The opposite of a shibboleth is a frisco

Well, it either outs you as a non-San Franciscan or a poor one, since that's the native demographic that's historically called it 'Frisco'. Really, the frisco should be 'San Fran'.

When I hear the word shibboleth for some reason I think of Cthulu. Like, if Yog Sothoth and Shib-Nuggarath had a baby, they'd name it shibboleth.

Everybody in Frisco (I lived there for a decade) knows the true anti-shibboleth is saying "The 5" instead of "5". 90% chance the person saying it grew up in southern CA.

Frisco is also a city in Texas, so named because it was on the path of a railroad headed to San Francisco.

I think jokes can act as anti-shibboleth. There are some jokes that are so obvious and overused that it stops being funny to insiders and they moved on. I am thinking of something like "Uranus" -> "your anus". I may be wrong with my example but I suppose astronomers like toilet humor as much as anyone else, but at some point, they need to do their thing without getting constantly distracted by that planet name, so they just stop joking about it.

It is not always obvious which jokes are off limits. Because they may not be bad or offensive, it is just that they interfere with day to day activity, and outsider may not know what are these day to day activities and how disruptive it is.

> people from all over the country think it’s cool to call San Francisco "Frisco"

Not all over. I've never heard it called that (I live in the North East) nor in any media I can think of.

I first heard the expression on a stats course for an MSc programme and am struggling a bit with the idea that it’s a concept not used by scientists, as other posters also attest to. The lecturer used the expression in the context of poor scientific news reporting where correlations were used to imply causation. Such that it’s used as a cheap propaganda or marketing gimmick.

It’s also fair point, as the writer points out, that correlation doesn’t say something interesting.

What I also find interesting is that the meaning of shibboleth has moved on: no longer a test of insider/outsider status. Now a totemic belief or principle.

I have been in the Bay Area almost 40 years and I still enjoy intentionally dropping "Frisco" and "San Fran" and even "San Fran Frisco" to unsuspecting individuals, just to witness them cringe.

To me the whole thing just reeks of "None of the cool kids call it that!"

This is strange, because the example they give about "correlation does not imply causation" being a "frisco" outing you as a non-scientist is very much not supported by the Slate article they claim to have gotten it from. The Slate article provides a very reasonable take on that phrase and in fact implies that we might need more such catchy phrases outing the common fallacies that scientists make and ignore. It gives a great reason why it's such an important phrase -- because forgetting it can lead us to interventions that make things worse rather than better. If saying "correlation does not imply causation" outs you as a non-scientist, then all it's saying is "true" scientists don't give a shit about the implications of their research, nor if people misconstrue their results and use it to justify harmful interventions. Which may be true, I suppose, but it's an extremely cynical take; the phrase is about whether and how we can apply scientific results to better our world, something apparently "true" scientists don't give a shit about?

> My desire to find a name for the anti-shibboleth grew stronger recently, when I read Dan Engber’s excellent piece in Slate about how all the idiots on the internet keep saying “Correlation does not imply causation.” Scientists know that, whenever someone says “correlation does not imply causation,” we are dealing with clueless civilians. The phrase is a perfect anti-shibboleth to smoke out civilians pretending to know something about science

I hate this paragraph and everything it represents.

Honestly, I hate the very idea of "a phrase that only idiots on the internet say". It's such an arrogant concept.

> It’s not like scientists are physically incapable of saying “correlation does not imply causation,” in the sense that Ephraimites were presumably physically incapable of pronouncing the word “shibboleth.” It’s just that no real scientists would.

Genuinely curious: What do real scientists say instead at the myriad of pop-science articles that superimpose two graphs and declare that jello cures laryngitis?

Neväda is better