Ambiguity is a friend of the deceitful and an enemy to good will. The only time ambiguity is useful is in abstract art exclusively for entertainment purposes, and only when it's understood by the consumer as such. Corrupt politicians and amoral lawyers love ambiguity, which is why there is an increasing demand for transparency and meaningful debate in both government and politics. Instead they increase the supply of misinformation and confusion to combat the supply of community-building productive information and productive meaning.

The Information Age was born shortly after the Age of Reason, as reasoning was and always will be based on information. The information without (productive meaning) correct interpretation, either from lack of education or misinformation, immediately gave way to excessive definitions for the same words and excessive words for single definitions within the same language. Paper-based guides like dictionaries, thesauruses and encyclopedias could not be edited, reproduced or widely distributed fast enough to combat the ambiguity given the limits and technology at the beginning of these ages. Ambiguity out grew productive meaning at an exponential rate, to the point that ambiguity was (counter-productive) corrosive meaning.

This quickly evolved into the Age of Confusion which we are in now. Lack of education or too much information is often to blame. There is no such thing as too much education and too much information. The culprit is too much ambiguity.

Ambiguity is profitable only to the small minority of us who benefit from the confusion. It's not the amount of information that makes information confusing, but the increasingly wider range of inadequate interpretations of information. This is compounded by obfuscation and lies, corrosive to the minority of any group of any size. Often a lie is believed by the majority even after proof or confession of a lie. But even with the absence of lies, ambiguity conceals truth more than it reveals it.

I fantasize about an "Age of Meaning" where everyone understands what everyone else with no confusion other than what comes from elementary-school-aged literacy. I doubt we will ever get to such an age. But if we do, it will be via an Age of Disambiguation. This age begins when the rate of collective disambiguation outpaces collective growing confusion, obfuscation, and misinformation combined.

In either case, we should all contribute to disambiguation for the sake of community and a productive political process. This may require us to be a little more anal about correct interpretation of words.

The rules have changed. We are armed with better technology than we had at the beginning of the Age of Reason, and the beginning of the World Wide Web. We can write in hypertext by taking the time to expand on every ambiguous or anticipated unfamiliar word in our sentences, as demonstrated in this sentence. There is online dictionaries and thesauruses that are constantly updated, which have solved the distribution problem for most of the world. There is online collaborative ongoing end-user-edited technology such as the wiki. The wikipedia is the best use of this technology so far. There is even an online Urban Dictionary to bridge the gap between formal intellectual speak and street slang. Online polls build consensus in meaning. In addition to stimulating new ideas, forums like CGCS build consensus in meaning useful to the small group at least if not for the broader community.

So if you want to improve your social environment, contribute to the disambiguation of our national and international knowledge pools.

http://trac.syr.edu/aboutTRACgeneral.html
Research group at Syracuse University

The purpose of TRAC is to provide the American people -- and institutions of oversight such as Congress, news organizations, public interest groups, businesses, scholars and lawyers -- with comprehensive information about federal staffing, spending, and the enforcement activities of the federal government. On a day-to-day basis, what are the agencies and prosecutors actually doing? Who are their employees and what are they paid? What do agency actions indicate about the priorities and practices of government? How do the activities of an agency or prosecutor in one community compare with those in a neighboring one or the nation as a whole? How have these activities changed over time? How does the record of one administration compare with the next? When the head of an agency or a district administrator changed, were there observable differences in actual enforcement priorities? When a new law was enacted or amended, what impact did it have on agency activities?

TRAC's History
TRAC was established in 1989 as a research center at Syracuse University. It has offices there, and in Washington, D.C. It has been supported by Syracuse University, foundations such as the Rockefeller Family Fund, the New York Times Company Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Beldon Fund and the Open Society Institute, research grants and contracts, and fees which help offset the costs of providing services to academics, reporters, attorneys and others subscribing to TRACFED, or those requesting specialized research and data set preparation.

