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Comment by collinmcnulty | Hacker News Reader

I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.

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Absolutely! I’ll dive into this a bit more in the second section, where even technical acronyms can be considered harmful because they are learned at a surface level and then spread at meme-like speed.

For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.

> For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea.

But wouldn't people still be unaware of the difference in meaning if the acronyms were spelled out? The word "consistency" appears in both names, with no indication that its meaning is context-dependent. I don't think you can lay the blame for this one at the feet of the acronyms.

Right. This whole argument is ridiculous.

The parent comment explains it. The acronym makes buries the idea one level deeper. When people learn it means Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance, they get an illusion of understanding but in reality they’ve only decoded the acronym.

There's also a power dynamic with which definitions take precedence.

You will always have to dumb it down for upper management. As soon as the acronyms come out, they will delay making decisions so that they don't have to take questions or be held accountable. If there is an acronym they use that's spelled the same way but means something totally different, you will have to avoid using yours even when it's the most appropriate term to avoid confusion.

My favorite example is ServiceNow using the term "CI" for "configuration item". You'll have to tell them in a lot more words what the deployment process is. :)

absolutely. this is an illusion our mind believes.

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