Corona Virus Diary, Part 66

Learning a new domain of any sort will involve learning new terms—sometimes called (technical) jargon. One challenging aspect of doing this is that you will often have to "overload" words you already use/know—learn a new specialized application of some word form.

What is an "Object" in programing? For each programing language that uses "Objects" in some way, there is a different answer to this question. In JavaScript, versus Ruby, versus C++ (and so and so forth) you will find that the technical meaning of object differs. To make matters more confusing, we use the word "object" in everyday speech, e.g. talking about "objects in a room" or even "speaking objectively".

Conversations can fail in many ways when people use the same word forms (sounds, spellings) but fail to share the same meanings. In relatively concrete domains, such as cooking, I think this is relatively rare. Saying, "please pass the salt shaker" or "this recipe calls for two potatoes" will be pretty easy to understand.

When moving into realms that involve more abstractions and difficult to name things, however, problems proliferate. In the programing example given above, we can see how words like object, function, evaluate, and return cannot be naively transferred from natural speech into code. Even English speakers have to learn new, precise meanings of these terms in the domain of computer programing.

In this way it is silly to say "why don't we make XYZ language keywords in computer language ABC to make it more accessible to such-and-such minority group"—everyone has to learn new uses for symbols when learning programing and the idea that you just do it in "plain" English is a non-starter. People are not computers. What is an esac and a fi?!?!?!? 1

In mass media, various words/terms are used to attempt to program you like a computer. 2 Associating a term with very bad feelings (e.g. facism, alt-right) and then attaching this label to someone/something is an easy way to quickly convey the message XYZ is bad, even if the viewer doesn't have any idea about what XYZ is on their own terms. Similarly, there are terms that the mass media uses to instinctively train "positive" reactions—consider democracy, freedom, rights, liberation, etc.

Saying that such-and-such defends democracy and protects human rights and leads to the liberation of such-and-such-group from extremists [...] is just a formulaic way to get people conditioned to repeat slogans. Uncriticially convinced they are on "the right side" of history, you get people marching for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea taking for granted that it is democratic and of the people and that it is indeed a republic (I can accept that it is on the Korean peninsula, lol). 3

What is the solution to all this confusion? One thing to do is to refrain from talking about stuff you don't understand and/or is none of your business (most stuff on the news) and to focus instead on learning some skill/domain, which will very likely involve learning lots of specialized vocabulary. I don't know much about cars, but I am guessing that somebody who does know about cars very often face-palms at non-"car people" driveling on about car matters they evidently know nothing about. Regarding car things, it is better if I listen and just honestly say that I made some decision trusting some authority, rather than pretending I know about what I'm talking about. Of course, I could do my own hands-on research reading my car's manual, watching some YouTube, poking around my car...


  1. Key words used in some scripting languages. Note all programing languages will have this-and-that syntactic requirements, like opening and closing parentheses; these are "artifacts" of the technology/form of computer programing just like human speech is shaped by the form of our mouths, noses, etc 

  2. See behaviorism research. 

  3. Abusing word forms and their associations often appears as the "Word Fallacy". 

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