Commentary by Roger Erickson
Unemployment falls but hiring slows
We're living a Semantic Nightmare on Elm Street? Yes, and it's in more than just your [bad] dreams!
Is that a perfect way to confuse an audience?
Gotta conclude that that's the goal?
These marketing campaigns never happen by themselves.
Didn't FDR have a quote on that very topic? "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
Brad Lewis writes "Part of this ends up being highly contested territory because we [lazily] distinguish between those looking for work and those who [supposedly] are not."
Of course, but when the semantics don't follow the direction of the conversation accurately enough, or soon enough ... group coherence evaporates, and entire electorates lose their orientation to reality. Without adequate agreement on the definition of basic terms, national alignment and policy agility is not possible. Isn't our goal an informed, not a mis-informed, electorate? Midway through WWII, did our DoD brass say the following? "Tell all military staff something different, or at least ambiguous. Then let's see where they all go, what they do, and what happens." Hell no! Team navigation doesn't work when every crew member thinks everyone else's feedback means something other than what was intended.
Our Semantic-Debt burden highlights both the art of and risk of politics as indirection. We have to be free to quickly mis-direct one another ... SLIGHTLY ... in order to quickly trigger distributed exploration of new situations. Yet, we must all the while be careful to remain within survivable tolerance limits. There's only so much group confusion we can tolerate, before distributed misdirection overwhelms collective intent. Call that burden our Semantic Debt, and keep it paid down.
To keep adjusting to new situations, organized groups must wipe the semantic-debt clean periodically, just to clear the air and regain NET situational awareness.
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