Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>
>>> Google's ranking by "relevance" (a semi-propagandistic term
>> since it means
>>> something quite different from the normal sense of "relevance")
>>
>> No it doesn't; It means whatever it means in the context of where
>> you are, just like in real-life.
>
> As I said: propaganda. When words cease to have meaning, or they are
> chosen to mean something quite different from the established idea,
> this is a basic point of advertising.
We are not just dealing with advertising and propaganda here, that's
only one particularly nasty aspect of a wider issue.
Programmers are talking in metaphors all the time, and among themselves
they find no problem with that. It is only when they confront the
uninitiated public with their stuff that the trouble starts.
These users cannot be expected to know that "relevance" in a
search service means something very different, esp. if there's
no explanation of the meaning. Some are of course savvy enough to
figure that out, but how many? We can't require them to know that much
about the potentially misleading language of computing, can we? We
cannot, after all, require them to learn _anything_.
Computer scientist Edsger ("goto statement considered harmful") Dijkstra
wrote in 1988:
"It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of
metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to
the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works
reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the
method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common
sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become
too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating.
This is the situation that is characteristic for the "radical" novelty."
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Mar 18 2009 - 06:12:59 EDT