This post actually updated me significantly on the “jargon: good or bad?” debate.
Previously, I knew a bunch of good reasons why Jargon was Bad (hard to understand, unfriendly to newcomers). I nonetheless ended up believing “jargon is basically good”, because I think there’s a benefit to excluding casual outsiders and maintaining an ingroup that’s harder to hijack and can maintain higher degrees of trust (as well as the jargon just actually often pointing to specific, nuanced concepts that don’t actually have direct analogues)
The new lens I’m looking at this through is “how should truthseekers be trying to contribute to the commons?”. I’m not sure how I weigh all the constraints against each other. But, the new set of considerations I’m thinking about include:
What sort of coordination protocols are appropriate for people who are trying to be part of the Coordination Supercluster of Robust Agents
Something that’s been on my mind this year is “easy verifiability”. It matters not only that someone is not deceiving you, but that it’s legibly obvious that they’re not deceiving you.
I do think “basically every advanced field descends into jargon”, and that they are doing it for mostly good reasons. Nonetheless, it’s pretty bad that academia often isn’t even trying to be comprehensible, and in some cases I think people are actively bluffing, and the collective willingness to use jargon creates a fog-of-war where it’s easier to bluff.
A naive take on this is that having a higher average level of jargon usage makes the incomprehensibility bluff easier to pull off against people who don’t know the jargon, so you might think it reduces the legibility of peoples’ knowledge and skill levels overall. But I don’t think it works out this way in practice. My experience is that on subjects where I have medium knowledge (not an expert, but more informed than most laypeople), when I come across laypeople pretending to be experts, they often give themselves away by using a jargon term incorrectly. I also find that glossaries are a good entry point into a subject, and avoiding jargon too much would make the glossaries less useful for this purpose.
I am a bit worried about people invisibly bouncing off our community because of the jargon, but I think the jargon is important enough that I’d rather solve it by making the jargon better (and making its intellectual infrastructure better) rather reduce the amount of it.
My experience is that on subjects where I have medium knowledge (not an expert, but more informed than most laypeople), when I come across laypeople pretending to be experts, they often give themselves away by using a jargon term incorrectly.
Hmm. That is an interesting term to be in the equation.
FYI I see two related things here: one is excessive jargon, the other is unnecessarily wide inferential gaps (i.e. often you need some jargon for the point you’re making but not all of it. In the original sequences, I think it was necessary for Eliezer to bridge a lot of inferential distance, which initially required an excessively-long-braindump. But, I suspect it’s possible to collapse a lot of that down in order to make individual points.
Ultimately I think it’s still possible for groups of intellectual insiders to communicate clearly with each other and make rapid progress, and also for a lot of that to be Babble that isn’t necessarily meant to hold up rigorously. I think this is more of an additional argument in favor of reducing research debt, and making sure to distill your ideas.
And, I think maybe people should feel more of an obligation to practice communicating their ideas to laymen, not just because it’s object-level-good to be able to explain ideas to a wider audience, but because there’s a tragedy-of-the-commons where if you don’t do that, the wider audience is not only ignorant, but vulnerable.
This post actually updated me significantly on the “jargon: good or bad?” debate.
Previously, I knew a bunch of good reasons why Jargon was Bad (hard to understand, unfriendly to newcomers). I nonetheless ended up believing “jargon is basically good”, because I think there’s a benefit to excluding casual outsiders and maintaining an ingroup that’s harder to hijack and can maintain higher degrees of trust (as well as the jargon just actually often pointing to specific, nuanced concepts that don’t actually have direct analogues)
The new lens I’m looking at this through is “how should truthseekers be trying to contribute to the commons?”. I’m not sure how I weigh all the constraints against each other. But, the new set of considerations I’m thinking about include:
How to combat learned epistemic helplessness on a mass scale.
What sort of coordination protocols are appropriate for people who are trying to be part of the Coordination Supercluster of Robust Agents
Something that’s been on my mind this year is “easy verifiability”. It matters not only that someone is not deceiving you, but that it’s legibly obvious that they’re not deceiving you.
I do think “basically every advanced field descends into jargon”, and that they are doing it for mostly good reasons. Nonetheless, it’s pretty bad that academia often isn’t even trying to be comprehensible, and in some cases I think people are actively bluffing, and the collective willingness to use jargon creates a fog-of-war where it’s easier to bluff.
A naive take on this is that having a higher average level of jargon usage makes the incomprehensibility bluff easier to pull off against people who don’t know the jargon, so you might think it reduces the legibility of peoples’ knowledge and skill levels overall. But I don’t think it works out this way in practice. My experience is that on subjects where I have medium knowledge (not an expert, but more informed than most laypeople), when I come across laypeople pretending to be experts, they often give themselves away by using a jargon term incorrectly. I also find that glossaries are a good entry point into a subject, and avoiding jargon too much would make the glossaries less useful for this purpose.
I am a bit worried about people invisibly bouncing off our community because of the jargon, but I think the jargon is important enough that I’d rather solve it by making the jargon better (and making its intellectual infrastructure better) rather reduce the amount of it.
Hmm. That is an interesting term to be in the equation.
FYI I see two related things here: one is excessive jargon, the other is unnecessarily wide inferential gaps (i.e. often you need some jargon for the point you’re making but not all of it. In the original sequences, I think it was necessary for Eliezer to bridge a lot of inferential distance, which initially required an excessively-long-braindump. But, I suspect it’s possible to collapse a lot of that down in order to make individual points.
Ultimately I think it’s still possible for groups of intellectual insiders to communicate clearly with each other and make rapid progress, and also for a lot of that to be Babble that isn’t necessarily meant to hold up rigorously. I think this is more of an additional argument in favor of reducing research debt, and making sure to distill your ideas.
And, I think maybe people should feel more of an obligation to practice communicating their ideas to laymen, not just because it’s object-level-good to be able to explain ideas to a wider audience, but because there’s a tragedy-of-the-commons where if you don’t do that, the wider audience is not only ignorant, but vulnerable.