6 ms·

Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon. For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment

Truly a miracle it is to witness the birth of new jargon. For academics working on understanding things like societal/economic dynamics, perhaps take a moment to consider that for the work to have any real impact, it needs to be understood by laypeople? Biologists can get away with naming things all sort of nonsense because the everyday person doesnt interact with it, but if you're trying to highlight destructive dynamics in the entrepreneurial sector, saying "this is an example of Veblenian Entrepreneurship!" doesn't communicate anything. Most of the writing that actually influenced the field use terms that are understandable and communicable build on terms already understood by practitioners, like minimum viable product or strategic inflection point. Making an argument with a whole bunch of jargon like "Ideology of Entepreneurialsm" or "Veblenian" just means anyone that wants to engage with the text has to go look up a bunch of random terms to figure out that you're referencing some 1800s era economist that coined the term "conspicuous consumption." It also makes you wonder if this level of being divorced from the actual practice impacts the analysis and if the findings are based on an actual understanding of the field or just an academic bubble. If, as they say at the end of the paper, this should be used as a catalyst to change entrepreneurship education- I wonder if they understand first how many people start companies because they majored in entrepreneurship, and second if they understand just how accessible this terminology and jargon is and if it would be getting in the way of making actual impact on curriculums

deleted 6y ago
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chartpath 6y ago
TBF this is an academic article though. Why should total accessibility of language to non-experts be a goal in that venue exactly? Isn't it reasonable to expect that other educated people will check the citations? Also in this case it looks like the authors are from business schools. Business buzzwords are a well known and common absurdity. On the other hand, I might be freaked out if random names for stuff started coming out of logic or maths circles.
ksdale 6y ago
FWIW, I am only interested in economics as a hobby, and I knew immediately what Veblenian meant. It's a pretty common reference in the field. I think you raise a valid point about the impact of overly academic work, but I also think it's not unreasonable for academics to expect that their primary audience will have a passing familiarity with the major figures in the field.
roosterdawn 6y ago
What you are demonstrating is one of many ironies that one can see in academic writing. Here, the writing criticizes the rise of Veblenian entrepreneurship and the fall of innovation entrepreneurship, but ironically, this kind of a paper could be considered an instance of Veblenian entrepreneurship! Perhaps that could be because Veblenian entrepreneurship, like most entrepreneurship, is made possible through higher margins. I always parade out this 2S Ventures post about the importance of margins [1] because it really drives the point home. On the contrary, "innovation" based businesses require a large variety of environmental factors to succeed, ranging from cultural ones to regulatory and logistic ones. And there is indeed no guarantee that an innovative business is necessarily one with higher gross margins than an incumbent whose products/services it would seek to unseat even if there is societal benefit, so the business may not intrinsically be attractive to investors. So it is with this piece here. Its explanations of new business formation targeted at conspicuous consumption are targeted towards academics concerned with earlier explorations of these areas, rather than practitioners. I think the possibility of it being thought provoking for the first group while common sense for the second group is where the irony comes in -- presumably, it was intended to be the other way around! [1] https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-matter/ https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-...
cat199 6y ago
do you not find it ironic that on a 'hacker entrepreneur' site that has played at least some small part in inspiring the culture of 'untrepreneurship' (if only in a 'copycat' fashion, lest I insult anyone here) that someone from outside the field of economics would complain about the lack of accessability of a formal paper in the field of economics to the 'average', 'casual' entrepreneur? fairly certain this is kind of what they are getting at.. also: 'Ideology of Entepreneurialsm' is about as plain-english as you can get 'Veblenian' / the concept of 'conspicuous consumption' is fairly well known in pop culture, at least among the bourgeois/intellegensia/dropping-the latest-malcom-gladwell-or-thinker-du-jour-theory-over-cocktails set; i personally have encountered it many times in casual reading (e.g. time, economist, new yorker sorts of publications) and it was presented 2-3 times to me in various 101-level academic courses
notahacker 6y ago
It's really no more obtuse than people trying to change the world of entrepreneurship by writing about getting 'ramen-profitable' or 'fuck you money' or 'bikeshedding'. Someone writing Medium blogs about startups probably expects the target audience to have at least a passing familiarity with what comparing an approach to Steve Blank might imply, and academic business schools referencing Veblen aren't very different.
deleted 6y ago
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neilk 6y ago
Perhaps you are not in the intended audience? This is a social science paper. I know a little bit about economics and social science, and for me the phrase "Veblenian Entrepreneur" was immediately meaningful and helpful. It gives me a theoretical frame for understanding a whole constellation of behaviors I've personally observed, and the incentives that drive them. What I think this paper contributes is the idea of the entrepreneurial industry itself; that the low quality of ventures isn't a bug, but a feature. It's an integrated system to provide necessarily expensive social and signalling needs. Some famous investors have questioned universities for the same reasons. The irony is that it might also be happening to technology ventures too.
- jostmey 6y ago
  Please stop throwing around the word "science" here. I see no science in this whatsoever. Science is formula for validating information requiring experiments and controls, which this does not have. Science falls within the domain of research, but not all research uses science
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They lead nowhere new or interesting. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Plenty of past explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20ideolog&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
kbenson 6y ago
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.
WJW 6y ago
Complaining about jargon in a publication for professionals is like complaining you don't know who this Torvalds guy is during a discussion on the linux kernel dev mailing list. It's not like Veblen is an obscure figure nobody has heard of in the field of economics.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  The complaint is about the entire field. There's a reason pop psych is separate from "real" psych - if fields don't learn how to communicate to the population at large and just keep research within ivory towers, then you'll just end up with increasing disconnect with the rest of the world while the narrative is increasingly controlled by unqualified but charismatic "thought leaders." This is a publication for academics, but not for all professionals, since "professionals" include a lot of practitioners that never stepped foot in an econ class but are still immensely powerful int he entrepreneurial environment. There's an entire set of stakeholders left out.
nabla9 6y ago
I find it sad that after people have learned to read, they think they are 100% literate, or that looking up words from dictionary is considered a bad thing. Demanding that everything should be written in basic reading level is celebrating low literacy and ignorance. I'm not an economist or social scientist but I understood what Veblenian means from Veblen goods and conspicuous consumption seemed familiar so I looked it up.
dang 6y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Reflexive, generic comments are much more boring to read than they are to write, and they take threads in uninteresting directions. With a submission like this, if you don't find something to engage with in the article, there are lots of other things to read on HN's front page.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  I didnt mean this as a shallow dismissal. I tried to write examples into the comment and discuss how the way the article was framed is counterproductive to it's own stated goals in its conclusion paragraph of generating change in how entrepreneurship is taught. I apologize if it came across as shallow, but I spent time trying to make it substantive by including counterexamples etc.
  - dang 6y ago
    I hear you, and I know it stings to get a moderation reply like that, so I hope you won't take it personally or feel discouraged. I'm not really seeing other examples in the comment. In any case, the main problem is that its core point is a misunderstanding. As other users have pointed out, the term "Veblenian entrepreneurship" means a lot: it instantly communicates the idea of entrepreneurship as a status signal, rather than for an economically productive purpose. In fact, if there's a problem with the term, it might be exactly the opposite: it already communicates so much that the mind could start to assume that it's a thing, and then find rationalizations for believing it. That's the reason I called the comment a shallow dismissal: it dismissed an entire field based on a misreading. Also, there was snark at the beginning. By the way, the problem with such comments is not that they're so bad in themselves—it's that threads are sensitive to initial conditions and they tend to choke out better, more specific discussion. This has something to do with the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflective%20reflex&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
groby_b 6y ago
You know that you're in essence saying "While I'm uneducated in the field, I demand all dialogue happens at my level", right? This is not how science works. Never has, never will. Like any specialty, it will - inevitably - develop its own jargon. Not as gatekeeping, but because shorthand matters for efficient communication. If you'd like to understand topics at a more layperson level, science papers are not what you want to read. You want to look to science communicators, who do the work of breaking it down, dejargonizing, and making it understandable for a wider audience. Demanding science is conducted at the lowest common denominator level makes science impossible.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chartpath 6y ago

