concepts which become part of the community have close analogies that have been better studied in academic literature
If they got into the community from the academic literature, this isn’t reinventing the wheel, right? At worst it’s rebranding the wheel, which feels like a different thing.
For example, is conservation of expected evidence an instance of reinventing the wheel, because this particular name for it is (as far as I know) a LessWrong innovation? I’m sure they (we?) didn’t rediscover the theorem from basic principles.
I suppose you might still regard this as a point of criticism insofar as it creates jargon barriers, or insofar as you draw indirect (and IMO tenuous) inferences about a lack of collaboration with the mainstream (i.e. we can only get away with using different words because people who use the “normal” words don’t talk to us). But I wouldn’t want people drawing from this that LW is unfamiliar with mainstream probability theory.
If they got into the community from the academic literature, this isn’t reinventing the wheel, right? At worst it’s rebranding the wheel, which feels like a different thing.
For example, is conservation of expected evidence an instance of reinventing the wheel, because this particular name for it is (as far as I know) a LessWrong innovation? I’m sure they (we?) didn’t rediscover the theorem from basic principles.
I suppose you might still regard this as a point of criticism insofar as it creates jargon barriers, or insofar as you draw indirect (and IMO tenuous) inferences about a lack of collaboration with the mainstream (i.e. we can only get away with using different words because people who use the “normal” words don’t talk to us). But I wouldn’t want people drawing from this that LW is unfamiliar with mainstream probability theory.