I tend to deliberately use jargon-dense language because I think that’s usually a good thing. Something we discuss in the chat.
I also just personally seem to learn much faster by reading jargon-dense stuff.
As long as the jargon is apt, it highlights the importance of a concept (“oh, it’s so generally-applicable that it’s got a name of its own?”).
If it’s a new idea expressed in normal words, the meaning may (ill-advisably) snap into some old framework I have, and I fail to notice that there’s something new to grok about it. Otoh, if it’s a new word, I’ll definitely notice when I don’t know it.
I prefer a jargon-dump which forces me to look things up, compared to fluent text where I can’t quickly scan for things I don’t already know.
I don’t feel the need to understand everything in a text in order to benefit from it. If I’m reading something with a 100% hit-rate wrt what I manage to understand, that’s not gonna translate to a very high learning-rate.
To clarify: By “jargon” I didn’t mean to imply anything negative. I just mean “new words for concepts”. They’re often the most significant mutations in the meme pool, and are necessary to make progress. If anything, the EA community should consider upping the rate at which they invent jargon, to facilitate specialization of concepts and put existing terms (competing over the same niches) under more selection-pressure.
I suspect the problems people have with jargon is mostly that they are *unable* to change them even if they’re anti-helpfwl. So they get the sense that “darn, these jargonisms are bad, but they’re stuck in social equilibrium, so I can’t change them—it would be better if hadn’t created them in the first place.” The conclusion is premature, however, since you can improve things either by disincentivizing the creation of bad jargon, *or* increasing people’s willingness to create them, so that bad terms get replaced at a higher rate.
That said, if people still insist on trying to learn all the jargon created everywhere because they’ll feel embarrassed being caught unaware, increasing the jargon-rate could cause problems (including spending too much time on the forum!). But, again, this is a problem largely caused by impostor syndrome, and pluralistic ignorance/overestimation about how much their peers know. The appropriate solution isn’t to reduce memetic mutation-rate, but rather to make people feel safer revealing their ignorance (and thereby also increasing the rate of learning-opportunities).
Naive solutions like “let’s reduce jargon” are based on partial-equilibrium analysis. It can be compared to a “second-best theory” which is only good on the margin because the system is stuck in a local optimum and people aren’t searching for solutions which require U-shaped jumps[1] (slack) or changing multiple variables at once. And as always when you optimize complex social problems (or manually nudge conditions on partial differential equations): “solve for the general equilibrium”.
And a follow-up on why I encourage the use of jargon.
Mutation-rate ↦ “jargon-rate”
I tend to deliberately use jargon-dense language because I think that’s usually a good thing. Something we discuss in the chat.
I also just personally seem to learn much faster by reading jargon-dense stuff.
As long as the jargon is apt, it highlights the importance of a concept (“oh, it’s so generally-applicable that it’s got a name of its own?”).
If it’s a new idea expressed in normal words, the meaning may (ill-advisably) snap into some old framework I have, and I fail to notice that there’s something new to grok about it. Otoh, if it’s a new word, I’ll definitely notice when I don’t know it.
I prefer a jargon-dump which forces me to look things up, compared to fluent text where I can’t quickly scan for things I don’t already know.
I don’t feel the need to understand everything in a text in order to benefit from it. If I’m reading something with a 100% hit-rate wrt what I manage to understand, that’s not gonna translate to a very high learning-rate.
A “U-shaped jump” is required for everything with activation costs/switching costs.