TBF this is an academic article though. Why should total accessibility of language to non-experts be a goal in that venue exactly? Isn't it reasonable to expect that other educated people will check the citations? Also in this case it looks like the authors are from business schools. Business buzzwords are a well known and common absurdity. On the other hand, I might be freaked out if random names for stuff started coming out of logic or maths circles.

ksdale 6y ago

FWIW, I am only interested in economics as a hobby, and I knew immediately what Veblenian meant. It's a pretty common reference in the field. I think you raise a valid point about the impact of overly academic work, but I also think it's not unreasonable for academics to expect that their primary audience will have a passing familiarity with the major figures in the field.

roosterdawn 6y ago

What you are demonstrating is one of many ironies that one can see in academic writing. Here, the writing criticizes the rise of Veblenian entrepreneurship and the fall of innovation entrepreneurship, but ironically, this kind of a paper could be considered an instance of Veblenian entrepreneurship! Perhaps that could be because Veblenian entrepreneurship, like most entrepreneurship, is made possible through higher margins. I always parade out this 2S Ventures post about the importance of margins [1] because it really drives the point home. On the contrary, "innovation" based businesses require a large variety of environmental factors to succeed, ranging from cultural ones to regulatory and logistic ones. And there is indeed no guarantee that an innovative business is necessarily one with higher gross margins than an incumbent whose products/services it would seek to unseat even if there is societal benefit, so the business may not intrinsically be attractive to investors. So it is with this piece here. Its explanations of new business formation targeted at conspicuous consumption are targeted towards academics concerned with earlier explorations of these areas, rather than practitioners. I think the possibility of it being thought provoking for the first group while common sense for the second group is where the irony comes in -- presumably, it was intended to be the other way around! [1] https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-matter/ https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-...

