Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
Honestly, I&#x27;m a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I&#x27;m also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology&#x27;s problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to everyday experience. We&#x27;re only 100 years from Lewis Terman and H. H. Goddard thinking they could measure intelligence by having people circle a face judged to be &quot;more attractive&quot;, it&#x27;s a young science and improving the rigor of how things are expressed is essential to advancement. Not only are a lot of these terms being used incorrectly, hence why this paper was even published, but because they carry a colloquial and historic baggage that don&#x27;t reflect academic understandings, or even philosophical understandings of the epistemological concept of science. Words have definitions, and if two people don&#x27;t share the same definition, then communication breaks down, research is misunderstood, and the field is worse off. This is for people operating within the field to consolidate knowledge, I don&#x27;t know why people insist that lay understandings of language and a field of study need to be reflected in the terms of art.<p>To put it in terms that engineers are more likely to appreciate, a lot of these terms would be like &quot;man-hours&quot;. Man-hours is obviously a useless term because it 1) implies that increasing workers scales production linearly, 2) implies each individual produces at the same rate, 3) inherits from a factory mode of production that engineers typically don&#x27;t believe fits their situation, and 4) generally results in poor estimations of cost and delivery times. Obviously if you&#x27;re trying to be productive as an engineer, your managers only using man-hours as a term invites ambiguity and worse working conditions. Same goes for things like the lay understanding of attention vs its specific meaning as an implementation template within deep learning, or even AI more broadly vs specific neural network techniques.