Alix—Thanks for writing this. I think it is a serious issue in terms of spreading EA from being a mostly Anglosphere movement (in UK, US, Australia, etc) to becoming a global movement,
There seem to be about 400 million native English speakers in the world, plus around another 1.5 billion people who have English as their second language (e.g. many in India and China), with varying degrees of fluency. From my experience of teaching college classes in China, often people there have much higher English fluency in writing and reading than in speaking.
So, roughly 75% of the potential English speakers in the world have English as their second rather than native language. This is a very large, often untapped market for EA ideas—people who might be able to read Singer, Bostrom, MacAskill, Ord, etc., and read EA Forum posts, but who might feel quite intimidated attention an EAG meeting in person and trying to talk with people.
I think one small, practical step we can take is to be aware of this issue when writing posts and comments on EA Forum. We often use Anglo-American colloquialisms, rather obscure academic vocabulary, and rather convoluted grammar, partly as a coolness-indicator, and partly as an intelligence-indicator. When we use EA/Rationalist in-group dialect, I imagine that might be especially confusing to outsiders.
So, when we’re writing stuff on EA Forum, I would suggest that people try to keep in mind a clear mental image of their audience—and instead of imaging our US/UK in-group friends, we should try to imagine a 22-year from Shenzhen, Mumbai, Beirut, or Prague who’s got pretty good English from a few years of school classes, but who’s not fully fluent, or familiar with current US/UK pop culture or Rationalist jargon.
I think the concern about jargon is misplaced in this context. Jargon is learned by native and non-native speakers alike as they engage with the community: it’s specifically the stuff that already knowing the language doesn’t help you with, which means not knowing the language doesn’t disadvantage you. That’s not to say jargon doesn’t have its own problems, but I think that someone who attempts to reduce jargon specifically as a way to reach non-native speakers better has probably misdirected their focus.
But a core thing that you don’t mention (maybe because you are a native speaker, and you have to not be one to realize that, not being mean here but simply stating what I think is a fact), is that jargon adds to the effort.
Not only you have to speak a flawless English and not mull over potential mistakes that potentially make you look foolish in the eyes of your interlocutor and reduce the credibility of your discourse, but you also have to use the right jargon. Add saying something meaningful in top of it: you have to pay attention to how you say things (language + jargon) and what you say.
Try handling the feeling of inferiority that inevitably arises when your interlocutor speaks a perfect English and can focus 100% on the content only on what they say while you have to handle the language + the jargon + the meaning behind and that gives you a pretty good mix to feel like a fraud, especially when you disagree with someone. Try a sensitive topic, such as prioritizing x-risk over global health, and add all that mental load. Good luck!
Ben recognizes that jargon adds effort, he is just saying it adds effort to both sides of the equation, because the nature of specialized jargon is it is not known to all native speakers:
Still, it might add more effort for the non-native speaker because a native speaker can identify something as jargon more easily. This is only a hypothesis of course, so to make progress in this discussion it might he helpful to review the literature on this.
Alix—Thanks for writing this. I think it is a serious issue in terms of spreading EA from being a mostly Anglosphere movement (in UK, US, Australia, etc) to becoming a global movement,
There seem to be about 400 million native English speakers in the world, plus around another 1.5 billion people who have English as their second language (e.g. many in India and China), with varying degrees of fluency. From my experience of teaching college classes in China, often people there have much higher English fluency in writing and reading than in speaking.
So, roughly 75% of the potential English speakers in the world have English as their second rather than native language. This is a very large, often untapped market for EA ideas—people who might be able to read Singer, Bostrom, MacAskill, Ord, etc., and read EA Forum posts, but who might feel quite intimidated attention an EAG meeting in person and trying to talk with people.
I think one small, practical step we can take is to be aware of this issue when writing posts and comments on EA Forum. We often use Anglo-American colloquialisms, rather obscure academic vocabulary, and rather convoluted grammar, partly as a coolness-indicator, and partly as an intelligence-indicator. When we use EA/Rationalist in-group dialect, I imagine that might be especially confusing to outsiders.
So, when we’re writing stuff on EA Forum, I would suggest that people try to keep in mind a clear mental image of their audience—and instead of imaging our US/UK in-group friends, we should try to imagine a 22-year from Shenzhen, Mumbai, Beirut, or Prague who’s got pretty good English from a few years of school classes, but who’s not fully fluent, or familiar with current US/UK pop culture or Rationalist jargon.
I think the concern about jargon is misplaced in this context. Jargon is learned by native and non-native speakers alike as they engage with the community: it’s specifically the stuff that already knowing the language doesn’t help you with, which means not knowing the language doesn’t disadvantage you. That’s not to say jargon doesn’t have its own problems, but I think that someone who attempts to reduce jargon specifically as a way to reach non-native speakers better has probably misdirected their focus.
But a core thing that you don’t mention (maybe because you are a native speaker, and you have to not be one to realize that, not being mean here but simply stating what I think is a fact), is that jargon adds to the effort.
Not only you have to speak a flawless English and not mull over potential mistakes that potentially make you look foolish in the eyes of your interlocutor and reduce the credibility of your discourse, but you also have to use the right jargon. Add saying something meaningful in top of it: you have to pay attention to how you say things (language + jargon) and what you say.
Try handling the feeling of inferiority that inevitably arises when your interlocutor speaks a perfect English and can focus 100% on the content only on what they say while you have to handle the language + the jargon + the meaning behind and that gives you a pretty good mix to feel like a fraud, especially when you disagree with someone. Try a sensitive topic, such as prioritizing x-risk over global health, and add all that mental load. Good luck!
Ben recognizes that jargon adds effort, he is just saying it adds effort to both sides of the equation, because the nature of specialized jargon is it is not known to all native speakers:
Native Speaker: Content + Jargon
Non-Native Speaker: Content + Language + Jargon
Still, it might add more effort for the non-native speaker because a native speaker can identify something as jargon more easily. This is only a hypothesis of course, so to make progress in this discussion it might he helpful to review the literature on this.