some of my favorite forum communities heavily rely on acronyms. but they also have a maintained gossary that introduces all the community/industry-specific acronyms. Acronyms help boost the density of the information conveyed
Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
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Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#12My 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.
YGTR!
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#13I 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. this is an illusion our mind believes.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#14My company has a strict NTLA policy.
That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms
Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#15some of my favorite forum communities heavily rely on acronyms. but they also have a maintained gossary that introduces all the community/industry-specific acronyms. Acronyms help boost the density of the information conveyed
It's also cheap shibboleth for communities - if you talk like we talk then you're one of us
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#16One 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)
That's why it's important to only use acronyms in their context, or provide the context when using them. And for goodness sake, expand them on the first use if you're audience is not already familiar with them! (and really, even if they are, it's just polite)
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#17My company has a strict NTLA policy. That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)
That seems worse to me.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#18Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#19I agree that acronyms can be overused, especially in marketing.
However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protocol" instead of http. And imagine if every url looked like "hypertext-transfer-protocol://world-wide-web.example.commercial/index.hypertext-text-markup-language". And if it had been given some other name, say "hyperprot" would that be any more meaningful than http?
Re: acronyms in English vs spanish.
I wonder if this is related to how human communication has a constant rate of information transfer. From what I understand, spanish is spoken faster, (more syllables per second) but has less information per syllable. One way that english is able to convey more information with less syllables is the use of acronyms and other abbreviations. And this is especially true for professional jargon that you use a lot to speak with colleagues at your job.
> You don’t see Kant writing TCI instead of “The Categorical Imperative” or Rousseau writing TSC instead of “The Social Contract”. You usually see the creation of concepts (Biopolitics by Foucault, Zeitgeist by Herder, Orientalism by Said) or the use of nominalization.
I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms. Maybe the name gives you a vague idea of what they refer to, but like many acronyms they are labels for complex ideas that you can't really understand just by knowing what it is called. And these terms can be, and are used for "in-group signalling" in much the same way as acronyms.
Finally, tech is not at all unique in its abundant use of acronyms. I don't know about in other languages but at least in English, Math, Physics, and astronomy also make heavy use of acronyms (ODE, PDE, QED, LCD, AGN, LASER, QCD, SI, CGS, AU, BEC, etc.) And from what I've observed medical and sales professionals also use a lot of acronyms.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#20One 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)
Yeah, the TLA (three-letter acronym) space is vastly overcrowded and most TLAs are overloaded. This goes double for TLAs (two-letter acronyms). :P