What Do You Mean?
Thanks to Danilo Vicioso for helping out with this essay.
Imagine a kind of technology that, when wielded correctly, was indistinguishable from fairy-tale magic.
If you wanted, you could use this technology to change people’s emotions and desires. You could make people happy, mad, or sad, or curious. You could shape their behavior and the directions of their lives.
You could use this technology to make yourself more efficient. You could become smarter, faster, more effective. You could solve problems. A carefully-considered application of this tool within a society might alter the course of that society for decades. Poor usage of the technology could cause a lot of harm.
This technology would be highly personalized. No two people would use it in the same way. One person may use the technology to improve relationships in their personal lives, while another person may use the technology to raise $100M for a world-changing company. Like I said, versatile.
There’s just one catch: using the technology poorly is quite easy. Using it well is quite difficult.
If a technology like this existed, what would the proper course of action be? I think we’d probably do what we did in the sciences, the work that made it possible for us to build space ships and cure cancers and generate nuclear energy. We’d do a lot of research, a lot of tests. We’d create the periodic table. We’d accumulate a lot of knowledge. We’d learn how to harness the magic at our disposal.
Well, surprise, that technology does exist. It is called “words”. Like other technologies, someone invented it. But we are not applying the same kind of intensity to words that we apply to some of our other, powerful technologies.
We think we know what words mean. But we don’t. What if we cared more? Cared with the same intensity we care about science?
I’m partially writing this essay because, on a personal level, it’s crazy to me how often I do not understand what people mean when they tell me things. I’m surprised by how common it is. But I don’t think I’m a (completely) unique weirdo. I think this is true for all of us, and that our lack of understanding of the words we use is one of the biggest barriers to things getting better.
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Imagine you are moving next weekend and you’re going to need help carrying the furniture out of your house and into the moving truck. Two of your friends live close by, so you call both of them to ask if they help.
Friend 1 says, “Sure, I’ll try to make it.”
Friend 2 says, “Sure, I’ll try to make it.”
(If you can, picture two of your real-life friends saying this.)
Now ask: Which of the friends is more likely to come help? Do you have an answer? If words are actually precise, that’s weird. Both of your friends said they would “try”. In fact they both said the exact same thing, word-for-word. So why is there a difference?
The reason you can guess which friend is more likely to come is because your two friends have different definitions of the word “try”. Maybe to Friend 1 “try” is a firm, do-anything-I-can commitment and to Friend 2 it means they will make a half-assed attempt if they don’t have anything else going on.
Now this is fine for you, because you know both of your two friends and have developed an understanding for their personal definitions of words like “try”. But what about me? Say I join a new company and now your Friend 2 is my coworker. He tells me he will “try” to do something by the end of the day. How am I supposed to know what he means by that? It’s probably not what LeBron James or Aaron Rodgers or Tadej Pogačar mean when they say they are going to “try”.
Right now there are billions of versions of “try” living out in the world, and they are all interacting with each other, and sometimes the people in those interactions understand each other and sometimes they do not.
This is all very obvious. I doubt you disagree. But it doesn’t seem like we take words as seriously as we take other things; we don’t look at them with the rigor a scientist might study a virus, or an animal.
This is not an unsolvable problem. If we wanted to, we could think harder about the word “try”. We could do a Human Genome Project-y mapping of the definitions that currently exist. We could categorize those definitions into some fixed number of useful categories; although there are billions of different definitions for “try” in the world, I bet we could come up with some helpful buckets.
By the way, we already do this for some words. Usually science words. Take the word “pinnipeds”, for example. Humans have thought a lot about pinnipeds. Here is a chart of all of them.
I have two thoughts about the pinniped chart:
(i) This is way more organized than any definition of the word “try”.
(ii) We did not organize things in the natural world like this until recently.
It’s not that this level of deep organization in the natural world is the default, and somehow pinnipeds deserve this while the word “try” does not. No, it’s just that within the last couple hundred years we decided it would be useful to classify science words in this way. So we did. There is no reason we can’t do this with a bunch of the ‘regular’ words we use.
Try. Good. Love. Great. Education. Smart. Intelligent. Risky.
Why do we accept a few sentences in a dictionary as the extent of useful knowledge about words like these? Why isn’t there a pinniped-level chart for all of these words? Shouldn’t we make one? (To be clear, I’m not saying we just need to use bigger dictionaries. It would be a bit ridiculous to consult a 3,000-word chart every time somebody says a word. Organizing words like this could be useful work to do, though.)
It would be nice to get closer to knowing what other people mean. When my coworker, your Friend 2, says “try”, what might he be saying? Can he point to a definition? When someone says a piece of work is “good”, do they mean it’s ready to go or do they mean it still needs more revisions? When someone says they are “educated”, what the hell does that mean? When you describe a person as “smart”, what are you trying to say about that person? What are they capable of? It’s a bit shocking to me that we currently don’t have good answers for these questions.
