here’s your monthly (/ yearly) reminder to use simple language wherever possible.
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Jargon isn’t inherently bad, but it’s often weilded for evil. When a scientist uses jargon it’s usually for precision and clarity. But corporations and conmen use it to obfuscate, confuse, and add a veneer of science/legitimacy to their bullshit.
Jargon is great when the word used is the most accurate word for that thing, describing why it exists and what its purpose is.
Jargon is terrible when they start using that as a synonym for a simpler word, and want to sound busy and smart
Corporate abuse of language is frustrating. I’ve worked with a lot of product manager types that really want to use extra words. “Let’s just swag it”. “We need to force rank these initiatives”. “Can you do a research spike this sprint?”
Research has consistently shown those staff have the lowest productivity and also love AI.
Yes. This is what the term ‘technocratic jargon’ refers to.
Tbh, the jargon is probably clearer than the translation is. You just need to learn what words mean.
Maybe the cognitive load for reading jargon (and looking up each word you don’t know its meaning each time you stumble upon them) is higher than when reading text written in simple language
Possibly, but I’m pretty sure the “translation” doesn’t actually mean anything while the technical jargon is actually telling you something. What does an ion being “floofier” even mean? If I’m trying to communicate something about ions to someone and I’m “translating”, I’ll need to translate multiple times and ways to make it make sense to multiple people, when the listener could go look up the technical jargon themselves and get the idea of the statement.
Technical jargon exists for a reason, it is truly simpler than using ambiguous language because you don’t need to keep explaining yourself to get one concept across. Complicated concepts need very specific words, can’t always use 5th grade reading level material.
Hrmm.
I’m not an academic. I’m an engineer. I’m guessing academic jargon is similar to technical jargon.
Yesterday I heard the price of “memory” was going up and was left to wonder if that is RAM, SSD, HDD, EEPROM, FRAM, NOR data flash, …
And pictured the news presenter saying “shut up, nerd!”
I pity psychologists. Imagine how many people want to chew their ear off about narcissism, emotional labor, gaslighting, or whatever self-help pop psychologists are grifting about today.
I’ve always associated ‘memory’ with RAM. HDDs and SSDs are ‘storage’. (And the average user probably shouldn’t have to know what EEPROMs are.)
To be clear, most scientists struggle with reading many papers. So it’s not a problem with technical specificity, it’s a problem with fundamentally bad writing.
In science, unparseable writing mainly comes from the fact that people aren’t told that you need to prioritize being clear. It’s the principle behind the curse of knowledge - it’s easy to forget that people don’t know what you know and don’t think the way you think. So you end up writing in a way that only you can interpret. It takes extra effort and time to read back what you wrote and think about how other people might understand what you wrote. But that’s time that a grad student could otherwise spend being further exploited, so QA ends up falling to the wayside
Thats true, the whole system of writing is poorly taught. The purpose of writing is to convay the meaning in a suitable manner - but, what exactly is a suitable manner? Well that depends on a variety of factors such as the intended audience, subject, purpose of writing, technicality, etc. There just isn’t a singular lexicon (dictionary) - as such, reverting back to more generally known words is better design than using unrelated lexicons.
In addition, general lexicons may have issues with ambiguity. But they also can be explicitly defined using contextual cues. The point in writing is so its understandable not extravagant.
Yeah I get that people can get defensive when they are overwhelmed by jargon, but thats the beauty of language. We have so many different words that means such complex things. Its what allowed us to keep developing technology based on the layer below it. People need to get over not understanding every single word in a scientist paper, as if it’s an attack on their intelligence.
And hell I know AI gets alot of hate on Lemmy but that shit is very good at helping break down complex scientific papers with the jargon. I work in medical research and the amount of time it’s saved by helping me understand the jargon has been immense.
I’m not going to jump down your throat for suggesting AI, but I’ll mention that Wikipedia often has a “Simple English” link in the Languages section that’s a godsend for ESL people and scientific/academic subjects for lay people.
Huh damn I had no idea. Thanks, I’ll try this next time.
Nothing worse than legal jargon
ChatGPT at home
Hot take: Calvin and Hobbes is pretty cringe and stupid and this comic exemplifies why
You were right about one thing: that is a legitimately hot take
