I do think there's some value in being able to tersely express your exact point to a peer.
For example "a random process" could mean "any process in existence" whereas "a stochastic process" clearly states stochastic as being a property of the process.
I however agree that things can sometimes get a bit wrapped up in sounding cool just to sound cool.
Yes, technical people often use shorthand terms that ascribe agency to random or inanimate processes, and I think laypeople take that agency literally more often than we realize.
There isn't a good reason to throw around the term loosely when talking about a specific field where the terms are quite well defined, like the one I gave.
Folks should use the right terms if they genuinely want to communicate ideas.
Right, it’s not termed to be understood from the user perspective, a common trait in naming. It increases the jumble within the pool of next possible word choices, as heat increases Brownian motion. That’s the way I think of it, at least.
It's also a specific choice of label though, and one which in the context of current discourse favors a particular side.
It's like insisting on calling anything physical "atom collections". Yes, we get it, it's true (under a certain interpretation)—but it's clearly pointless to say except as an attempt at devaluing through reduction. (And it takes a particular stance on what it means to "be" something: to say it's literally the truth that anything physical is "just atoms" isn't the only way of looking at it.)
There were things we could've called "statistical word generators" decades ago; insisting on using a term directed at that level of generality implies a belief that nothing significant has happened since. Printing press? Just atoms. Cars? Just atoms. Computers? Just atoms.
a. avoid making certain subsets of people think you're using precise concepts that you aren't.
b. make it easier for people that don't know what entropy even is to understand what this tool does. Disorder is a far more widely understood term in my view.
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you're getting at. I never claimed that you can't use an arbitrary name to convey information. You can call it Classical Mechanics "gleeebnok" and people will understand you long as they can look up "gleeebnok" but that doesn't mean it's not a dumb name.
Why not? Well, simply because I'd prefer to use technical terms as they're widely used and widely understood. If someone wants to argue that the definitions themselves ought to change, then that's a semantic argument that doesn't interest me.
This is a common dynamic in many areas. As applied to programming languages, you can consider it as either the language complexity (learning curve), or terseness of terms. In that context, it also becomes clear what the paper gets from using those terms, more accurate communication of the concepts in question, but to an reduced audience. An extreme example of this is APL. For APL programmers, a show APL program can communicate a concept to other APL programmers which is for the most part illegible to others. If the idea is to communicate to other APL programmers, little explanation might be needed. For you and I, comment explaining the gibberish we're seeing would be appreciated. But if the goal is for other APL programmers to read it (as in a code base of APL), then perhaps that comment is sometimes superfluous.
As a more direct example staying with the theme of computer science but using English communication, in the context of programming I can can use the term isomorphism and the subset of people I'm communicating to (or expecting to) will know what it means, or after looking it up likely quickly understand what I'm communicating. For a novice or non-programmer, that may be significantly less likely. Am I better off replacing the term isomorphism with "running the same code on the client and server" all over the place? It depends on my audience and goals.
So, what's the purpose of this paper? To be widely distributed to the general public, or to be spread between business and economics academics for further research and discussion? I suspect writing your academic papers to the lowest common denominator is a good way to get your ideas dismissed by peers, as it both takes them longer to wade through the extra (unnecessary, for them) words which are also less clear, as an oft-used community term will carry more meaning than is easily expressed by the words you can replace it with in usage in a sentence.
I still feel like it comes with the implication that you're not expected to see this as a normal term; but in this case, its apparently perfectly well-known, just in a particular field that HN doesn't perhaps specialize in.
It would be like adding [sic] to articles about quantum mechanics, using terms that a physicist naturally know, but a programmer wouldn't. And that'd just be weird (or rather, a lot of [sic]'s going around)
It's a term of art. It has a very precisely defined technical meaning that specialists are familiar with and share a common understanding of. Its primary purpose is to permit those educated in the subject to converse clearly and unambiguously with one another in an efficient manner.
It is perhaps not the most reasonable thing to expect specialists conversing with their peers in the argot of their field to reduce all their conversations to the point of intelligibility to the average layman. It's also perhaps not the most reasonable thing to expect all terms of art to be re-named every few decades as language shifts. Never mind the challenges of achieving consensus every time someone wants to rename something.
Oh, it wasn't my intention to criticize anything or anyone in particular with that comment.
I was just pondering that our originally clearly defined terms are rapidly getting used in very confusing manner, which increases the difficulty of a discussion, as participants interpret words very differently.
I dont think that people look up the actual definition of terms in a thesaurus anymore. They hear it in some context and create their own personal definition. It wasn't as obvious before the internet i think, but nowadays everyone is bombarded with technical terms all the time, which likely contributes massively to this increasingly fluid terminology
I think you're right on each count. But I also think that there's a lot of benefit from having a vocabulary - even a goofy one - that allows these things to be broken down and understood. On some level it certainly does remove that je ne sais quoi from the topic, but on the other hand it illuminates it somewhat (so long as the terminology isn't too slanted). Even a mild bias isn't bad, since we naturally adjust for rhetorical tone, and it can add a bit of levity to an otherwise tedious discussion (see Phabricator for a nice case study in that).
At any rate, I really like the idea that there really isn't bad people conspiring but just a badly formed/tuned system. (I'm a process engineer, so I suppose that gives me hope where others wouldn't see any.)
Yes, but it ether should be that way for all or for none of them, not for some of them.)
Logically, they should refer to the same entity. It is "natural" - when people are trying to communicate a concept to one another they assume they are referring to the same concept. Not to an instance of it.)
Of course. But by "process," I think we all understand "defined process." If it's not defined and enforced, it's left to whim and chance. I wouldn't really call that process.
People sometimes forget that words are just useful labels, the ship of Theseus is whatever ship we agree is the ship of Theseus, it was just very handy to make a sound for others to know what ship I'm talking about, but it is not an specific/defined set of atoms, it never was, the same thing happens with a lot (maybe all) concepts such as swimming, or even statistical inferences.
For example "a random process" could mean "any process in existence" whereas "a stochastic process" clearly states stochastic as being a property of the process.
I however agree that things can sometimes get a bit wrapped up in sounding cool just to sound cool.
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