Conflation is a valid concern, but if we believe the best in people, and there are almost always truth seekers among us, we will eventually discover the most minute of differences. We use analogies all the time and they’re okay even if not perfect analog so long as we acknowledge that. It’s really how people learn.
Blurred concepts and terms will always have people to clarify them but I wouldn’t lump that into echo chamber-ism. It is such only for those that spend an entire career in one ecosystem and never step out of their comfort zone to have their fuzzy ideas challenged, conceptualized differently, or placed against in the context of a different domain.
When I think echo chambers, I think JavaScript and its immense cargo culting of front end frameworks and libraries. It’s almost taboo to speak out against React without hearing the common talking points and refrains that its large community of users have adopted to combat dissenters or people suggesting other libraries or frameworks. Dan Abramov of Redux/React and Facebook engineer spoke out against a YouTuber that kept making fun of Angular. I say this because at least with echo chambers it’s easier to spot them and avoid them.
We also can’t teach anyone that isn’t ready to learn, and we tend to forget that some of the smartest people are the most hard-headed and often feel attacked if something or someone challenges their long-established beliefs. It causes tons of cognitive dissonance and often bars them from further learning. I recently had a discussion asking my cousin, a former Google engineer and heavy JS user if he’s checked out SvelteJS or some of the other micro-libraries, and I simply got, “why subject myself to a lack of support?” (not verbatim). That’s classic “straw manning” (just because of this, then it must mean that). What he actually meant was, “I just need to build something and it’s what I’m familiar with and don’t want to spend the time considering all the options right now”. That would be a much better premise to start on and would be fine, but we all know that people don’t say that, because we don’t want others to misconstrue that as being lazy. I’ve been in enough of these conversations now to be able to read between the lines and avoid an entire discussion on trying to share something I find fascinating to someone else when they’re not looking to have me do that.
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Conflation is a valid concern, but if we believe the best in people, and there are almost always truth seekers among us, we will eventually discover the most minute of differences. We use analogies all the time and they’re okay even if not perfect analog so long as we acknowledge that. It’s really how people learn.
Blurred concepts and terms will always have people to clarify them but I wouldn’t lump that into echo chamber-ism. It is such only for those that spend an entire career in one ecosystem and never step out of their comfort zone to have their fuzzy ideas challenged, conceptualized differently, or placed against in the context of a different domain.
When I think echo chambers, I think JavaScript and its immense cargo culting of front end frameworks and libraries. It’s almost taboo to speak out against React without hearing the common talking points and refrains that its large community of users have adopted to combat dissenters or people suggesting other libraries or frameworks. Dan Abramov of Redux/React and Facebook engineer spoke out against a YouTuber that kept making fun of Angular. I say this because at least with echo chambers it’s easier to spot them and avoid them.
We also can’t teach anyone that isn’t ready to learn, and we tend to forget that some of the smartest people are the most hard-headed and often feel attacked if something or someone challenges their long-established beliefs. It causes tons of cognitive dissonance and often bars them from further learning. I recently had a discussion asking my cousin, a former Google engineer and heavy JS user if he’s checked out SvelteJS or some of the other micro-libraries, and I simply got, “why subject myself to a lack of support?” (not verbatim). That’s classic “straw manning” (just because of this, then it must mean that). What he actually meant was, “I just need to build something and it’s what I’m familiar with and don’t want to spend the time considering all the options right now”. That would be a much better premise to start on and would be fine, but we all know that people don’t say that, because we don’t want others to misconstrue that as being lazy. I’ve been in enough of these conversations now to be able to read between the lines and avoid an entire discussion on trying to share something I find fascinating to someone else when they’re not looking to have me do that.