oops. “Just” the other day I explained my decision to use an iphone as “pragmatic”. :)
Seriously, while I liked most of the post, the focus on pragmatic seemed misplaced. Do people really abuse this word? All the other deadly sins seemed about right, but I haven’t seen much pragmatic abuse.
P.s. Any one care to guess Is large captive IT shop in Austin IBM?
Yes, I know many people who make fun of the misuse. Next time you hear the word “pragmatic” try to replace it with “convenient” to figure out what they’re really saying.
Thanks. Perhaps I am one of the guilty parties. I associate it with connotations of not exactly “convenient”, but more like “not ideal, but best we can do for now”. It is an admission that the design contains compromises, and is even perhaps short term biased.
“Pragmatic” is the engineering-discussion equivalent of “realist” in applied epistemology: it’s begging the question. If someone is asking you “Why do you think we should use A instead of B, C, D, or E?” they are implicitly asking “Why do you think A is a more pragmatic choice than B, C, D, or E?”[1] If you answer that question with “A is more pragmatic”, you’re just refusing to answer their question, but wasting their time with words they have to decode. And you’re sort of implying that the answer ought to be obvious. It would be politer to just pretend you didn’t hear the question.
[1] This is assuming a sort of meta-Gricean situation: presumably you will advocate A if and only if you think it is in fact the more pragmatic choice. Alternative possibilities include that you want the project to fail and so you are advocating courses of action that you think will fail, or that you don’t care if the project fails but you want to pad your resume with A experience, or that you’re so insecure that you aren’t willing to try anything new even if it would work better. But generally these conversations presuppose that you aren’t doing things like that.
i particularly hate “We just have to get this out the door” used as a club to end a discussion - it’s very demoralising to the team.
I think the key word in that phrase is “just”. Anytime you “just” have to do something, you are rhetorically handwaving away an entire discussion.
oops. “Just” the other day I explained my decision to use an iphone as “pragmatic”. :)
Seriously, while I liked most of the post, the focus on pragmatic seemed misplaced. Do people really abuse this word? All the other deadly sins seemed about right, but I haven’t seen much pragmatic abuse.
P.s. Any one care to guess Is large captive IT shop in Austin IBM?
Yes, I know many people who make fun of the misuse. Next time you hear the word “pragmatic” try to replace it with “convenient” to figure out what they’re really saying.
Thanks. Perhaps I am one of the guilty parties. I associate it with connotations of not exactly “convenient”, but more like “not ideal, but best we can do for now”. It is an admission that the design contains compromises, and is even perhaps short term biased.
“Pragmatic” is the engineering-discussion equivalent of “realist” in applied epistemology: it’s begging the question. If someone is asking you “Why do you think we should use A instead of B, C, D, or E?” they are implicitly asking “Why do you think A is a more pragmatic choice than B, C, D, or E?”[1] If you answer that question with “A is more pragmatic”, you’re just refusing to answer their question, but wasting their time with words they have to decode. And you’re sort of implying that the answer ought to be obvious. It would be politer to just pretend you didn’t hear the question.
[1] This is assuming a sort of meta-Gricean situation: presumably you will advocate A if and only if you think it is in fact the more pragmatic choice. Alternative possibilities include that you want the project to fail and so you are advocating courses of action that you think will fail, or that you don’t care if the project fails but you want to pad your resume with A experience, or that you’re so insecure that you aren’t willing to try anything new even if it would work better. But generally these conversations presuppose that you aren’t doing things like that.
Pragmatism is 19th century nonsense and should’ve stayed in that century.