I’ve always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity. I plan to add a lot of jargon to an Anki deck, to avoid hand-waving at big concepts quite so much.
However, there are still some pretty big drawbacks in certain circumstances. A recent Slate Star Codex comment expressed it better than I ever have:
One cautionary note about “Use strong concept handles”:
This leans very close to coining new terms, and that can cause problems.
Dr. K. Eric Drexler coined quite a few of them while arguing for the feasibility of atomically precise fabrication (aka nanotechnology): “exoergic”, “eutactic”, “machine phase”, and I think that contributed to his difficulties.
If a newly coined term spreads widely, great! Yes it will an aid to clarity of discussion.
If it spreads throughout one group, but not widely, then it becomes an in-group marker.
To the extent that it marks group boundaries, it then becomes yet another bone of contention.
If it is only noticed and used within a very small group, then it becomes something like project-specific jargon – cryptic to anyone outside a very narrow group (even to the equivalent of adjacent departments), and can wind up impeding communications.
Although compressing a complex concept down to a short term obviously isn’t lossless compression, I hadn’t considered how confusing the illusion of transparency might be. I would have strongly preferred that “Thinking Fast and Slow” continue to use the words “fast” and “slow”. As such, these were quite novel points:
they don’t immediately and easily seem like you already understand them if you haven’t been exposed to that particular source
they don’t overshadow people who do know them into assuming that the names contain the most important features
The notion of using various examples to “triangulate” a precise meaning was also a new concept to me too. It calls to mind the image of a Venn diagram with 3 circles, each representing an example. I don’t think I have mental models for several aspects of learning. Gwern’s write up on spaced repetition gave me an understanding about how memorization works, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a similar gap in my model (or lack thereof) for how understanding works.
(I’m not sure the triangulation metaphor lends much additional predictive power. However, an explicit model is a step up from a vague notion that it’s useful to have more examples with more variety.)
I’ve always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity. I plan to add a lot of jargon to an Anki deck, to avoid hand-waving at big concepts quite so much.
However, there are still some pretty big drawbacks in certain circumstances. A recent Slate Star Codex comment expressed it better than I ever have:
:)
Feels good to change a mind. I’m curious if there were any parts of the post in particular that connected for you.
Although compressing a complex concept down to a short term obviously isn’t lossless compression, I hadn’t considered how confusing the illusion of transparency might be. I would have strongly preferred that “Thinking Fast and Slow” continue to use the words “fast” and “slow”. As such, these were quite novel points:
The notion of using various examples to “triangulate” a precise meaning was also a new concept to me too. It calls to mind the image of a Venn diagram with 3 circles, each representing an example. I don’t think I have mental models for several aspects of learning. Gwern’s write up on spaced repetition gave me an understanding about how memorization works, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a similar gap in my model (or lack thereof) for how understanding works.
(I’m not sure the triangulation metaphor lends much additional predictive power. However, an explicit model is a step up from a vague notion that it’s useful to have more examples with more variety.)