The squirrel lay there on its back, quivering.

I knew it was totally screwed. Its back was probably broken, but it was clearly still alive.

“Fuck,” I thought to myself. “Look at how much it’s suffering. Should I kill it to put it out of its misery?”

I stood there pondering the question, trying to decide if the ethical thing to do was to kill it.

It then suddenly flipped over, ran through a hole in a fence, and climbed up a tree.

That was a great reminder of why one should set the bar extremely high for harming another creature “for a greater good.” It’s disturbing to me to consider the possibility I could have killed that squirrel in a foolish attempt to prevent its suffering.

It’s also a reminder that I don’t know shit about squirrels.

If you’re wondering how a squirrel could be okay after such a drop, a quick google search suggests it’s due to their high floofiness to mass ratio, plus their amazing falling instincts (they position their body and tail so as to increase drag).

But size is also a surprisingly important factor when it comes to falls. The smaller you are, the lower your kinetic energy is when you hit the ground, and the greater your surface area is relative to your mass, which means that air resistance has more effect. If dropped from a high place, an ant lands gracefully on the ground, whereas a whale practically explodes.

So if you ever fall from the top of a tall tree, I’d recommend being an ant or at least a squirrel, and definitely not a whale.

This was first written on November 16, 2022, and first appeared on this site on November 18, 2022.

Can a chosen definition be “wrong”? No. If you choose a definition, then you can define a sound or series of characters to mean whatever you want them to mean. For instance, if you wanted, you could declare that whenever you say “phloop,” you mean one of those little paper umbrellas that are sometimes found in Piña coladas. That would be weird, but it wouldn’t be “wrong.” But we suggest that there are at least seven ways a definition can be “lousy.” 

By understanding what makes a good definition and what makes a lousy one, you can better formulate your ideas, and you can better spot mistakes in other people’s arguments. For instance, you might be in a situation where you’re trying to define the essence of an idea you came up with or characterize the unique career role that you’ve designed for yourself. Alternatively, you might be struggling to understand a definition that someone else is using, and you want to diagnose why exactly you’re finding it confusing. The words we use are crucial to the success of the interactions we have, and it is very handy to be able to pinpoint when a particular word is making a conversation more confusing than it needs to be. So, here are the things that we think make for lousy definitions! 

1. Miscommunication

If you decide the word “dog” refers to cats, people are going to be very confused.

Similarly, if you’re talking to someone who uses the word “racism” to mean X (say, “an explicitly held and endorsed belief that some racial groups are inferior to others”), and you use it to mean Y (say, “any form of negative generalization or attitude to a racial group, whether it’s implicit or explicit”), your conversation is probably not going to go as well as you would like until you identify that difference in usage. For these reasons, good definitions shouldn’t reuse terms that people are already familiar with or have multiple meanings associated with them. A good way to avoid the latter is to clarify upfront what you mean when you’re using a particular definition if the other person might not know what you mean when using that word.

2. Irrelevance

If you define a “dooooog” to be a dog with more than five legs, you’re not going to find it to be useful for much of anything. Dogs like that probably do exist, but they are not something almost anyone ever needs to refer to. We want our definitions to aim toward the things we are likely to want to reference.

For instance, someone bothered to define the word “Rasceta” to mean the crease commonly found going across a person’s wrist. Presumably, there is some subculture where that is a useful word, but very few people will ever need to know that definition. 

3. Unnaturalness

If you define “dogephant” to include all dogs smaller than 10 pounds AND all elephants more than 8000 pounds, you have not “carved reality at the joints.” Because of mixing things that aren’t clearly alike, using this definition makes communicating more muddled than it needs to be.

Another instance of this phenomenon is our use of the word “selfish.” Sometimes people define the word “selfish” in such a way that it includes both “stealing money from someone” and “sacrificing your own life to save the life of ten others because you feel such a strong emotion of compassion for those people;” it’s about doing things that make you feel “good.” An alternate reading of “selfish” might be much more negative: it’s about taking actions which benefit you at the cost of other peoples’ wellbeing.

4. Opinionatedness

If you define “dogmor” to be “those dog-loving morons who somehow are convinced that dogs are better than cats,” then the definition imports both a debatable opinion and an emotional slant into its meaning, causing usage of this word to be infected with either or both of these things.

For example, the word “sissy” not only suggests that someone — usually a boy or man — embodies feminine qualities but carries with it a negative, insulting connotation. If your aim is to make certain people feel bad, then this might be a good strategy to take, though you might be being a jerk, and that approach doesn’t make for clear, unbiased communication.

5. Ambiguity

If by “dogdog” you mean anything that a dog can like, then your word is (1) hard to use and (2) hard to think about; dogs like a large range of things, and individual dogs also have distinct preferences!

The word “problematic” (when used without clarification) is another (problematic) example of a definition: the problem being referred to could be of many different types and could range from quite objective to just the idiosyncratic, subjective opinion of the writer.

