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I'm not sure how you can "safely say ... [he] knows precisely what he's talking about" while admitting "not knowing the meaning." I think perceiving it as "bree
by _dps 15y ago
I'm not sure how you can "safely say ... [he] knows precisely what he's talking about" while admitting "not knowing the meaning." I think perceiving it as "breeding confidence" is precisely the reason why many business situations where experts' actions must be managed/approved by non-experts result in a flood of impressive-sounding jargon.
The deluge of specificity creates a posture of expertise; however,without knowing what the specifics mean you can't possibly evaluate it for truth. There are many equally impressively structured but semantically ridiculous statements, such as "We host our servers on NLTK, serving up EC2 to a browser frontend running varnish and memcached."
- rhizome 15y agoIt's almost a shibboleth, these reverse abstractions into understandable English. The more I hear someone jargon it up, the more I think they don't understand what they're talking about. "I like big data!"
- alexqgb 15y agoIt's more subtle than that. Looking past the technical terms, the first formulation is very distilled, and cites a specific action. It's an elegant expression. The second one uses fluffery like "performed" instead of "did". And that's what sets off the BS detector.
- doktrin 15y agoI think you missed the point. Why do you perceive statement #1 to be factual? If you have no domain expertise, you have no way to evaluate it. _DPS's example sounds -identical- to someone without domain knowledge, and yet is comically absurd.
- Dylan16807 15y agoBut that example goes well beyond meaningless buzzword boasting into flat-out lying. This is a bit of a different problem and it's a lot easier to fact check factual statements, with or without domain knowledge.