TRAC's Use of FOIA TRAC's core purpose is to make information about the federal government's enforcement and regulatory effort more accessible to the public. An essential step in this process is TRAC's systematic and informed use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The basic principle of FOIA is very simple: The records of the federal government should be generally public. All you need to do is ask. But because of the sheer number of records, the vast complexity in how information is recorded and stored, and the uneasiness many agencies feel about the public examining their day-to-day performance, the actual process of obtaining federal records is far from simple. In fact, the systematic collection of such information usually is a difficult and time-consuming task. So difficult, in fact, that many news organizations, public interest groups, scholars and others do not bother to exercise their rights under FOIA.

Because comprehensive and relevant records about what an agency is doing -- and not doing -- are essential to meaningful oversight, TRAC continuously uses the law to obtain new data about government enforcement and regulatory activities. Some agencies are remarkably open. Other agencies are not. In some circumstances TRAC has to file suit in federal court to force the release of vital data. An example of these efforts is TRAC's current suit against the Justice Department.

TRAC's Analyses of Data
Once TRAC obtains the data through its FOIA efforts, the information is analyzed. With the use of a variety of sophisticated statistical techniques, the raw information obtained from the agencies is checked and verified. Where possible, data from one agency is compared with another for general consistency. Through the addition of relevant population figures and staffing counts, the enforcement data is placed in an understandable context -- such as the per capita number of prosecutions. County-level data obtained by TRAC on significant local community features can provide useful background about specific federal enforcement activities. For example, in connection with FBI robbery investigations in a particular district, the number of branch banks operating in it would be relevant. In the same way, information on the relative number of persons 65 and over living in an area could add perspective to a report on the prosecution of fraudulent medical providers who often prey on the elderly.

The focus of these efforts is to develop as comprehensive and detailed as possible picture about what federal enforcement and regulatory agencies actually do, to describe what resources (staffing and funds) they have to work with to accomplish these tasks, and to organize all of this information to make it readily accessible to the public.

TRAC's Services
TRAC offers various information services:

TRAC Public Web Site. Since 1996, TRAC has mounted and updated a series of specialized sites on the World Wide Web with highly detailed but easy-to-access information on selected federal enforcement agencies, special topical reports, and "snapshots" about federal expenditures, staffing and enforcement. The sites -- featuring colorful maps and graphs and tens of thousands of pages of tables and other supporting material -- are available without charge to anyone with access to the web. Currently featured are separate TRAC Web sites describing the enforcement activities and staffing patterns of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the U.S. Customs Service.


TRACFED is TRAC’s dynamic subscription site. It provides a vast range of information about federal enforcement activities -- criminal, civil, and administrative -- as well as detailed information about federal staffing, federal funds, and the diverse characteristics of counties, federal districts, and states. Subscribers with the click of a mouse can request specific statistics, detailed listings, maps or charts and have the information return immediately to their browser. More advanced web-tools allow users to conduct tailor-made analyses of specific subsets ("data slices") they want to examine in depth. A flash movie allows you to view without charge TRACFED features.
All federal criminal enforcement activities are covered -- under any law or Justice Department program category, by any agency, and in any one of the 90 federal judicial districts or for the nation as a whole. The civil enforcement layers allows analysis of civil litigation handled by the U.S. Attorneys where the government sues or is itself the subject of a suit. In either case, broad statistical reviews as well as detailed information about individual cases or matters may be obtained. The administrative enforcement layer, now featuring information about IRS audit and collection actions, focuses upon administrative enforcement activities outside of court.

To place these enforcement activities -- criminal, civil, and administrative -- into a broader context, another layer provides detailed information on federal civilian employees, where they work, what they do, and how much they are paid. Again, broad statistical overviews including rankings and time trends are available, as well as detailed information on salary, post of duty, and occupation down to the individually named federal employee. A further layer on federal funds provides comprehensive information about where government funds are spent -- by program and agency -- for each state, federal district, and county. Finally, the community context layer provides demographic and economic information about every county, state and federal judicial district.