And it’s not just that it would be useful, but that not caring deeply about words is a massive drag on humans working together, with some serious costs.
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In the classic Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a united humanity is trying to build a tower so tall it reaches Heaven. At this point in the story, humans are all speaking the same language. God sees this as a threat and remarks, ”now nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”
Concerned about humanity’s potential and angry at their pride, God scrambles the languages of humanity so that the builders find it hard to coordinate. The project fails, and the humans scatter.
What this story gets remarkably correct is that humans not understanding each other is a big (perhaps the biggest) barrier to coordination and progress.
I am writing this in English and you are likely reading this in English, but are we really speaking the same language? When you say you “love” something I’m not sure what you mean. When you say you will “try” to do something, I don’t understand. This is obvious, so why don’t we look at it with more rigor?
You’ve probably experienced situations where this lack of understanding has caused problems. Take this simple series of events:
> We are working on a project together.
> I need something from you. I ask for it.
> You say you will “try” to get it to me by the end of the day.
> I operate under the assumption that I will have it by the end of the day.
> You do not send it. The project derails slightly. Now our timing is off.
> You say you did not commit to sending me the item.
> We get into a big argument about what “try” means.
Here is another:
> Jake and Mikayla are in a relationship.
> Jake says he loves Mikayla. She says she loves him, too.
> Two weeks later, Jake takes a job abroad and breaks up with Mikayla.
> Mikayla is shocked and confused.
> She says he didn’t “love” her if he dumped her for a job.
> He says he did “love” her, but he had bigger priorities.
> They get into a big argument about what “love” means.
And one more:
> I view “risky” to be generally a good thing.
> My friend views “risky” to be generally a bad thing.
> My friend tells me they want to quit their job and start a moving company.
> I refer to this decision as “risky”.
> My friend decides not to do this because he thinks it is too “risky”.
> I tell him I think he may have made the wrong decision.
> We get into a conversation about what “risky” means. (You get the idea.)
The friction piles up fast, with negative effects for almost everyone.
For example, there are virtually no large organizations on the planet that get better as they get bigger. You could point to many reasons for this, but one is that they are worse at communicating; there is not a shared library of definitions. It might also be fair to say that millions of relationships collapse every year because of miscommunication. It may be true that we are decades or centuries behind our potential technological progress because we are not very good at coordinating.
That’s a little scary. But it’s also encouraging.
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The upside of words being an relatively untapped technology is that we have a lot to gain by thinking harder about them. This essay is meant to be an observation about the world, not a perfect solution, but I do think we could on a societal level see gains by thinking about everyday words with the intensity we think about other things (like pinnipeds).
To be clear, I’m not proposing that we simply write a better dictionary. Though it might be helpful in some contexts; the U.S. army, for example, has one. If you run a company, your company could have a dictionary about its important terms, too (for one, you could literally define “try”). If you are in a relationship with someone, you might find it helpful to define important terms (like “love”) between you. Though it sounds silly, you could create a personal dictionary that you share with coworkers who may not understand you. These are all things that could make the problem better.
But defining things does not always make them better, and no static dictionary can tell you precisely what somebody means. There are emotions, and there is context. I could personally use the word “try” to mean ten different things depending on who I was talking to and how I was feeling. Maybe someday someone will create a project, or a piece of technology, that helps more than a simple dictionary. I’m not sure.
Like any technology, words are not perfect. We can probably improve upon them beyond our current efforts (which can be summed up to adding ~1,000 new words a year, and dropping ~1,000+ old words a year). Would it be helpful to do a Human Genome Project-like thing where we study words with scientific intensity? Would it be helpful to do something else? Again, I’m not sure.
But I think that any, or perhaps most, improvements in understanding each other start with individual people caring just a little bit more. Words are like atoms, and there’s plenty of room at the bottom.
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I’ve tried to keep this essay’s scope narrow. That means this piece is not comprehensive. Here are a few more ideas.
- In a post about words (which was the origin for some of the ideas in this essay), Danilo points out that our choices about words shape entire human systems. Why do we call it “education” instead of “examples”, he asks?
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Then there’s the issue of AI, specifically LLMs. At a high, oversimplified level, these products work by consuming trillions of human-written words and then using probability to predict which word should follow next in any given context. But the AI does not actually understand the words it uses, and why. What are the implications of that? Do we even understand the words we use?
- I’m also curious about what companies mean when they say things. Take a company that says they want to change the world via “education”. Have they defined what education means? I have a hard time reading a mission statement like that and knowing what, exactly, is the thing they want to change.
Perhaps topics for another day :)
By the way, if you want to think a bit harder about words and the way you write them, you could come write with us over at Writing Club. It’s a place to write alongside other people (including us) and get useful feedback.
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