Business, Technology and the Tyranny of Techno-Babble

The lack of usage common terms to explain new terms.

Business, Technology and the Tyranny of Techno-Babble

Made you look....another trivial colloquialism :)

As I was reading a rather informative article today about the eternal New Year Promise of easier time understand computer languages and more user friendly code libraries. And I partially enjoying the humor in the article, as some of the jokes I understood and others I missed entirely, I was reminded of how half the battle of trying to understand a new technology, a new stock or options trading strategy or any of the newest “next big things” is the “slang language”.

In every of my past undertakings, I always start with a book recognized by practitioners in the field as the “definitive” text on the subject, and I consistently can’t finish them and frequently get little out of them.

Initially I thought I was to dense to understand this higher language, but my friends assured me, it was not me, it was the author. While I appreciated their attempts to protect my ego, I couldn’t help but feel my education had somehow been inadequate, as how could I not know so many words! It was maddening!

But one day, while reading one of those “Options trading for Dummies” books, a painful admission on my part by the way. I had an “epiphany”. The author was not a trader of stocks or options, and on the surface he appeared ill-suited to the task, as he admitted to being an English major. My first thought upon reading his background before reading any of the book was that he would not be My first choice. But I was in a BookStore, a rather luxurious occasion for me, enjoying the look and feel of new books, and not feeling to good about the authors credentials. But I decided to read a few chapters anyway.

I read a few chapters and really enjoyed it, and started thinking that “oh my goodness” this guy’s an options education genius. I suddenly understood clearly concepts I had been grappling or wrestling with for weeks. In terms of sudden understanding, “...light bulbs were going off in my head.” Please excuse that terrible American English idiom, it means I was suddenly enlightened and understood.

I feel compelled now to explain my English idioms because that’s what my epiphany was about. I was having trouble learning options trading because of the idioms or slang. But I realized this author was in the habit of explaining every concept in common English words. It was this constant explanation of Options terminology and his focus not on the strategies per se, but the translation of the terms used to explain the strategies that made his book so good.

I realized and coined a phrase (made it up) for this, which I half jokingly call The Tyranny of Techno-Babble. You are probably familiar with the Bible Story of the Tower of Babel, when everyone who spoke one language and could work together, suddenly spoke many different languages and couldn’t work together anymore.

I feel that one of the limiting issues for adoption of new ideas and technology is in explaining it to the end user or potential customer. People who study and immerse themselves in a subject become very knowledgeable and are sometimes very good at applying their understanding of what a technology can do to modern day processes, but their frequent short coming is that not only do they explain their new technology in terms used only by those well versed in that technology, but they define those terms with other terms known only to those well versed in that technology. Then they are puzzled by the puzzled looks they receive at their briefings.!

As an example I read a thread where someone explained distributed consensus using terms like decentralized nodes, and finished his description saying these nodes were immutable and infinitely scalable. I laughed so hard I almost wet my pants :)

If we wish to reach the masses we need to communicate using first the language of the technology followed by common non-technical language. We can’t complain about nobody joining our ranks and sharing our enthusiasm if we speak only in Greek and define our Terms with other Greek words. Our audience will be limited to Greeks and other enterprising nationals who speak Greek.

The end of the Tyranny of Techno-Babel must begin with us.

Stay thirsty for knowledge my friends.

✍️ written by Shortsegments

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