I believe a great many problems on the net and in the world could be mitigated if more thought were given to effective, clear communication.
Here's a quote from someone who doesn't actually know the meaning of the words he's just said, cribbed from TheStreet.com, Feb 28, 2006:
"Google finance chief George Reyes, speaking at a Merrill Lynch conference Tuesday morning, said that "clearly our growth rates are slowing."
"You can see that each and every quarter... We are going to have to find new ways to monetize the business..."
"... We're getting to a point where a law of large numbers starts to take root. At the end of the day, growth will slow..."
The Law of Large Numbers is not about a slowing in the increase of an asset's value as it becomes more expensive... it's about the way in which probabilistic events become very predictable, in the aggregate, when there are lots and lots of trials.
For example, this is why insurers can sell policies and pay claims without going out of business... provided they have enough policyholders. If an insurer sells life insurance policies to two 30-year-old people, it has no idea how much risk it's taken on. Both could die these next day as readily as they could live another 60 years. If it writes policies for two million people, it can accurately predict the claims it'll pay every year going forward, because probabilistic events converge with many, many trials.
The other way to see this is the old "flip a coin" game. In two flips, you might get two heads or two tails. In ten thousand flips, the head/tails mix should be fairly close to 50/50.
What's the harm in the Google finance chief's quote? (1) Guys like this only speak to investors periodically, and don't have time to cover every important issue. Limited bandwidth has been wasted; (2) mis-speech like this tends to propagate, lowering the signal::noise ratio in other communications.