Labels

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Dima introduces jingle and jungle fallacies — two ways labels can go wrong — and takes Slava through examples to show harder cases that are easy to miss.

• Names and labels help to compress knowledge and facilitate communication, but the label is always distinct from the thing it denotes
• Jingle fallacy — using the same label for two different things and treating them as one
• Jungle fallacy — using different labels for the same thing and treating them as different
• Jingle comes in two flavours
  • Simple miscommunication – two parties independently pick the same word for different things. This causes confusion, but not too difficult to prevent or spot and fix
  • Failure to differentiate – treating things as one category when finer distinctions matter. This can be a serious hurdle as it gets into "unknown unknowns" territory
• Jungle comes in two flavours
  • Lost efficiency – two groups independently develop the same thing under different names. This isn't too problematic, just unfortunate
  • Failure to converge – treating essentially the same thing as distinct indefinitely. This forecloses options and can misdirect effort with greater negative impact over the long-term
• In Ukrainian, different shades of blue have distinct words — the same object would carry genuinely different meanings depending on the speaker's language
• The failure-to-differentiate and failure-to-converge cases are harder to spot and fix than miscommunication. Because of that consequences can be more damaging
• Jingle and jungle can also be weaponised — deliberately conflating or splitting concepts in rhetoric to mislead

"I would say that I probably had a jangle fallacy about jingle and jangle fallacies." — Slava