“Is there a number on your phone that you can call when you are in the worst time of your life, say, maybe when you are thinking of ending it youself?” “Is there a person who knows what you are, your dreams and aspirations and can predict your thoughts and actions?” “Is there a person who challenges your principles and ideals not because he wants to have fun arguing or engage in some intellectual masturbation but is concerned that you might be doing something wrong?”
“Do you have any friends who are not continuous partial?”
I first came across the the adjective “continuous partial” in Robert Scoble’s blog about breathing less while emailing and twittering. I fell in love with it immediately. It perfectly described many concepts that were floating around in my mind at that time. Linda Stone, the person who coined the term, uses it to describe attention and relationships. I now use it to describe knowledge as well. Continuous partial knowledge - knowledge which fails to go in-depth. I will save the details for another post. I liked the term so much that it has now become part of my vocabulary and I use it quite frequently!
I don’t read philosophy or management. In fact, I don’t read pretty much anything except textbook science. (I will save my crazy theory on reading only textbooks for another post.) All the philosophy and management that I pout are reflections during travel. When I come back to my computer, I put down my thoughts in words as either a blog or enter them into my log book. And I give it a title and the tile is used to refer to the idea. For example, “microcosm theory” refers to my idea on the loss of individuality in large companies and how it affects policies, “too many eggs” refers to my economic theory and so on and so forth.
Sometimes, I have found that my ideas already have formal names in philosophy and management. Once I find them, I tend to use the formal terms rather than my cooked up inventions. I would love to quote a few examples but I have no recollections of how I refered to my ideas before I actually found out that they are referred to as “Objectivism” and “Determinism”.
I agree. Jargon is intimidating. Just imagine if I was at a lunch table and I suddenly used the term “continuous partial” in the conversation! People might be offended outright. But then, I sometimes wonder that if my words really meant anything to the people at the table, they would ask me to explain the jargon. And in reply, I might either decide to explain the idea or ask folks to google it out or locate it in my blog. I guess it makes sense to do the former when an understanding of the term is necessary for the conversation to proceed.
Jargon saves time. Once a jargon is understood, you spend a fraction of the time to transmit an idea. I was recently interviewed by a person at work who was interested in finding out what motivates folks. Instead of a long rant, I sent her a list of links to my blog posts. Why waste time when you have already spent enough on expressing your ideas? Similarly, why waste time explaining an idea when a term for it has already been invented? When one word would do, why waste energy and time on a hundred?
Well, I leave it to my readers to add, subtract, multiply or divide my thoughts on jargon. Stay tuned for my posts on “continuous partial knowledge”, “conditioning by books” and “random self mutating premise generators“.
