This was initially written in response to “Communicating effective altruism better—Jargon” by Rob Wiblin (Facebook link), but stands alone well and says something important. Rob argues that we should make more of an effort to use common language and avoid jargon, especially when communicating to audiences outside of your subculture.
I disagree.
If you’re writing for a particular audience and can do an editing pass, then yes, you should cut out any jargon that your audience won’t understand. A failure to communicate is a failure to communicate, and there are no excuses. For public speaking and outreach, your suggestions are good.
But I worry that people will treat your suggestions as applying in general, and trying to extinguish jargon terms from their lexicon. People have only a limited ability to code-switch. Most of the time, there’s no editing pass, and the processes of writing and thinking are comingled. The practical upshot is that people are navigating a tradeoff between using a vocabulary that’s widely understood outside of their subculture, and using the best vocabulary for thinking clearly and communicating within their subculture.
When it comes to thinking clearly, some of the jargon is load-bearing. Some of it is much more load-bearing than it looks. On the margin, people should be using jargon more.
I’m the author of Rationality Cardinality (http://carddb.rationalitycardinality.com/card/all/). The premise of the game is, I curated a collection of concepts that I thought it was important for people to be familiar with, optimized the definitions, and mixed them together with some jokes. I’ve given a lot of thought to what makes good jargon terms, and the effects that using and being immersed in jargon has on people.
I’m also a developer of LessWrong, a notoriously jargon-heavy site. We recently integrated a wiki, and made it so that if a jargon term links to the appropriate wiki page, you can hover over it for a quick definition. In the medium to long term, we hope to also have some mechanisms for getting jargon terms linked without the post author needing to do it, like having readers submit suggested linkifications, or a jargon-bot similar to what they have on the SpaceX wiki (which scans for keywords and posts a comment with definitions of all of them).
Jargon condenses ideas, but the benefit of condensation isn’t speed. Short phrases are more accessible to our thoughts, and more composeable. The price of replacing “steelmanning” with “giving the best defense of a position” is to less-often notice that steelmanning is an option, or that someone is doing it. The price of replacing “Moloch” with “coordination problems” is to stop noticing when what look like villain-shaped problems are actually coordination problems instead.
Much of our jargon is writers’ crystallized opinions about which concepts we should have available, and the jargon is the mechanism for doing so. If we reject those opinions, we will not notice what we fail to notice. We will simply see less clearly.
Appendix: A few illustrative examples from the slides
If I replaced the term “updated” with “changed my mind” in my lexicon, then I’d get tripped up whenever I wanted to tell someone my probability estimate had gone from 10% to 20%, or (worse) when I wanted to tell them my probability estimate had gone up, but didn’t want to commit to a new estimate. Ie, the power of the word “updating” is not that it’s extra precise, it’s that it’s *imprecise* in a way that’s useful.
Replacing “agenty” with “proactive and independent-minded” feels like obliterating the concept entirely, in a way that feels distinctly Orwellian. I think what’s actually going on here is that this concept requires a lot more words to communicate, but it also happens to be a concept that the villains in Orwell’s universe would actually try to erase, and this substitution would actually erase it.
Replacing “credence” with “estimate of the probability” would imply the existence of a person-independent probability to be argued over. This is a common misunderstanding, attached to a conversational trap, and this trap is enough of a problem in practice that I think I’d rather be occasionally inscrutable than lead people into it.
Now I would like to see an article that would review the jargon, find the nearest commonly used term for each term, and explain the difference the way you did (or possibly admit that there is no important difference).
This was initially written in response to “Communicating effective altruism better—Jargon” by Rob Wiblin (Facebook link), but stands alone well and says something important. Rob argues that we should make more of an effort to use common language and avoid jargon, especially when communicating to audiences outside of your subculture.
I disagree.
If you’re writing for a particular audience and can do an editing pass, then yes, you should cut out any jargon that your audience won’t understand. A failure to communicate is a failure to communicate, and there are no excuses. For public speaking and outreach, your suggestions are good.
But I worry that people will treat your suggestions as applying in general, and trying to extinguish jargon terms from their lexicon. People have only a limited ability to code-switch. Most of the time, there’s no editing pass, and the processes of writing and thinking are comingled. The practical upshot is that people are navigating a tradeoff between using a vocabulary that’s widely understood outside of their subculture, and using the best vocabulary for thinking clearly and communicating within their subculture.
When it comes to thinking clearly, some of the jargon is load-bearing. Some of it is much more load-bearing than it looks. On the margin, people should be using jargon more.
I’m the author of Rationality Cardinality (http://carddb.rationalitycardinality.com/card/all/). The premise of the game is, I curated a collection of concepts that I thought it was important for people to be familiar with, optimized the definitions, and mixed them together with some jokes. I’ve given a lot of thought to what makes good jargon terms, and the effects that using and being immersed in jargon has on people.
I’m also a developer of LessWrong, a notoriously jargon-heavy site. We recently integrated a wiki, and made it so that if a jargon term links to the appropriate wiki page, you can hover over it for a quick definition. In the medium to long term, we hope to also have some mechanisms for getting jargon terms linked without the post author needing to do it, like having readers submit suggested linkifications, or a jargon-bot similar to what they have on the SpaceX wiki (which scans for keywords and posts a comment with definitions of all of them).
Jargon condenses ideas, but the benefit of condensation isn’t speed. Short phrases are more accessible to our thoughts, and more composeable. The price of replacing “steelmanning” with “giving the best defense of a position” is to less-often notice that steelmanning is an option, or that someone is doing it. The price of replacing “Moloch” with “coordination problems” is to stop noticing when what look like villain-shaped problems are actually coordination problems instead.
Much of our jargon is writers’ crystallized opinions about which concepts we should have available, and the jargon is the mechanism for doing so. If we reject those opinions, we will not notice what we fail to notice. We will simply see less clearly.
Appendix: A few illustrative examples from the slides
If I replaced the term “updated” with “changed my mind” in my lexicon, then I’d get tripped up whenever I wanted to tell someone my probability estimate had gone from 10% to 20%, or (worse) when I wanted to tell them my probability estimate had gone up, but didn’t want to commit to a new estimate. Ie, the power of the word “updating” is not that it’s extra precise, it’s that it’s *imprecise* in a way that’s useful.
Replacing “agenty” with “proactive and independent-minded” feels like obliterating the concept entirely, in a way that feels distinctly Orwellian. I think what’s actually going on here is that this concept requires a lot more words to communicate, but it also happens to be a concept that the villains in Orwell’s universe would actually try to erase, and this substitution would actually erase it.
Replacing “credence” with “estimate of the probability” would imply the existence of a person-independent probability to be argued over. This is a common misunderstanding, attached to a conversational trap, and this trap is enough of a problem in practice that I think I’d rather be occasionally inscrutable than lead people into it.
Now I would like to see an article that would review the jargon, find the nearest commonly used term for each term, and explain the difference the way you did (or possibly admit that there is no important difference).
Why does the link for rationality cardinality go through facebook?
This comment was crossposted with Facebook, and Facebook auto-edited the link while I was editing it there. Edited now to make it a direct link.