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.
Absolutely! I’ll dive into this a bit more in the second section, where even technical acronyms can be considered harmful because they are learned at a surface level and then spread at meme-like speed.<p>For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.
absolutely. this is an illusion our mind believes.
My company has a strict NTLA policy.<p>That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms<p>Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)
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.
One thing that irks me quite a bit is when adjacent fields adopt the same acronym for different things<p>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)
yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.<p>Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...
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
I enjoyed this article about AFSI.
IFHA
tl;dr