I wonder how far this generalizes. If it only applies to sensory disfluency it raises some interesting tradeoffs for future investigation, but if it also applies to parsing it might go some way towards explaining the fashion for deliberate obscurantism in some branches of philosophy (and other academia).
(crossposting this forum post from July, I think it has some bearing on this idea)
So I was thinking about scientists, and how they frequently write things that laypeople can’t begin to parse. Do they do this to look smart? All scientists live in a crippling fear that what they are doing is not important or groundbreaking, so like a squid they generate a defensive cloud of technical terminology to obscure that fact. For a time I thought this was the whole of the explanation, when I was at my nadir of cynicism. Then I thought, well, maybe scientists just don’t write very well. The things they write are unreadable not because of some plot to make them unreadable, but because it is the natural state of text to be unreadable, and there’s no optimization process pulling scientific writing away from that. Then I grew kinder to scientists, and thought, maybe it’s not that they can’t produce readable text, but that they don’t bother, because the point of scientific writing is to communicate facts to other scientists efficiently, and to hell with laypeople.
I have a new theory.
Human beings are not good at science. Their brains do not naturally work by looking at evidence and updating probabilities based on it, they pattern-match the things they see to the things they’ve seen before and treat them the same. The fundamental operation of the human brain is a cache lookup, and to the extent that humans have rationality it is a high-level construct built on top of it. Scientific language is an attempt to force a cache miss, a page fault, so that humans are forced to actually bring their rationality to bear instead of assuming that they already know the answers because particle physics is basically like billiards and I’m good at billiards. Take “climate change” (please). When the scientific community started talking about “climate change” instead of “global warming”, people called it a cynical political move. Through this lens, though, it looks like a desperate attempt to regain scientific neutrality for a topic that has flooded everyone’s cache due to widespread popular contention. Akin to the euphemism treadmill and the dysphemism treadmill, we have here the formalism treadmill.
Well, I was thinking more of the language you see in (e.g.) continental philosophy than in science and math, but that might just be reflecting my skillset: I’ve got a much better compatibility mode for scientific language.
That aside, though, I think there probably is a formalism treadmill in science, but I suspect it’d be more prominent in fields that intersect broadly with the public than in disciplines or branches of disciplines that mostly talk within themselves (where your “to hell with laypeople” explanation seems to suffice). We can distinguish between the two by checking the stability of language: if preferred terms change rapidly as older ones enter the lay lexicon, there’s probably a need for formalism. If they don’t, there probably isn’t—even if popular (mis)use of (e.g.) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tends to drive professionals in the discipline a little crazy.
Outside of contentious popular science topics, I’d say we tend to see that sort of unstable language in psychology and to a lesser extent in medicine. Makes sense; I can think of reasons for both to find cache misses useful when dealing with the public.
What evidence and what arguments can be produced in support of the controversial suggestion, first made by Leo Strauss now over 65 years ago, that most earlier philosophers wrote esoterically and, what is more, that they did so, not merely from fear of persecution, but with an eye to enhancing their pedagogical effectiveness? I argue here that the inherent paradoxes of philosophical education combined with the inherent shortcomings of writing led many earlier thinkers to see the pedagogical necessity of something like the “Socratic method.” And esoteric writing—a rhetoric of riddling concealment—is the closest literary approximation to the Socratic method.
My opinion of the general Straussian suggestion has been heightened by the recent claims of finding musical structures in Plato’s dialogues, who had been one of the major proposed users of esotericism.
I wonder how far this generalizes. If it only applies to sensory disfluency it raises some interesting tradeoffs for future investigation, but if it also applies to parsing it might go some way towards explaining the fashion for deliberate obscurantism in some branches of philosophy (and other academia).
(crossposting this forum post from July, I think it has some bearing on this idea)
So I was thinking about scientists, and how they frequently write things that laypeople can’t begin to parse. Do they do this to look smart? All scientists live in a crippling fear that what they are doing is not important or groundbreaking, so like a squid they generate a defensive cloud of technical terminology to obscure that fact. For a time I thought this was the whole of the explanation, when I was at my nadir of cynicism. Then I thought, well, maybe scientists just don’t write very well. The things they write are unreadable not because of some plot to make them unreadable, but because it is the natural state of text to be unreadable, and there’s no optimization process pulling scientific writing away from that. Then I grew kinder to scientists, and thought, maybe it’s not that they can’t produce readable text, but that they don’t bother, because the point of scientific writing is to communicate facts to other scientists efficiently, and to hell with laypeople.
I have a new theory.
Human beings are not good at science. Their brains do not naturally work by looking at evidence and updating probabilities based on it, they pattern-match the things they see to the things they’ve seen before and treat them the same. The fundamental operation of the human brain is a cache lookup, and to the extent that humans have rationality it is a high-level construct built on top of it. Scientific language is an attempt to force a cache miss, a page fault, so that humans are forced to actually bring their rationality to bear instead of assuming that they already know the answers because particle physics is basically like billiards and I’m good at billiards. Take “climate change” (please). When the scientific community started talking about “climate change” instead of “global warming”, people called it a cynical political move. Through this lens, though, it looks like a desperate attempt to regain scientific neutrality for a topic that has flooded everyone’s cache due to widespread popular contention. Akin to the euphemism treadmill and the dysphemism treadmill, we have here the formalism treadmill.
Well, I was thinking more of the language you see in (e.g.) continental philosophy than in science and math, but that might just be reflecting my skillset: I’ve got a much better compatibility mode for scientific language.
That aside, though, I think there probably is a formalism treadmill in science, but I suspect it’d be more prominent in fields that intersect broadly with the public than in disciplines or branches of disciplines that mostly talk within themselves (where your “to hell with laypeople” explanation seems to suffice). We can distinguish between the two by checking the stability of language: if preferred terms change rapidly as older ones enter the lay lexicon, there’s probably a need for formalism. If they don’t, there probably isn’t—even if popular (mis)use of (e.g.) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tends to drive professionals in the discipline a little crazy.
Outside of contentious popular science topics, I’d say we tend to see that sort of unstable language in psychology and to a lesser extent in medicine. Makes sense; I can think of reasons for both to find cache misses useful when dealing with the public.
“On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing”, Arthur Melzer 2007:
My opinion of the general Straussian suggestion has been heightened by the recent claims of finding musical structures in Plato’s dialogues, who had been one of the major proposed users of esotericism.