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by jjk16613 hours ago |
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upvoteby red-iron-pine10 hours ago|
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The Gervais Principle by the Ribbonfarm guy gets into this: powertalk vs. babytalk

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of these concepts.

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upvoteby ignoramous9 hours ago|
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Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...
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upvoteby red-iron-pine8 hours ago|
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this reads like an AI clickbait.

it does make Rao's original article a little easier to digest but it was already pretty tight through the first 3-4 parts.

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upvoteby jvanderbot12 hours ago|
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from TFA:

> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”

I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.

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upvoteby jjk1669 hours ago|
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But they're not semantically rich. People who speak the code aren't doing it to more efficiently communicate, such that a long and complicated message can be expressed quickly. They are taking a short simple message, stripping away all the details, then padding it such that it becomes more verbose and vapid. This makes the real message harder to decipher for the uninitiated, it removes information even for those who understand the code, and it serves as a display for people who appreciate the flourish. There may still be some meaning left, but it's semantically emptier.

Further much of it is not even code. Examples like the microsoft letter are clearly a performative act to soften the blow of bad news. No one in the know is reading such an email to discern some hidden message; it's written to not be read.

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upvoteby zmgsabst2 hours ago|
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In exactly the sense my HTTPS packets are semantically emptier than my HTTP packets.
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upvoteby georgefrowny43 minutes ago|
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I think it's more like that you are signalling by your use of HTTPS at all, and the packet body itself is encrypted nonsense.

Hiding information in the protocol layer while the bulk content that is "supposed" to contain the meaning is present but actually meaningless. Or for a physical analogy the payload of the envelope vis a decoy and the real information is hidden in the way the flap is sealed.

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upvoteby thfuran1 hours ago|
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It's not even meaningfully similar, let alone exactly that way.
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upvoteby georgefrowny47 minutes ago|
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I'm always reminded of Asimov's Lord Dorwin: "[the linguistic analyst] after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed."
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upvoteby andrewflnr9 hours ago|
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In some cases, sure, they're semantically rich, but the result here is that in some cases it doesn't matter whether they are or not, that some people can't tell. That can still be true even if corporate jargon originated and is sometimes still used for rational-ish reasons.
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upvoteby oblio11 hours ago|
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> Eventually they figured out that language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind--but tranches. The bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense."

The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.

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upvoteby astrange11 hours ago|
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I thought a mezzanine was when you go see a movie at noon.
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upvoteby vermilingua10 hours ago|
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I believe that’s a matinee
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upvoteby mikrl11 hours ago|
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That’s a martingale you’re thinking of
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upvoteby Paracompact4 hours ago|
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Actually, I think he's referring to the resplendent angel of the Kabbalah, Metatron. In the Jewish canon, Metatron is a big film buff.
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upvoteby thenobsta3 hours ago|
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Megatron is also a film buff and the enemy of Optimus Prime. Optimus Prime flies well above the mezzanine.
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upvoteby rawgabbit10 hours ago|
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The mezzanine is the drink with the worm in it; after you get "mezzed", you feel like the worm is eating you from the inside.
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upvoteby ahoka9 hours ago|
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No, that’s mescaline (Spanish for tequila).
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upvoteby rawgabbit9 hours ago|
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It was my attempt at a joke.
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upvoteby notahacker7 hours ago|
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yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like

"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."

What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.

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upvoteby zmgsabst2 hours ago|
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Or that those “nonsense” phrases are not actually nonsense when spoken by a manager.

The conclusion they’re nonsense comes from the random generation and the technical perspective on semantics; but it’s entirely possible they’re generating phrases that do have semantic meaning when said by a manager… and hence their whole study is flawed.

They quietly assume their conclusion, when assuming their generated phrases are vacuous rather than contain coded semantic content.

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