TRAC Training More and more, TRAC is training individuals and organizations who want to improve their ability to use data to examine the actual policies of individual U.S. Attorneys, agencies, and administrations or to explore how well or poorly a specific law is functioning. Our training does not focus on technical skills like down loading data into spreadsheets or using software-specific commands. Rather, it is designed to give students a solid framework for understanding how they can use enforcement data for constructive oversight. What information is available? How should it be explored? So far, TRAC's training has been aimed at news organizations that want to improve the quality of their reporting. Examples of the training have included one-day hands-on seminars for up to 10 reporters and editors working for news groups like the Associated Press and more intensive three-day hands-on seminars for students from a variety of different organizations. TRAC soon hopes to expand its training to other members of the oversight community such as public interest groups.


TRAC Research. Congressional committees, government agencies, public interest groups, news organizations, lawyers, scholars and others frequently hire TRAC to create specialized data packages or to conduct focused data studies. Human Rights Watch, for example, needed data on how the government was enforcing the laws against brutal law enforcement officials. Morality in Media wanted information about the federal prosecution of pornographers. One of the independent counsels sought information on how long the Justice Department took to prosecute cases under a selected group of statutes. News organizations like The New York Times, the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, the Wall Street Journal, the Rolling Stone, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe and the St Louis Post Dispatch all had data needs that TRAC could satisfy. Selected examples of how the news media, Congress, and public interest groups have used TRAC data are available in the TRAC at Work section on this web site.


The co-directors of TRAC are Susan Long, a statistician and professor in Syracuse University's School of Management who as a FOIA pioneer has specialized in federal enforcement issues for more than 25 years, and David Burnham, an investigative writer and former New York Times reporter, who has covered local, state and federal enforcement issues since 1966. TRAC has offices in Syracuse, NY and Washington, D.C..

Bill,

I see what you're saying. However, "ambiguity" is just a word. I put it in a pile with such words as "selfish" and "manipulation." Both words have come to carry a heavy load of value negativity, although neither is intrinsically bad.

If I could edit you a bit, I'd say that ambiguous communication can be a bad thing, especially in politics, which is what you're largely talking about.

In my business (psychology), the ability to deal with the ambiguous is deemed to be a sign of health and maturity.

Great statement Bill. While Tolerance for ambiguity, or Cognitive Flexability is a
positive, adaptative characteristic, Preferance for Ambiguity is not adaptative.

I think a sense of the ambiguity of life is a prerequisite for wisdom, justice, love, scientific discovery, international diplomacy, etc. Ambiguity is disconcerting and we all have a natural tendency to reduce ambiguity to our individual preconceptions of reality. Fully considering the ambiguity in any situation causes anxiety and discomfort.

Without the capacity for tolerating ambiguity we become shadows of ourselves - two dimensional, caricatures locked into stereotyped behaviors and primitive defense mechanisms. I see the ability to tolerate ambiguity as inversely proportional to the level of hyperarousal people feel. The more highly aroused (terrified/enraged) people are, the more likely they will reduce ambiguous stimuli to black and white caterories in order to function.

I think we need to teach people how to cope better with the anxiety producing onslaught of the information age and international terrorism. I like the methods psychologists have devised to help people cope with disasters. Pointing out to people how they have coped before in stressful situations, normalizing their emotions/responses to disasters, giving them practical inforamtion to allay their confusion, etc.

Attempting to create common definitions we can all mostly agree on is very valuable. I think that's different from ambiguity, though. Seems like that is the part of communication where people start by defining what they mean by certain words so everybody is reading off the same page.

I don't think many people have a preferance for ambiguity, rla. I see it like you do - a tolerance for ambiguity or cognitive flexibility. I think this ability is diminished when people are overly stimulated. In order to improve this ability we need to help people cope better with the overstimulation of information overload and fear of terrorism.

Tolerance for ambiguity from the receiving end of communications may be healthy.

Accidental use of ambiguity from the transmitting end of communications should be tolerated, but minimized and avoided whenever possible.

Intentional use of ambiguity from the transmitting end of communications in anything but abstract entertainment is what we shouldn't tolerate.

It is.



Can you describe intentional use of ambiguity from the transmitting end with some more concrete examples? I don't think ambiguity has anything to do with entertainment - but maybe it does.

