Another case of multiple meanings(polysemy) applied to everyday usage which vaguely and remotely reminds me of "conceits".
Suitcase words
Marvin Minsky
called words that carry a variety of meanings “suitcase words.”
“Learning” is a
powerful suitcase word; it can refer to so many different types of experience.
Learning to use chopsticks is a very different experience from learning the
tune of a new song. And learning to write code is a very different experience
from learning your way around a city.
(These are words pregnant with meanings and
quite often manipulated by politicians or businessmen to suit their meanings to
their wills; i.e.: democracy, liberalism, progress, freedom, tolerance,
performance, yield, sustainability, change, interest and so on and so forth.)
When people hear
that machine learning is making great strides in some new domain, they tend to
use as a mental model the way in which a person would learn that new domain.
However, machine learning is very brittle, and it requires lots of preparation
by human researchers or engineers, special-purpose coding, special-purpose sets
of training data, and a custom learning structure for each new problem domain.
Today’s machine learning is not at all the sponge-like learning that humans
engage in, making rapid progress in a new domain without having to be
surgically altered or purpose-built.
Likewise, when
people hear that a computer can beat the world chess champion (in 1997) or one
of the world’s best Go players (in 2016), they tend to think that it is
“playing” the game just as a human would. Of course, in reality those programs
had no idea what a game actually was, or even that they were playing. They were
also much less adaptable. When humans play a game, a small change in rules does
not throw them off. Not so for AlphaGo or Deep Blue.
Suitcase words
mislead people about how well machines are doing at tasks that people can do.
That is partly because AI (Artificial Intelligence) researchers—and, worse, their institutional press
offices—are eager to claim progress in an instance of a suitcase concept. The important
phrase here is “an instance.” That detail soon gets lost. Headlines trumpet the
suitcase word, and warp the general understanding of where AI is and how close
it is to accomplishing more.
Marvin Minsky
has written about "suitcase words." Using examples like
"consciousness," "emotions," "memory,"
"thinking," and "intelligence," the MIT Media Lab professor
observes that a suitcase word "means nothing by itself, but holds a bunch
of things inside that you have to unpack." He saw the need to unpack and
analyze each word in order for it to be understood fully. They are not
precisely buzzwords, those technical terms or euphemisms shorn of precise
meaning through hype and overuse, or jargon; the specialized vocabulary used
and understood in specific contexts like given industries. Suitcase words are
different in that they often contain multiple and expanding meanings across
disparate contexts. They can obfuscate as much as they clarify. Hence the
importance of context in any given situation.
Consider
"creativity," "leadership," "data," and
"digital." Or, look at arguably the single most-used – and explicated
– word in the Berlin School Global Executive MBA program which I direct:
"Value." It needs to be repeatedly unpacked across disciplines. In
leadership courses, it can refer to the beliefs and principles of an
individual, team or organization. In strategy, the benefits are exchanged with
clients or customers. In finance, the monetary, material or assessed worth of
an asset or firm. Eric Almquist of Bain & Company consultancy has outlined
30 different elements of consumer value. That kind of unpacking, undertaken for
specific situations, is too often neglected in many discussions of creating or
delivering "value." That profusion of possible interpretations is
where the potential problem emerges. Speakers can use the intrinsic ambiguity
of suitcase words tactically, not to suss out meanings collaboratively but to
rely on generic concerns as the basis of superficial agreement.
Even when two people
use the same words they may give them different meanings. Take for instance the
words democracy or liberal. They may mean very differently from one person to
another or one country to another. No dictator will ever accept being called a
dictator but any politically correct word will do instead. Remember the times
of “organic democracy”...?
