Sometimes there isn't even a word for the wider category. “Pivot” and “jump” are two types of … what? What's the genus? “Change”? Same with “refactor”.
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So in people's minds the concept snaps to a higher level of generality, which is the only place it can fit. “Pivot” and “refactor” both just come to mean “change”.
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Sometimes the concept wasn't very clearly defined in the first place. I blame “agile” and “product-market fit” for this. Then they quickly come to mean whatever anyone wants them to mean (i.e., they mean almost nothing).
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Sadly, I don't know what to do about this. Concepts run away from their inventors and take on a life of their own. It's natural and organic, determined by some laws of memetic evolution no one can directly control.
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Is there any way to protect our technical concepts? Or at least to guide their evolution? What should pioneering thinkers do to communicate their ideas intact to a broad audience? What are successful examples?
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Turned this thread into a blog post:https://jasoncrawford.org/the-dilution-of-precise-concepts …
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Many cynical replies to this, saying people pick up buzzwords to deceive others / sound smart. I'm more charitable / naive—I think many people simply lack cognitive precision in general and dilute concepts without any ill motives. Not sure if that's optimistic or pessimistic…
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Replying to @jasoncrawford
I don’t think there are ill motives either! I think a big motive is the desire to join conversations, which isn’t really malice. But it means that you might stretch the definition of a narrow term so that you can apply it to your own case.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @jasoncrawford
Once people have stretched the term so it’s no longer precise, new entrants may be honestly/innocently mistaken. (I’d heard “disruption” used to mean “change” for years before I read The Innovator’s Dilemma; initially I had no way of knowing it was originally a precise term.)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @jasoncrawford
I think the process of broadening definitions is not just misunderstanding because it happens to words whose meaning *isn’t* intrinsically difficult or specialized: “very”, “really”, “literally”, “unique.”
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You don’t need a rare kind of expertise to comprehend the concepts “the only one of its kind” or “identically equal”. The terms drift because people want to exaggerate, to use superlative language even when it doesn’t exactly apply.
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