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> Because that is the commonly understood definition? It didn't come from general use by the population. At some point academia decided to use a definition th
by sheepmullet 8y ago
> Because that is the commonly understood definition?
It didn't come from general use by the population.
At some point academia decided to use a definition that deviated from the mainstream.
Certain fields of academia have a long history of doing this and it has led to millions of average people being mis-informed.
> As lay people we do get confused when we don't understand those terms.
Yes even the well educated hn reader gets confused - and so how do we fix this?
Either we have to fix academia or we have to fix reporting on academia.
Especially because the majority of the population does not have the education or time necessary to properly investigate for themselves.
Propaganda by any other name...
- ksk 8y agoI've found that the average hn reader vastly overstretches their expertise. Its unfair to expect programmers to be subject matter experts in anything other than their own domain. I take most comments here on politics/science/economics/etc with a bit of humor. In this case, I don't think it's THAT complicated to explain what the term means to the average person. The definition of terms can sometimes be intuited, but intuition can be wrong and lay people should not necessarily be the arbiters of definitions of terms. My co-worker refers to their hard disk storage space as "computer RAM". We know what they meant as opposed to what they said and can work around it.