6. Inefficiency 

If you define “doglegs” to be anything with the legs of a dog, and “dogface” to be anything with the face of a dog, etc., then you can talk about walking your dog by saying, “I just got back from walking a creature with doglegs, dogface, dogfur, dogheart, …” But this is a ridiculously inefficient way to talk about your dog! Some definitions make communication substantially more efficient since they compress lots of information you commonly want to express into a small package.

Consider a different instance of this: it is possible to talk about calculus without having a word that means “the derivative” (e.g., by always referring to “limits of functions”), but this is going to be a painful and inefficient way to think and communicate. The word derivative makes ideas in calculus much easier to talk about. 

7. Lack of precision

If you define “floofster” to be any animal with fur, then you will not be communicating very precisely when you say, “I pet my floofster this morning.” You may be saying something true (and rather adorable), but someone will not know if you were petting a dog, a cat, or something more exotic like a lizard wearing a fur coat! Ideally, we want our definitions to focus on just those items or concepts we are trying to communicate.

Similarly, if you say to your friend, “I’m feeling bad,” the ambiguity of the word “bad” makes it harder for them to understand what you’re going through. If you say, “I have a headache,” then it will be easier for your friend to help you. Even better, if true, would be to say, “I have a migraine.” 

So, no chosen definition can be “wrong,” but plenty of definitions are “lousy.” To prevent lousy definitions, you should choose definitions that:

(1) allow clear communication, 

(2) refer specifically to the things of interest, 

(3) carve reality at the joints, 

(4) don’t sneak in debatable opinions/slants, 

(5) are relatively unambiguous, 

(6) express more information in fewer words, and 

(7) allow us to be more exact and specific with our words. 

We hope you found this helpful!

This piece first appeared on the Clearer Thinking blog on March 2, 2021, and was published on this site on December 16, 2022.

Usually, these involve assuming that someone did something that you don’t like on purpose when it would be more accurate to say they did the thing automatically (and they may need significant practice to change that automatic behavior). Of course, it’s still up to that person (with your help, ideally) to recognize the mistake and work on improving it.

What makes this all the more tricky is that just caring a lot or being motivated to be a better person/friend/partner, or deeply valuing the relationship at stake, often isn’t enough to cause the problem to go away on its own. What the offender really may need is to consciously start using specific strategies that are tuned to that particular kind of automatic cognitive mistake, so that they can successfully adjust a subconscious tendency or behavior.

It, of course, COULD be that the person doesn’t care about you, or doesn’t want to make an effort to improve for you, but the problem is that even if the person really does care and feels motivated to improve they may need explicit strategies to help them do so (and continuing to make certain classes of mistakes is not necessarily a strong indicator that they don’t care).

Some examples:

(1) Forgetting Important Things
e.g., Your friend forgot that you are vegetarian and tried to serve you meat.
e.g., Your friend forgot that important story you told them about a critical moment in your childhood.
e.g., Your partner forgot that today is your anniversary.

If a person forgets something that was important to you, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that they didn’t really care about that thing or don’t really value you. But the human brain is such that we forget nearly everything. It can take purposeful work to get something to stay in memory; otherwise, it’s a crapshoot. To make matters worse, people’s natural tendency to remember different types of information varies a lot, so people who naturally have better memories around a particular type of information may think that those with worse memories just don’t care, and those with worse memories can feel like they are unfairly being held responsible for transgressions that they don’t remember ever occurring (or that they don’t know how to get themselves to remember).

strategies: To improve memory it can really help to start using conscious encoding strategies (e.g., repeating something to yourself multiple times on purpose, writing the thing down so you can look it up when needed, putting it in your calendar to remind you of it when you will need it, using visualization techniques to leverage the strong visual memory system in even non-visual memory tasks, using spaced repetition systems, etc.)

(2) Annoying Routine Behaviors
e.g., Your friend talks too much when you’re together instead of asking you questions.
e.g., Your friend laughs sometimes when you say something that is meant to be serious.
e.g., Your partner keeps leaving their pants on the floor instead of in the hamper.

If you know that a person knows you don’t like it when they do a certain behavior, yet they keep doing the behavior, it can be very natural to assume the other person has made a choice to annoy or hurt you. But grooves in the mind really occur in a meaningful sense, and when someone has done a certain set of behaviors in reaction to a certain set of stimuli for a long time, it can take a lot of work to stop. Even if they manage to suppress the behavior some of the time, it can then reoccur as soon as they have less willpower or are distracted.

strategies: To improve undesirable habits it helps to have regular, fast and accurate feedback whenever we slip up (e.g., the other person nicely reminding us each time we do the thing wrong) and to practice replacing these negative habits with more positive behaviors (whenever the stimulus that typically precedes the negative habit occurs, we consciously do some different thing instead; that we’ve chosen in advance).

(3) Avoiding Important Topics or Situations
e.g., Your friend seems anxious about something, but they say it’s nothing when you ask.
e.g., Your partner doesn’t want to go out dancing together.
e.g., Your partner doesn’t proactively bring it up when they are upset about something in your relationship.
If a person avoids a situation that is meaningful (e.g., attending a certain event or being proactive about having a certain difficult conversation), it’s again easy to assume they don’t value that thing or don’t value you. On the other hand, if the other person has high levels of anxiety, it’s worth noting that avoidance is a very common symptom of anxiety and in fact the more the person cares about that thing, the more anxious they may feel about it (hence valuing the thing a lot may make them feel less capable of being able to handle doing it).

strategies: To improve anxious avoidance it can really help to undergo Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with a therapist, or to use self-guided exposure therapy with a “fear hierarchy” where we practice facing fears of increasing intensity, or to use self-administered rejection therapy, or to learn coping techniques like progressive muscle relaxation and diaphragmatic breathing, or to take anti-depressants which help some people who have high anxiety.

(4) Not Preempting Your Needs
e.g., You want your friend to validate how you feel when you’re upset, but instead, they tell you not to worry about what’s bothering you.
e.g., You want your partner to make more time for you on the weekend.
e.g., You want your friend to ask you about the important things going on in your life.
If a person doesn’t preempt your needs when you really want them to, or when think they should be able to, it is easy to feel frustrated or angry or at least let down due to them not being more “thoughtful.” But people’s minds (and needs) can be very different from each other, and the more different two minds are, the harder it is for one to predict or preempt the needs of another. For instance, if when you are sad, you really like it if people do X, but when your friend is sad, they hate it when people do X, you are very likely to keep making the error of doing X when your friend is sad. And even if the friend tells you they don’t like X and want Y, you may struggle to do Y, or be very bad at it at first, because it feels to your brain like the wrong thing to do in the situation (and your brain’s simulation of their brain, in fact, still says that it is bad).

strategies: To improve it can help a lot to ask others to spell out their needs for you as explicitly as they are able and willing to do (ideally not just what they desire from you, but also why they desire it), since if your needs are different from theirs, or your brain works differently from theirs, you may do a bad job of guessing their needs. And without knowing the “why” behind the needs they do express, you may have trouble generalizing specific instances of what they want to other new cases that you haven’t seen before.

(5) Not Reacting To Your Emotions
e.g., Your are angry at your friend and are showing it blatantly, but they don’t address it or apologize.
e.g., You feel sad, but your partner doesn’t seem to notice.
e.g., You tell your friend you had a terrible day, and they only minimally respond.

If a person doesn’t respond to the emotions we feel, it can be frustrating or saddening or make us think they don’t care about us. The trouble is that people differ in (a) how good they are at reading the emotions of others (e.g., they may literally not have noticed your emotion because they are bad at reading emotions generally, or noticed that something was off but not been able to pinpoint what emotion you were experiencing), (b) how savvy they are at giving the right response to the emotions of other people (e.g., they may have noticed we were experiencing a certain emotion but not known the right way to respond and so didn’t react at all) and (c) how much they assume others want them to respond to their emotions (e.g., they may have noticed your emotion but assumed you wouldn’t want them to do something that would call attention to it or make it obvious that they identified it).

strategies: We can improve by practicing reading emotions generally (e.g., emotion recognition training online that Ekman offers), and by asking people how they’d prefer we respond when they’re feeling different emotions (e.g., some people want a hug when they are sad without talking about it too much, others want us to be upbeat; still others want us to ask why they are sad and validate their explanation).

(6) Reacting Emotionally In Ways That Bother You
e.g., You are telling your partner about something they do that bothers you, and they have an angry response.
e.g., You tell your friend about something bad that happened to you that you want to talk to them about, but they become sad and redirect the conversation to a problem they are having instead.
e.g., You tell a friend that they did something you didn’t like and they suddenly become very upset.

If there is a situation where a friend or partner has an emotional response that seems to you to be unfair, unjustified, inappropriate or insulting, it’s only natural that you may feel bothered by it. But be careful about holding someone’s automatic emotional response against them too much, since there is a good chance they don’t have control of it, and couldn’t change it easily if they wanted to. Automatic emotional responses can be changed, but generally, it takes a lot of work, and not everyone knows how to do it. Furthermore, emotional responses often happen so fast that we don’t have time to stop them in real-time before the emotion is out there. What is fairer to hold a person responsible for, is how they respond once their initial emotional response has occurred (rather than for what that initial emotional response is). The other issue is that the fact that the person had an emotional response that caught you off guard means there is probably something you can learn about them (and perhaps that they can learn about themselves), and so rather than blaming them for having this reaction it can be a lot healthier to discuss it while trying to avoid judging them for it.

strategies: To change an emotional response you have that seems destructive, try to actively reframe that kind of situation in a manner that evokes the sort of emotional response that you think is ideal, or to increase your control over emotional responses that have just occurred, consider learning techniques from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or learning to excuse yourself momentarily when you feel an emotion coming on that would be destructive in the given context.