site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4372 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why do people love to use terms like "orders of magnitude" and "exponentially" these days, even when they don't apply?

The misuse of "exponentially" in particular infuriates me. I can't count the number of times I see "'exponentially' large" as if it just means the same as "really" instead of referring to specific functional relation. It's as nonsensical as saying "linearly large" and immediately indicates to me that I should probably disregard anything else said by the writer.

STEM geeks love to use those terms when they do apply, and other people learn words by exposure without necessarily learning them correctly by exposure. You can't infer "'exponential' is for when a thing is growing proportionally to it's present amount" as easily as you can misinfer "'exponential' is for when a thing is growing and it's super duper serious".

(aside: the pedantic geek in me wants to point out that "orders of magnitude" is always applicable when comparing two positive numbers in the same units; it's just not the scaling you'd go to right away when the number of orders is less than 2...)

Of course, many STEM geeks suffer from the same failure, just not with the same words. I suspect any humanities geek could properly explain how "to 'utilize' is to use a thing for something other than its intended purpose" or "to 'utilize' is to make use of a thing that would not have previously been useful" or some such subtlety of meaning that I only discovered in late adulthood, whereas grep tells me that I've written multiple papers and proposals and a dissertation during the period when I'd misinferred that "to 'utilize' is to use a thing and it's super duper serious".

Can you do "leverage" as well? It also now seems to mean "use a thing and it's super duper serious".

"Leverage" seems like a straightforward metaphor to me: "to use a thing to obtain an effect disproportionate to the input effort" (yes, yes, work is conserved; in this metaphor effort is force).

But often someone using that metaphor correctly has reason to be proud, so I can see how the popular meaning might indeed have shifted to "and we’re damn clever for having done so."

I think what it means now is “we’ve used a thing and we’re damn clever for having done so.”

Science-like, math adjacent techno-babble is currently in vogue. I have the suspicion that you may have seen this to some extent during the Moon race in the 1960s.

I distinctly remember some horrible fluff piece by, I think, Business Insider (which is the smoothest brain "professional" publication on earth) fawning over Elon Musk and his "management technique known as 'First Principles'"

It gets more cringe when you have two worlds intersect. I have a limited background in defense contracting and there's now a bunch of silicon valley types flooding into that market. I keep hearing dudes who have zero military experience talking about "accelerating the killchain." It makes me laugh, cry, and drink.

If you enjoy being pedantic, you can simply reply, "what's the exponent?".

"-0.69"

That was the best SIGBOVIK keynote.

Because they make things sound big while making the speaker sound smart.

A recent headline here was:

Government delayed [COVID] lockdowns even though it knew the virus was spreading "exponentially"

No shit, that's what viruses do. What's the doubling time? What are the current conditions? What do those data points say about the near-term future?

It's the upper class equivalent to Trump's "yuge!" or "bigly!"/"big league!"

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats