SUITCASE WORDS

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”...?