My favorite notion of the week: complaining this morning about grifters “doing violence to concepts.” How evocative! He meant it negatively, but ofc sometimes concepts must be violently recast!
(Thanks to @mariodgabriele for hosting—I think there’ll be a recording?)
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When is it best to “do violence to concepts” vs. defining new concepts? I guess that’s one of the core tactical question of culture wars?
I struggle with this a lot with gamification. I’m trying to distinguish myself from normal gamification but people know what gamification is so I don’t think I can get away with a new word. I’m attacking the concept of gamification as people know it.
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At the same time, the least violent approach I can think of is calling points, badges, and leaderboards the “Foursquare genre” and asking what other genres might exist.
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There's a decent amount written about this in philosophy's conceptual engineering / conceptual amelioration literature.
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"Conceptual engineering"!!! Do you have any recommended references?
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Where would you want to do violence to a concept rather than calmly characterizing + contextualizing, identifying implications, architecting an array of alternatives + epistemic equilibria... ?