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Comment by drew870mitchell | Hacker News Reader

Not about the UA flight, but the grandparent's first point. I can see how it's not simply superstition or theater. Critical info gets communicated either over fuzzy radio or 220 character ACARS messages. You wouldn't want to introduce into that context any spurious usages of phrases that would result in wasted time disambiguating whether a garbled transmission was referring to the Very Serious Bad kind of "crash" or referring to something comparatively trivial like the ticketing system being down.

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The problem is that there isn't a simple canonical way to disambiguate, despite that being the obvious and superior solution.

Taboo is a shitty communication feature. Taboo demands active silence in a system with too much entropy for that to be feasible. It would be far superior to train everyone to say "good crash" (and respond appropriately) instead.

Words only have meaning in context. The whole point of instating a taboo is that you control the context. Rather than use that control to introduce danger to words, we should use it to isolate danger from words.

That would not solve the problem. On a radio, you could have a moment of interference and only receive 'crash' when someone broadcasts 'good crash'. It is better to avoid certain words entirely. There is also no reason to use those specific words when you could describe, e.g. a software crash as a software problem, error, issue, etc.

If the communication medium is made ambiguous by high entropy, then the language needs to reduce that entropy somehow. The entropy we are taking about is temporal, like packet loss. The solution is for the speaker to be redundant and for the listener to be uncertain.

What you are advocating is silence, which implies confidence in the communication stream, which is the opposite of what we want.

We already knew that silence is hard to distinguish from signal noise, which is why we say copy instead.

I'm not advocating for silence, your reading comprehension is lacking.

Maybe you can work on yours?

I'm not making a distinction between silence as a pause and silence as keeping your mouth shut, because that distinction is irrelevant. In either case, nothing is communicated, because a pause is indistinguishable from a failed copy (something said that came through as signal noise).

You are advocating for the avoidance of specific words. That's a problem, because both the circumstances surrounding word choice and the signal itself have high entropy. You cannot reasonably expect the sound "bomb" to never be heard over a radio. It might be from a failure to obey the taboo, or it might be from a totally different and irrelevant signal that sounded to someone like "bomb". Signal and hearing simply don't work that way, and neither does society.

If you want to avoid miscommunication, the only feasible option is to accommodate the entropy of the communication system and the entropy of its participants.

Is it a taboo, or is it just reserving specific words to mean specific things and insist everybody be precise about it?

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