Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#2One thing that irks me quite a bit is when adjacent fields adopt the same acronym for different things
LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#3I enjoyed this article about AFSI.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#4I enjoyed this article about AFSI.
I felt like it was just another WIWA rehash.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#5tl;dr
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#6One thing that irks me quite a bit is when adjacent fields adopt the same acronym for different things LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)
yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.
Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#7I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#8My pet peeve = authors who start using an acronym without ever "introducing" it. Suddenly there is an acronym used throughout an article, and one has to carefully go back and find the phrase to which it refers. Necessitated because the author was too lazy to introduce the acronym in parens after first using the phrase. Not sure how AI does this, but this problem predates AI by quite a bit.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#9I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
Absolutely! I’ll dive into this a bit more in the second section, where even technical acronyms can be considered harmful because they are learned at a surface level and then spread at meme-like speed.
For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#10IFHA