cat199 6y ago

do you not find it ironic that on a 'hacker entrepreneur' site that has played at least some small part in inspiring the culture of 'untrepreneurship' (if only in a 'copycat' fashion, lest I insult anyone here) that someone from outside the field of economics would complain about the lack of accessability of a formal paper in the field of economics to the 'average', 'casual' entrepreneur? fairly certain this is kind of what they are getting at.. also: 'Ideology of Entepreneurialsm' is about as plain-english as you can get 'Veblenian' / the concept of 'conspicuous consumption' is fairly well known in pop culture, at least among the bourgeois/intellegensia/dropping-the latest-malcom-gladwell-or-thinker-du-jour-theory-over-cocktails set; i personally have encountered it many times in casual reading (e.g. time, economist, new yorker sorts of publications) and it was presented 2-3 times to me in various 101-level academic courses

notahacker 6y ago

It's really no more obtuse than people trying to change the world of entrepreneurship by writing about getting 'ramen-profitable' or 'fuck you money' or 'bikeshedding'. Someone writing Medium blogs about startups probably expects the target audience to have at least a passing familiarity with what comparing an approach to Steve Blank might imply, and academic business schools referencing Veblen aren't very different.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

neilk 6y ago

Perhaps you are not in the intended audience? This is a social science paper. I know a little bit about economics and social science, and for me the phrase "Veblenian Entrepreneur" was immediately meaningful and helpful. It gives me a theoretical frame for understanding a whole constellation of behaviors I've personally observed, and the incentives that drive them. What I think this paper contributes is the idea of the entrepreneurial industry itself; that the low quality of ventures isn't a bug, but a feature. It's an integrated system to provide necessarily expensive social and signalling needs. Some famous investors have questioned universities for the same reasons. The irony is that it might also be happening to technology ventures too.

jostmey 6y ago
Please stop throwing around the word "science" here. I see no science in this whatsoever. Science is formula for validating information requiring experiments and controls, which this does not have. Science falls within the domain of research, but not all research uses science
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They lead nowhere new or interesting. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Plenty of past explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20ideolog&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

kbenson 6y ago

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.

WJW 6y ago

Complaining about jargon in a publication for professionals is like complaining you don't know who this Torvalds guy is during a discussion on the linux kernel dev mailing list. It's not like Veblen is an obscure figure nobody has heard of in the field of economics.

vikramkr 6y ago
The complaint is about the entire field. There's a reason pop psych is separate from "real" psych - if fields don't learn how to communicate to the population at large and just keep research within ivory towers, then you'll just end up with increasing disconnect with the rest of the world while the narrative is increasingly controlled by unqualified but charismatic "thought leaders." This is a publication for academics, but not for all professionals, since "professionals" include a lot of practitioners that never stepped foot in an econ class but are still immensely powerful int he entrepreneurial environment. There's an entire set of stakeholders left out.

nabla9 6y ago

I find it sad that after people have learned to read, they think they are 100% literate, or that looking up words from dictionary is considered a bad thing. Demanding that everything should be written in basic reading level is celebrating low literacy and ignorance. I'm not an economist or social scientist but I understood what Veblenian means from Veblen goods and conspicuous consumption seemed familiar so I looked it up.

dang 6y ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Reflexive, generic comments are much more boring to read than they are to write, and they take threads in uninteresting directions. With a submission like this, if you don't find something to engage with in the article, there are lots of other things to read on HN's front page.

vikramkr 6y ago
I didnt mean this as a shallow dismissal. I tried to write examples into the comment and discuss how the way the article was framed is counterproductive to it's own stated goals in its conclusion paragraph of generating change in how entrepreneurship is taught. I apologize if it came across as shallow, but I spent time trying to make it substantive by including counterexamples etc.
- dang 6y ago
  I hear you, and I know it stings to get a moderation reply like that, so I hope you won't take it personally or feel discouraged. I'm not really seeing other examples in the comment. In any case, the main problem is that its core point is a misunderstanding. As other users have pointed out, the term "Veblenian entrepreneurship" means a lot: it instantly communicates the idea of entrepreneurship as a status signal, rather than for an economically productive purpose. In fact, if there's a problem with the term, it might be exactly the opposite: it already communicates so much that the mind could start to assume that it's a thing, and then find rationalizations for believing it. That's the reason I called the comment a shallow dismissal: it dismissed an entire field based on a misreading. Also, there was snark at the beginning. By the way, the problem with such comments is not that they're so bad in themselves—it's that threads are sensitive to initial conditions and they tend to choke out better, more specific discussion. This has something to do with the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflective%20reflex&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

groby_b 6y ago

You know that you're in essence saying "While I'm uneducated in the field, I demand all dialogue happens at my level", right? This is not how science works. Never has, never will. Like any specialty, it will - inevitably - develop its own jargon. Not as gatekeeping, but because shorthand matters for efficient communication. If you'd like to understand topics at a more layperson level, science papers are not what you want to read. You want to look to science communicators, who do the work of breaking it down, dejargonizing, and making it understandable for a wider audience. Demanding science is conducted at the lowest common denominator level makes science impossible.