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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

The paper itself, 4th paragraph of the Introduction chapter:

> speech community [...] conceptual entrepreneurs [...] noisy ignorance [...] permissive uncertainty [...] surface-level agreement

Am I uneducated or is the author trolling?

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I think there's probably a difference between specialist terminology (i.e. jargon) and the type of bullshit that they're talking about (although the distinction isn't always obvious). If I say "I couldn't SSH into the host - which I thought was because of a rule change on the firewall. Turns out that the IP I had been using was the reverse proxy address and not the backend server itself." that might sound like bullshit to a non-tech but if you're familiar with those terms/concepts then the sentence is fairly easy to understand. Not so with some of the bullshit this paper is talking about.

It's also about the target audience. This is an academic paper written for an audience who will understand immediately what speech community means. A lot of the more irritating forms of corporate bullshit are distributed quite widely.

Perhaps via Baudrillard, the author is identifying bullshit as a way to make us believe that the rest is real?

Nah these are jargon but concerned w communicating truth.

I find 'speech community' esp. Illustrative. These are the 'idea people' who talk all day instead of rolling their sleeves up. Not as bad as bullshitters tho.

I am not sure, I googled https://www.google.com/search?q=%22permissive+uncertainty%22 and most of the top results refer back to this paper or similar website talking about bullshitry. But maybe I am wrong and this is a real professional jargon of a real profession.

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