nebulous terms
Table of Contents
Terms that are too ambiguous to be of any use.
As Tim Ferris pointed out, 2 categories of these terms are:
- marketer-speak
- terms designed to sell/scare, with no/little scientific basis; or have more selling/scaring effect than of scientific use “Firming”, “Shaping”, “Bettering”, “Too Late”, “Offer” Words are supposed to be refering to stuff, not to make you happy/fearful/anxious. Yet indeed when solely words can make you happy/fearful/anxious, there’s room for profit.
- over-used scientific sounding word
- terms that are used too much for too many things to have an agreed-upon meaning “Health”, “Fitness”, “Optimal”, “reading”, “think”, “understand”, “consciousness”
1. a list of big no-nos
do not, under any circumstance, use terms on this list:
- reading, reading is a nebulous term
- deep
1.1. reasons
- reading
it could refer to reciting with mouth, eye movement on the text, recognizing characters, using text materials to for organization of ideas under a topic, visualizing textual description of a visual object…
Too much in objectives and methods, it does not refer to a primitive or an area of interest quickly
- deep
- deeper understanding in [neural network]- there’s no such thing, it has no meaning whatsoever, and only make you worry if your understanding is deep enough, or others with a deepr understanding is going to have an advantage on you
- looks deep into [my soal] - there’s no such thing. There’s about 2 or 3 layers, what you do | what you think| what you assume, or socially/appropriate actions and ideas|style/belief on strategies and ideas|unconscously influenced by [skeptism school] [hacker culture]… That’s as deep as it gets. You can hide stuff and lie and be cryptic, but that’s not in your soul init.
2. reference
This idea is mentioned in Ferriss, Timothy ::: The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman:
"I just want to be health" is not actionable. "I want to increase my HDL cholesterol and improve my time for a on mile jog or walk" is actionabl . "Health" is subject to the fads and regime du jou. Useless. -- Fundamentals, the 4 hour body
Backlinks
select thinking primitives to better mental state
Certain mental state caused by poisonous thought and nebulous terms apply unnecesary cognitive loads
By thinking exclusively with a defined definite set of primitives, those states could be avoided.
reading is a nebulous term
Reading is a nebulous terms:
- multiple meanings
- reading for information
- reading for fun
- reading for professional skill
- reading for knowledge(typically in general art sense)
- reading for aesthetic
- reading out loud
- reading word by word
- skimming
- …
- ambiguous
- most of the meanings are indistinguishable in where it took place(in front of a book/computer) and how it looks like(imagining reading…)
read
(why so narrow)
Read is a nebulous terms and has been used to refer to at least the following activities(only with written materials):
- recognize symbols/letters/math/handwriting
- making sense of a sequence of symbols(sentence/formula/graph)
- strategically reading a large bulk of structured/unstructured text (chapters? an enormous article? zettelkasten? blog? source code? documentation? manual? read them all)
- knowledge acquisition (read textbooks)
- text material analysis (read paper to extract ideas, evaluate result, extract field status…)
- speak out words on a script (read out loud)
So much meanings has made the term totally unusable. It is advisable to just retire the term or note that only the narrowest meaning of reading a sentence to extract a meaning is used every time it is used.