Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language
by wpietri on Saturday May 30, 2020 @09:26AM
(#23361003)
I agree we should be more positive, but I think it's a mistake to think that if we understand enough, we stop calling things bullshit. I think that there are two common meanings of the term that are analytically useful.
One is Frankfurt's, as explained in his book On Bullshit [1]. His definition is "speech intended to persuade without regard for the truth". There's a lot of this in tech. Ego-driven posturing. Blind ideology. And a bunch more that comes from American business culture, where we have a special legal category for bullshit so obvious that it legally doesn't even count as false. [2]
The other is what Lean process experts call Muda [3]. It can be translated as: "futility; uselessness; wastefulness". But bullshit is often a perfectly good translation. As the original article points out, there can be an enormous amount of wasted effort coming up to speed, like "the footguns that will cost me a day to debug". Just yesterday I spent a day on what turned out to be a bug from 2015 that hundreds of people have voted on, but the tool maintainers have refused to solve because it doesn't fit with their initially chosen architecture. I am comfortable calling that bullshit.
I also think your "I don't have to spend time on it" bit is, well, let's gently call it "erroneous". Languages aren't like books, where a reader's choices are infinite. There are a finite number of languages popular enough for practical use, and every one of them was built with the express intention of having a lot of people use it. Every one of them has people who make their living from maintaining it, and many are purely corporate profit-driven considerations. When people set out to insert themselves into other people's lives, there's an inherent level of responsibility there. It shouldn't be handwaved away.
One is Frankfurt's, as explained in his book On Bullshit [1]. His definition is "speech intended to persuade without regard for the truth". There's a lot of this in tech. Ego-driven posturing. Blind ideology. And a bunch more that comes from American business culture, where we have a special legal category for bullshit so obvious that it legally doesn't even count as false. [2]
The other is what Lean process experts call Muda [3]. It can be translated as: "futility; uselessness; wastefulness". But bullshit is often a perfectly good translation. As the original article points out, there can be an enormous amount of wasted effort coming up to speed, like "the footguns that will cost me a day to debug". Just yesterday I spent a day on what turned out to be a bug from 2015 that hundreds of people have voted on, but the tool maintainers have refused to solve because it doesn't fit with their initially chosen architecture. I am comfortable calling that bullshit.
I also think your "I don't have to spend time on it" bit is, well, let's gently call it "erroneous". Languages aren't like books, where a reader's choices are infinite. There are a finite number of languages popular enough for practical use, and every one of them was built with the express intention of having a lot of people use it. Every one of them has people who make their living from maintaining it, and many are purely corporate profit-driven considerations. When people set out to insert themselves into other people's lives, there's an inherent level of responsibility there. It shouldn't be handwaved away.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term)