorithms, emphasizing that the data structures are by far the more important.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks

That's a feature. Human words are supposed to be flexible. Re-defining and re-shaping them is a key way that we evolve as a society.

Insisting that everyone in the room uses the same definitions for all words, and trying to force some mono-mind of language, rather than actually working to solve problems is counterproductive. It can be productive to discuss and understand how terms are being used differently by different parties, and it is absolutely necessary for everyone in the room to understand that words are different for different people, but then you have to actually start working on the shared problems.

It's incredibly frustrating when people waste everyone's time trying to come up with a completely new shared "compromise vocabulary" that no one is happy with and will get discarded the moment people leave the room.

The problem could be solved by simply discussing definitions at the start of a debate, there's no need to come up with new vocabulary.

Human words should change over time, as that helps communication. However, human words varying across participants of the same conversation drastically harms understanding.

As a non-political example, the first time I heard the term "server-side rendering", I thought it was one of the soonest ideas I had ever heard. With the latency between client and server, needing to go back to the server for every screen draw would make for an incredibly laggy interface. I hadn't known that JavaScript developers use "rendering" to refer to making HTML, whereas I associate it only with making an image to be displayed. Because there was no shared definition, communication was harmed.

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