Eliezer Yudkowsky gets at the thing that probably bothers me the most about almost all public discourse these days on politics, religion, philosophy, and so on.

You get a very different picture of what people agree or disagree about, depending on whether you take a label’s-eye-view (Albert says “sound” and Barry says “not sound”, so they must disagree) or taking the test’s-eye-view (Albert’s membership test is acoustic vibrations, Barry’s is auditory experience).

More often than not, I get quickly frustrated with how people resort to ambiguous and undefined words in an attempt to argue their point: “socialism”, “conservative”, “racist”, and so on.¹ It leads to unproductive arguments, in that people tend to be talking past each other and can’t even figure out what they agree on. Much less have a chance at convincing anyone to think differently about a topic.

To be fair, the actual process of tabooing your words during an argument is difficult, as all parties need to agree to do it, and it can be rather time consuming.² But the actual process of doing it to ones own beliefs is, I think productive.