Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms

lmpdev

One 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)

JoshGG

I enjoyed this article about AFSI.

collinmcnulty

I 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.

needSomeCoffee

My 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.

fouc

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

gumby

My 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)

zjp

Acronyms 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.

thayne

I 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.

jterrys

I think I've accumulated enough acronym cruft in my middling age where it has introduced serious imprecision in my language and understanding. Particularly when the recycling of acronyms is so common. PTP, P2P, PVP, NTP, LDAP, DNS, SMTP, B2B, CRM, SAP, SATA, IDE, PCI...at some point these terms stop meaning anything to me anymore and my eyes glaze rather than recollect context

loaderchips

I Have always found that acronyms are not the problem. They are necessary. However they become a problem when a lot of people start shoehorning them as attention targets instead of using them naturally in flow.

WalterBright

I was disappointed that KAOS was not an acronym.

burnto

Agree acronyms are often used to signal expertise and depth that isn’t really there, or even needed. But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.

pixelpoet

Since we're talking about fatigue: weary*