Aggravated by “algorithms”

I’m mostly a descriptivist when it comes to the meaning of words. If everyone uses “literally” to mean “figuratively”, that’s fine by me. Same if there is no likelihood of confusion, as with “aggravate” for “annoy” as well as “exacerbate”. But that still leaves me plenty of room to gripe about the way in which words are used, so it’s time for a good old whinge. What got me started on this was talk about “demand destruction” in oil markets, often claimed to be a term used by economists. This piece of idiocy conflates reductions of consumption in direct response to price changes (movements along the demand curve), reductions for other reasons like the arrival of electric cars (shifts in the demand curve) and permanent shifts away from oil as a response to (presumably temporary) price shocks arising from events like the US-Iran war. Next up is “algorithm”. Until recently an algorithm was a defined procedure, guaranteed to yield a correct answer to an appropriate class of problems given…