"War on Terror"

Abstractionism

"War on Terror" is intentionally ambiguous for strategic purposes. There is little consensus on what the word "terror" means, and who the real enemies are in such a war. This ambiguity allows the administration to label anyone a terrorist or accuse them of aiding terrorist for almost any reason in a war with no foreseeable end.

If it were something more concrete like "war against al Qaeda", then we would be able to hold the administration more accountable for not stopping al Qaeda or going after groups other than al Qaeda. Then defeating al Qaeda would be the end of a war that war profiteers and neocons don't want to end.

The Patriot Act is another one because there isn't much consensus on what it means to be a patriot. Some people consider it a patriotic duty to question authority. Others consider it unpatriotic. Rights are stripped and people don't question it for fear of being unpatriotic. The people who try to protect our country get persecuted by it.

It happens in corporate politics and courts of law as well. Ambiguity is used intentionally to dilute unmistakable meaning to a judgement call at best. Job descriptions are left open so employees can be held responsible for all failure while their managers take credit for their success. Defense attorneys get criminals off on reasonable doubt. It happens in relationships when a partner hints at what they want, leaving themselves the options of saying they never wanted it if it turns out bad.

Ambiguity is often used as a tool to intentionally confuse and cloud judgment. But even when it's unintentional, we should make every effort to minimize and avoid ambiguity. This doesn't mean we all become machines with no fuzzy logic. This doesn't mean we take the fun out of life. It just means we save the ambiguity exclusively for mutual entertainment.

Another example of transmitting ambiguity (intentionally or accidentally) is to call a distinction an oversimplification. A distinction is a tool for managing complexity without necessarily denying the existence of detail.

A distinction is saying 9 millimeters is less than a centimeter and 11 millimeters is more than a centimeter. An oversimplification would be saying that there is no millimeters, only centimeters.

This is what people do when they either can't, refuse to, or want to deny others from dealing with the complexity or the fine details of a situation. Instead these people accuse others of avoiding what they themselves are avoiding.

In order to deal with complexity or fine details there must first be a course frame of reference. Relative to centimeters, meters are a course frame of reference. Relative to meters, centimeters and millimeters are fine details. Without the course frames of reference, the fine details are noticeable but less manageable. Without the word meter, word millimeter would be meaningless.

Calling a distinction an oversimplification is like calling a centimeter an oversimplification of millimeters.

Another tool of modern technology that makes disambiguation easier is the search engine. The search engine can be used to determine what terms are more widely used or understood.

When I made the last post, I wasn't sure if I was using the proper word for describing course in the contexts of describing detail. I looked up "corse" and "course" in the dictionary. There were 40 definitions to sort out. So instead I searched the word in context of a phrase on Google. "corse sandpaper" yielded 579 results and "course sandpaper" yielded 746,000 results.

579 results is proof that improper use of terms is wide spread. 746,000 results proves which term is more acceptable.

I googled "Coarse sandpaper" and got 225,000 hits.

So what does that prove? That we are a nation of bad spellers?

I did the phrase "Coarse sandpaper" in quotation marks and only got 33,800 hits. Without quotation marks I got 231,000 hits

Many of us are bad spellers. So often that the misspelled words get added to the dictionary, increasing the supply of ambiguity. That was my point of why search engines are a more useful disambiguation tools than the dictionary.

However, after reading the coarse definition, I guess I was one of those bad spellers. :embarrassed:

Being one of those bad spellers myself, this proves that I need to improve my methods of disambiguation. Thanks for being a disambiguator and pointing out the correct spelling.

My wife is a better speller than me, next time I will ask her before I do a Google search.

You spelled "course" correctly.

But it's a homonym.

Like right and write.

Besides, the great vice as well as the great virtue of Google is that it is skewed by the users that query it.

Googling "Miserable Failure" takes you to the White House site.

It's a technique called "Google bombing"

I just recently started using Goggle. One of the first things I noticed (For the benefit of those who wonder if we here at CGCS are ever heard?), of the concepts I've Goggled, most got a first on second page reference to a CGCS
discussion. I don't know much about surfing the web, but this indicates to me, that we are pretty much pluged in to the World Wide Web Live Data Base 24-7.

