| Why is this community so uncomfortable around 'woo'? Some of my ideas: Woo multiplies entities beyond necessity. Woo uses imagery (goddesses, grandmotherss, spirits, 'energy') that we find aesthetically displeasing? Woo has an anything goes feel to it (whatever is true for you...) But perhaps we should look at our own woo before criticizing others too much for theirs, after all the world of business is full of it's own sort of woo (synergize our two platforms to leverage our cloud based infrastructure going forward...) To me when someone speaks woo, it's a sign that the person may be on to something that can't yet be expressed. This can happen to techies, for example during that interval when you feel that you have solved a problem you have been working on, but can't quite express it clearly yet. But woo is so open ended, that this is only true for the best cases. Often it's just nonsense, but so are scientific abstracts and press releases sometimes. |