The vocabulary settled down
Twelve months ago a great deal of the talk was still borrowed. People reached for words that belonged to other subjects, partly because the field had not finished naming itself and partly because borrowed words sound confident. A good deal of that has quietly fallen away.
What replaced it is plainer and, to my ear, far more useful. More people now describe what a thing does rather than what it is, which is a smaller claim and a much easier one to check. The decline of grand nouns has been one of the healthier developments of the year.
It is not that the enthusiasm has gone. It is that the enthusiasm has become more specific, and specific enthusiasm is a great deal easier to have a conversation with.
The questions got smaller
At the start of the year the questions were enormous. What will this do to work, to truth, to everything. By the end they had shrunk, and the shrinking was progress rather than retreat. A small question has an answer somebody might actually have.
The best of them came from people doing a particular job and wondering about a particular part of it. Those conversations went somewhere, because there was something concrete to be right or wrong about.
- Where does this already work well enough to be boring, and who noticed.
- What does it get wrong, how often, and what happens when it does.
- Who checks the result before anything depends on it.
- What would have to be true for this to stop being useful.
What the good conversations had in common
The ones I learned most from were not the most certain. They were the ones where somebody was willing to describe a thing that had not worked, in enough detail that the failure was interesting rather than embarrassing. That takes a kind of confidence that has nothing to do with being right.
They also tended to be slow. Nobody arrived at anything useful in the first five minutes, and the parts worth keeping usually came after a pause that an impatient host would have filled.
What I am carrying into next year
Mostly a preference for the ordinary. The version of this subject that will matter to most people is the version that turns up in their work without announcing itself, and that version is still badly under reported compared with the spectacular one.
And a reminder that listening is cheaper than predicting and considerably more reliable. I have no forecast to offer for next year, which after twelve months of this feels less like a gap than like the point.
Frequently asked questions
What changed most over the year?
The vocabulary. Far more people now describe what a thing does rather than what it is, which is a smaller claim and much easier for a listener to check.
Why are smaller questions better?
Because somebody might actually have the answer. A question tied to a particular job and a particular part of it gives a conversation something concrete to be right or wrong about.
What made a conversation worth keeping?
Usually a willingness to describe something that had not worked, in enough detail to be interesting. Those conversations were also slow, and the useful parts tended to arrive late.