EA - Anti-'FOOM' (stop trying to make your cute pet name the thing) by david reinstein

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Anti-'FOOM' (stop trying to make your cute pet name the thing), published by david reinstein on April 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Notes/basis: This is kind of a short-form post in style but I think it's important enough to put here. Obviously let me know if someone else said this betterSummaryFormal overly-intellectual academese is bad. But using your 'cute' inside joke name for things is potentially worse. It makes people cringe, sounds like you are trying to take ownership of something, and excludes people. Use a name that is approachable but serious.The problem.Where did the term 'FOOM' come from, to refer to AGI risk? I asked GPT4:[!ai] AIThe term 'foom' was coined by artificial intelligence researcher and author Eliezer Yudkowsky in his 2008 book titled "The Sequences". Yudkowsky used the term to refer to a hypothetical scenario where an artificial general intelligence (AGI) rapidly and exponentially improves its own intelligence, leading to an uncontrollable and potentially catastrophic outcome for humanity. The term 'foom' is a play on the word 'boom', representing the sudden and explosive nature of AGI development in this scenario.Another example: 'AI-not-kill-everyone-ism'Analogies to fairly successful movements:Global warming was not called ''Roast", and the movement was not called "anti-everyone-burns-up-ism"Nuclear holocaust was not called "mega-boom"Anti-slavery was not called ... (OK I won't touch this one)How well has the use of cute names worked in the past?I can't think of any examples where they have caught on in a positive way. The closest I can think of are"Nudge" (by Richard Thaler?)... to describe choice-architecture interventions; - My impression is that the term 'nudge' got people to remember it but made it rather easy to dismissothers in that space have come up with names that caught on less well I think (like "sludge"), which also induce a bit of cringe"Woke"I think this example basically speaks for itself.Tea-Party movementThis goes in the opposite direction perhaps (fairly successful), but I still think it's not quite as cringeworthy as FOOM. The term 'tea party' obviously has a long history in our culture, especially the "Boston Tea Party.What else?I asked GPT4when have social movements used cute 'inside joke' names to refer to the threats faced?The suggestions are not half as cute or in-jokey as FOOM: Net Neutrality, The Umbrella Movement, Extinction Rebellion (XR), Occupy Wall Street (OWS)I asked it to get cuter... [1]Prodding it further... Climategate, Frankenfoods, Slacktivism ... also not so inside-jokey nor as cringeworthy IMO.Prodding it for more cutesy more inside-jokey yields a few terms that barely caught on, or didn't characterize the movement or the threat as a whole.[2]Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.