At the risk of being an old they/them yelling at clouds…!

Buzzwords are—rightly, in my view—frequently mocked.

Here are some words that I encounter all the time that aren’t really buzz words but that I don’t think carry any actual substantive meaning.

  1. “Expert”. This seems to just indicate somebody who is really good or experienced at something. I think this is a really general word that masks the more useful specific details of a person’s skills and experience. In the context of “we should contact an expert in X”, we might as well say “we should contact someone with expertise in X”. In the context of self-promotion, anyone can call themselves an expert, so the word doesn’t enable the listener/reader to actually determine whether the speaker/author is indeed an expert. Thus, it is much more informative to replace “I am an expert in X” with “I have … years of experience doing X, with some specific activities being …”.
  2. “Professional”. I have no gripes with this word in the context of “this person derives their full-time income from activity X”. But when it’s used in the context of “this person acts professionally” or “this behaviour is professional”, this really just means “this person projects an aura of confidence in the workplace” or “this behaviour is the sort of thing that I like to see at the workplace”. Humans are ape descendants who have to put up with each other’s company for the sake of survival; I feel that the word “professional” is often used to pretend to be something that we are not. This attitude has also been criticised for reproducing white/Western norms that don’t fit well for e.g. Black people or people from/in the Global South. (See also Nerds with laptops)
  3. “Scientifically proven”. This one shits me to tears. Under the framework of empirical falsification, you cannot scientifically prove an empirical statement. Moreover, even if we have strong evidence for the effect size of some variable X on some other variable Y in scientific studies, this doesn’t mean that the effect size necessarily holds in different contexts or for different individuals.
  4. “Best practice”. This just means “things that I like”, or more precisely “things that I was taught at university and therefore like”, and is a way to unduly elevate one’s preferences to the status of “stuff everyone should be doing”. Especially in animal advocacy, we are such a young movement with a very long battle ahead of us. To suggest that we know what practice is “best” and what practice is “not best”, when we don’t even know the most effective ways to make progress on addressing animal suffering, strikes me as overconfident.
  5. “Fastest growing”. e.g. “birdwatching is the fastest growing hobby” or whatever. This is a strange one (not birdwatchers—though them too!). If, say, a sport is the biggest, that means its raw number of participants is the highest of sports that you’ve looked at. If it’s the fastest growing, that means that its first derivative of the number of participants is the highest of sports you’ve looked at. But this introduces so many knotty methodological problems and measurement errors! You need to know the sport’s size at time t and at time t+1, and you need to know this for every sport, and you need to know what variance and measurement error these measurements have… This is ripe for the optimizer’s curse. Besides, it’s common to see an article published in like 2010 saying “XYZ is the fastest-growing thing”—but is its first derivative still highest next year? Maybe, maybe not, but people will repeat the empirical statement before they go and verify that it’s still up-to-date.