Another question I would like help with?Where do you go to get a comparison of what you get from a comprehensive, traditional review of the scientific and professional literature with what you get from a comprehensive web search via search engines?

Do you mean a comparison of theories, or a comparison of critiques?

At the moment I don't recall where I picked up the concept but there is good reason to assume that each person has a customary level of stimulation-activation (resulting from the interaction of genetics, maturation and learning).
The height of this bell shaped curve, rising from waking to sleep. is normally distributed in the population and may be represented by personality types from
race horses to snails.The experience of feeling bored is essentially that of experienceing less than customary stimulation-activation while the feeling of being
overwhelmed and anxious is that of too much stimulation. The better Self Management, Relationship Management and Life Management skills the Person has, the better they can anticipate and arrange for an optimume level of stimulation-activations. This self-in-situation adaptation will reduce the perceived
ambiguity in one's life and help to better tolerate the ambiguity that is inherent in growth experiences.

Ultimately both. A critique of the two methods' for assessing the goodness-of-fit
of particular theories or conceptuals models with the empirical data available to test them.

The wikipedia is a good place to start for both critique of theories and methods, as well as the theories themselves. If there is a subject matter that is under scientific debate, it is most likely being settled on the wikipeda with less bias than you would get anywhere else.

From there you can do Google searches on the sources referenced in the wikipedia.

I disagree with the premise that ambiguity is the real problem. The real problem is deception. Deliberate ambiguity is just one tool among many. And accidental ambiguity is simply a fact of life that is easily handled by honest people whenver it arises.

You are confusing Vagueness and Ambiguity, an ironic confusion in a topic about Ambiguity. "War on Terror" is vague, therefore it covers many meanings. It is not ambiguous. An ambiguous reference would be "World War," since it doesn't specifiy if it is I, II or the always worrisome, III.

Sometimes a distinction is in fact an oversimplification when it leaves out a salient detail. For example, if we are choosing people to play on a pro basketball team, and knowing we don't want anyone too short, we might separate them into two groups, those under 5 feet and those over 5 feet. This distinction is a form of oversimplification and creates ambiguity because it leaves out the fact that most people over 5 feet tall are still much too short to play pro basketball, and we still would not know if the members of our team were tall enough or not.

It's not deception or ambiguity. It's deception enabled by ambiguity.

In 1978, the worst aviation disaster as of that time in history happened over my city because there was confusion over instructions from air traffic control. I'm sure everyone was honest despite that accident.

So I guess you don't want to be a disambiguator.

Look up ambiguity in the dictionary and you'll see that vagueness is the first synonym listed. Note that there are multiple definitions of both words.

The word ambiguity may be ambiguous, but I chose it because the topic is about disambiguation and disvagueation is not a word.

Offering alternate meanings, when the context of the word in this thread is relatively straight forward, only makes the word more ambiguous than it needs to be. The word "ambiguous" only has 2 definitions while "vagueness" has 6. The word "vagueness" is more vague than "ambiguity" is ambiguous.

In the example, "distinction" is not the problem. The "criteria" is the problem. "Short" and "tall" are distinctions. "5 feet" would be the criteria for determining who's short and who's tall, . Distinctions are just the labels you put on the different groups.

Distinctions are not to include or exclude detail. Distinctions sort out detail. A distinction is like a folder in a file cabinet separating the documents. You wouldn't say that the file cabinet is an oversimplification of documents. You might even say that the low-tech folders making distinction are an oversimplification of data compared to a computerized database. But I would respond that having only one criteria for sorting would be the oversimplification compared to database technology.

The only distinction that would exclude detail would be the distinction between what documents will be filed and what documents are trash. What is trash would be based on the criteria for distinction. If your assistant trashed something important, you wouldn't blame the file folder, file cabinet, or the trash for being distinct. You would blame the assistant for having a faulty criteria for what is trash and what is not.

I tend to agree with PP. I think the lack of Trust and Trustworthiness is the most pervasive problem at every level of the human social system.

