alt Hacker NewsI just don't think we'll be able to agree (and that's okay). I'll just put my thoughts here, not expecting that you'll meet me anywhere.
Human judgement in itself is not uniform or defined enough for it to be useful, but dispersed and more random than just situational. And yes, universal definitions in general are extremely rare outside of a subset of definitions in hard sciences. The only reasonable thing we can do is agree on a definition in a certain context, ie definitions in a scientific paper or in a conversation. But 'I know it when I see it' or some vague idea of human judgement doesn't even work as a definition within a defined context, and therefore doesn't help us find common ground or make a conversation useful. Which is why I characterize it as a thought-terminating cliché.
In a way, this entire back-and-forth is an example of us 'knowing what a thought-terminating cliché is when we see it' which unsurprisingly, to me, is unhelpful.
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I think there's a meaningful difference there: "thought-terminating cliché" specifically means something that causes those who say it (or accept it) to stop thinking there. That's not just something that's up to interpretation: that's something that has actual variation depending on the people involved.
To put it another way, if we posit Person A and Person B, they might both describe "I'll know it when I see it" as a thought-terminating cliché, because they've heard it described as such, and Person A will actually leave it at that, not seeing any reason to discuss the subject further. But Person B does want to continue discussing, and certainly continues thinking about it. Thus, even though they saw the phrase as a thought-terminating cliché, for them, it actually wasn't one.
On the other hand, terms like "robot" and "pornography" really are purely something that's up to interpretation. If I say "I think a light with a motion detector is not a robot", there's no more objective meaning of "robot" that anyone can point to to definitively say I'm wrong.
Common speech is slippery, definitions change over time, and the only way we can define words is to see how people use them. In technical context we do define words so that everybody knows what we are talking about.
A good example is the use of the term AI, and how we use it in CS vs how the general public understand it.