[swimwiththebeat]

It’s amazing how much attaching a name to some phenomenon or problem and discussing it helps in understanding it and taking the first steps to address it. Knowing that bedtime procrastination is a real thing that affects others not only gives me comfort, but also helps me think about it very consciously and figure out how to take the first steps to solve it.

I never thought about it from the revenge and agency perspective, but I appreciate the author at least trying to hypothesize why people do this despite it being detrimental. All the suggestions and tips in the article are also incredibly helpful.

[extragood]

I had a similar revelation at work recently.

I've lead a team for the past several years. Our productivity and the quality of the work never was never questioned for the first ~4 years. We consistently met or exceeded expectations, and everyone was happy.

In the past year of belt tightening, my leadership and methods have come under scrutiny by our executives. I've spent many hours defending my decisions, especially team structure. The thing which finally got them (mostly) off my back was sharing the name of the methodology that most resembled what I had built. Suddenly my explanations check out.

While I'm happy to have a lot of that pressure relieved, it's also been a frustrating experience. My credibility relied on someone else giving a name to a methodology that I devised independently, and that was more important than any of the results of the previous 4 years.

[simmschi]

Ha, I can relate to that. What is the name of your leadership style?

[dredmorbius]

Ideas, both names and concepts, are interfaces. They are useful, though they are also limited in the sense both that the label is not the thing (the map is not the terrain), and that simply having a name for a thing is not the same as having a deep understanding for it, though having a language for discussing the thing can itself help substantially in achieving that understanding. It can also lead to cargo-cult or fad-based ("buzzword bingo") aping, however, and you want to be on the watch for that.

Feynman illustrates the distinction between naming and knowing in an lecture (I believe also appearing as an essay in one of his books):

See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a Halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a Chung Ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.

<http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html>

I find Feynman a bit too dismissive of the value of shared terminology, though his broader point has merits.

[otikik]

Names are important. One of the most important things, perhaps. It conditions how we think. For example, the denomination “fiscal paradise” could have been “tax evasion den” instead.