Google Expert – Noun? Not Verb? – First Run At It

Or maybe the subtitle “how to change the meaning of anything using punctuation” would be more clear. Check this out:

“Google expert.” Google-expert. Google “expert.” Google expert.

The same two words in the same order can have two distinct meanings depending on punctuation and how it is used. Without the quotation marks or the hyphen the meaning is unclear – it means each of the distinct meanings, just not both at the same time. It probably doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things because so long as there are some follow-up sentences to add context people will be able to figure out what is going on. Except when speed is required, and when dealing with a specific type of thinker.

For example, the 2019 Kentucky Derby that was run on May 4 saw the first disqualification in the history of the race. The horse that crossed the line first was later disqualified because it seemed to change its path and was deemed to have impeded another horse. A lot of people are commenting about it. I don’t know anything about horse racing so I don’t know if the DQ is appropriate. Google experts.

What do I mean by google experts? There is probably enough context there to be 70% sure that I am being ironic and implying that most people who are commenting are as qualified as I am when it comes to horse racing. That leaves about 25% to assume that I am inviting you to do an Internet search to find out what horse racing experts have to say about the race and to allow you to formulate a more educated opinion. The remaining 5% is to cover the possibility that I didn’t proof read this post and failed to notice the sentence fragment at the end of the above paragraph.

This is not a case in which speed or specific types of thinkers will be impacted by my lack of punctuation. The world does not depend on you understanding exactly what I mean in that situation. In fact, the lack of clarity is actually what I’m getting at here. BUT it is lousy writing in the paragraph nonetheless. Ideally I should go back and correct it to say “Google experts.” By the same token, I would be incorrect to go back and update the post title to “”Google Experts” – Noun, Not Verb” because that would be redundant given that the second half of the sentence directly says what part of speech I am making reference to. While not technically incorrect, it’s just, well, redundant.

Being very specific is important when there isn’t much time to process and respond to the information that is being communicated. Consider the use of “affirmative” vs. “right” used by air traffic controllers and pilots. Both mean “correct” but only one of them means a direction. It’s a small thing right now, but in an emergency situation it could become the only thing.

Being specific is very important for “run with it” (RWI) or “primed” thinkers. In the event that you have never really thought much about it, people have a number of different thinking processes, some of which are more dominant than others. Many people will be able to loop back and correct their thinking path when they realize that they made an error while interpreting an ambiguous sentence. A little time will be wasted with having to do this, but if there is no time crunch it won’t matter very much. However, those who’s thinking is disproportionately RWI may never loop back and correct their path. Their interpretation triggered unconscious thought processes and the thinking has begun. It will not be influenced by the intended meaning until it runs its course. This could take a while because of the recursive nature of unconscious mental processes – whatever output is generated becomes input and is reprocessed. With someone who is dominated by this type of thinking, a lack of clarity can cause them to waste a lot of effort on stuff that doesn’t matter or was never intended to have been said.

“Primed” thinkers are very similar to RWI thinkers but differ in terms of just how quickly thoughts take hold. While a RWI thinker is off to the races and will not be back until they reach the end the thought stream, the primed thinkers are less overcome by their mental experiences. Unconsciously a lot is happening – various mental processes will fire-up, but these are less recursive in nature and can be looked at as being clerical or akin to database access commands. While a RWI thinker will go a great distance, a primed thinker will activate memories, knowledge, the neural networks that contain the process code for mental functions, and anything else that the brain brings to mind as a result of the idea or notion they have been primed with.

In the above example about the Kentucky Derby, if we assume that I was inviting people to google the horse racing experts in order to find out what the entire thing is all about, the 25% probability interpretation, a RWI thinker who makes the 70% probability call, that “google experts” was my intended meaning, a whole lot can be triggered and happen before it reaches an end and they return to learn that it was an invitation to seek out actual expertise and not a critical statement that anyone can scream their opinion on-line. The primed thinker may be more likely to loop back quickly and receive the corrected meaning BUT their brain will be filled with a lot of stuff that has to do with the false experts and the misrepresentation of knowledge as wisdom and the over confidence that is associated with the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Of course, it would be my fault if this was how they ran with it and I would be the person who was responsible for bringing them back or correcting the misinformation that I put out. People cannot be held accountable for how they interpret unclear communication and if my lack of clarity was responsible for an unnecessary mental journey, the sole responsibility of cleaning it up fall onto me. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is immoral for us to waste other peoples time and mental resources. They have a very limited bandwidth so when we are asking for a portion of it, we need to be very careful with how we put it to use.

I accept that this may seem like an over the top assessment of the value of other peoples intellectual horsepower. And it might be more than just an over the top assessment. But when you take a moment to consider what your time is worth and the value you place on having agency over your own brain, it may not seem so far fetched to suggest that we need to take great care when making requests for others people brain power. The truth is that thinking is so much more than what is consciously going on in someones brain. That piece is actually the smallest part of it – maybe 10 percent. Most of the thinking a person does happens below the level of awareness, meaning that it can be next to impossible to identify when our actions have actually triggered their brain to do something and when we are the direct cause of the usurping of someone else’s bandwidth. It will never be a bad idea to be mindful to the reality that our actions have an obvious and a covert impact of the brain of other people. When we engage others carefully and with a genuine intent to be helpful and only as disruptive as absolutely necessary, we will eliminate a lot of the wasted mental effort for all of the people we engage.

Under certain circumstances some useful information can be revealed by analyzing how a person interprets ambiguous statements, but this would only be done when absolutely necessary and with as much consent as it is possible to get. The nature of conversations means that things will happen that are not planned, that mistakes will be made and information will be revealed without anyone setting out to get it or agreeing to allow it to be mined. That’s fine, so long as the lessons are learned and the knowledge is applied to the conversations moving forward. It is essential that this approach is never used as a form of manipulation or to get other people to do what you want them to do. While both of these things are possible, the people you do them to will learn to not trust you and to avoid spending time with you. As they should, because manipulating people is a pretty underhanded thing to do.

Clarity is very important, which is a big reason why I prefer to read the things that I want to learn as opposed to watch them. Words and punctuation work together to eliminate some of the possible meanings and to more clearly indicate the intended meaning. This works for me because I have a tendency towards running with it when I get an interpretation and can very easily find myself five or ten minutes older and having invested a lot of mental energy onto something that didn’t matter, wasn’t said, or wasn’t what was intended to be communicated. Reading can limit a lot of these potential tangents and allow me to remain more focused on the subject at hand.

When I want to float away and give someone else influence over what my brain does from moment to moment, I’ll listen to Podcasts or YouTube videos. This is a lot less constrained and very often results in more creative thinking. And that is great, but only when I have the time to deal with it. Otherwise it can be a real pain in the side, and a very inefficient use of the finite amount of mental energy and capacity that I have access to.

Speaking, writing, or communicating clearly can be a little more challenging, but in the long run it allows you to make much better use of other peoples brain power. You’ll get the best quality information from them, and you will get to a solution as quickly as possible. Even if it doesn’t have this impact on others, it’s worth the effort. It will streamline your own thinking and narrow the scope of what your brain does because it will limit the input to a single thing – as opposed to having to decode the ambiguity before considering a single thing or divide the mental effort giving both potential meanings an equal share.