Dan Luu
patreon
Phrases that mean their opposite
🕑 Added 2021-12-12 04:12:38 +0000 UTCI'm reading a github issue on a correctness bug where the first comment from the lead developer is about how much they care about correctness and how much effort they put in.
I find the comment quite striking since the project is, for things I've used that are in its class, worst in class on correctness.
I've seen a similar response to correct bugs on a few other projects and those projects are also worst in class.
To be clear, this is distinct from a project having a page explaining that they care about correctness and detailing how they check correctness (e.g., explaining that they have 8 million tests, or they use an oracle to test for correctness and run millions of randomly generated tests per day, etc.). This is about project maintainers reflexively respond to bugs with something like "we try really hard to catch bugs like this".
After running into this, I thought about this further and I think there are a number of other statements that often convey the opposite. One that we've discussed previously here is when someone at a big company tells you that their team is "just like a startup". The more they insist, the more big company obliviousness they're likely to have.
One that we haven't discussed is when someone is described as humble. I've seen this a few times in, e.g., a eulogy given by a spouse, and in every case, it was for someone who was not only arrogant, but one of the most arrogant people I've ever met. Of course, I know people who are actually humble, but I don't really see those people often described as humble.
One that I've seen a lot more is when, in an online discussion, in a heated debate, person A asks, "why are you so angry?" or, better yet, a more passive aggressive phrasing, like "imagine getting angry over this" / "imagine caring about this", etc. It is, of course, generally the more angry person who accuses the other person of being angry.
Comments
I've seen the phrase "we're just like a startup" used to correctly convey the project being a wild bet that's unlikely to succeed, and sometimes also lacking resources to execute. Ofc the upside of the unlikely success would not include your previously worthless stock options going way up in value, and the downside of failure would not include losing one's job; in fact, a doomed 2-3 year project might result in many key people getting promoted and the team kept intact and redeployed to do some other doomed project. It's still a bit different from the phrase conveying nothing apart from the big company blindness of the person using it, though it's admittedly not _that_ different.
I've encountered this a lot as well. Some more phrases : "I always try to objectively look at all different angles" (the opposite being true) or (depending on the intonation) "of course I knew that" (nope, you didn't). On a more abstract level this can be reduced to "to be" vs "to do", i.e. "I am such a great coder" vs "I created two open source projects, ffmpeg and videolan, that everyone in the video world relies on". Hence I'm always wary of someone saying "I am xyz", as opposed to "I recently did xyz".