Oh boy, this topic is more trouble for me than it's worth. For me to discuss it, we would need disambiguate ambiguity, vagueness and deception. And you don't seem to want to do that. Even if you did, it would put me in the unusual position of arguing with a dictionary, which I have never been able to do online, but I have rarely been able to do in person, but only with lawyers and readers of William Safire's "On Language" column.

You are entitled to your opinion, and maybe you will come to some good conclusion on this thread. But I would just muck it up, and that's a fact. See you on the next thread.

The thread isn't to question if deception is worse than ambiguity. I'm sure most people (including myself) would agree that it is. Ambiguity is one of many tools used to deceive. The worst would probably be outright lies with an ounce of truth to make them believable.

The point of disambiguation is to take away one of the tools for deception and minimize accidental ambiguity for the sake of better communication. Because lies and deception are worse than ambiguity alone, it doesn't make disambiguation a futile effort. Disambiguation surely wouldn't make the situation any worse.

I'm not sure I understand any of the above.... It strikes me as having far too much emphasis on words and the cerebellar logic of words. I'm sure I'll need to do some more reading, though, to try to get a handle on this thread.

But a couple of things come to mind:

"The map is not the terrain."

The human mind is distributed throughout the body, and is not dominantly or even always preferentially located in the frontal lobes.

The apparently separate factors of mind, body, emotion, intellect and spirit are, in fact, inseparable. For better or worse, each supports and feeds on the other.

The Heisenberg Principle

Several recent emerging themes in education are those of emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence.

If we are visceral beings made of atoms which are mostly nothing living in a cosmic stream that is ever-changing, there must be some room for ambiguity.

But I'm not sure about that....

I'll wait to see how I feel about it tomorrow.

There is room for some ambiguity in the cosmic stream mansion.

There's a party suite for the exclusively entertaining ambiguity.

There's a temporary guest suite for unavoidable ambiguity.

There is no vacancy for the avoidable ambiguity:

The intentionally deceptive ambiguity should be put in jail or shot on sight.

Well said. Nothing unclear there.

My comments above ought not to be construed as neither respectful of nor desirous of clean, crisp, understandable, brief and illuminating prose. I'm still working on it (especially the brevity part). Maybe what I am trying to get at is that ambiguity is an understandable and acceptable waypoint on the way to clarity.

http://www.google.com/maphp?hl=en&tab=il&q=Clarity

Ambiguous information is preferable to no information. But we shouldn't take comfort in ambiguity when clarity is an option.

Bill, I think I use the phrase, "Make Explicit What Is" to name one of the major
"curative" processes in counseling and psychotherapy, in a similar way to your use of the concept, "disambiguation" in general interpersonal communication.

Well, we're getting closer together.... I think we can take comfort in ambiguity when we understand that people have different viewpoints, there are different theories, and that we may not understand everything. This should push us to learn and explore and dialogue. I agree with you in the sense that, if clarity is staring us in the face, we can't afford to ignore it or approach it or seek it.

I take comfort in the diversity, and I'm sometimes entertained by the accidental ambiguity. But I don't see a point in letting it rule us.

We have a choice. We can clean up our language or spend most of our time guessing.

I'm totally with you here. When my wife and I got married she had a 9 year old son whom I developed a big brother and somewhat fatherly role. I never thought I got much respect from him generally, but one day when he was about 12, he
and 2 of his friends were having an argumnet at our table and he said to them, "Ask Robert, he's a word mechanic. I had never heard that expression and
I thought it was a Hell of a nice compliment.

Word Mechanic. I never heard it before but I like it. It makes me think of language as a communication machine with parts that need to be maintained, repaired, or upgraded. If the communication machine is faulty, communication is faulty. We all pay. Therefore we should all be word mechanics.


Maybe they should teach grammar with that attitude in mind, that students are not just there to learn what has been perfected, but that students have a life-long responsibility to maintain, repair, and upgrade the imperfect for the sake of a better society.

A disambiguator would be a skilled word mechanic.

Post Literacy

Another route to disambiguation that may not require redefining or clarifying words at all.

I don't know which part of the human experience became corrupt first, our motives or our language. I'm certain that corrupt motives and corrupt language continue to corrupt each other. It's a match made in hell.

That gives me an idea for a poll