I don’t have an overarching theory of the Hard Problem of Jargon, but I have some guesses about the sorts of mistakes people love to make. My overarching point is just “things are hard”
Working in finance, you find a lot of unnecessary jargon designed to keep smart laymen out of the discussion. AI risk is many times worse than buyside finance on this front.
This is a deeply rare phenomenon. I do think there are nonzero places with a peculiar mix of prestige and thinness of kayfabe that lead to this actually happening (like if you’re maintaining a polite fiction of meritocracy in the face of aggressive nepotism, you might rely on cheap superiority signals to nudge people into not calling BS), or in a different way I remember at when I worked at home depot supervisors may have been protecting their $2/hr pay bump by hiding their responsibilities from their subordinates (to prevent subordinates from figuring out that they could handle actually supervising if the hierarchy was disturbed). Generalizing from these scenarios to scientific disciplines is perfectly silly! Most people, a vaster majority in sciences, are extremely excited about thinking clearly and communicating clearly to as many people as possible!
I also want to point out a distinction you may be missing in anti-finance populism. A synthetic CDO is sketchy because it is needlessly complex by it’s nature, not that the communication strategy was insufficiently optimized! But you wrote about “unnecessary jargon”, implying that you think implementing and reasoning about synthetic CDOs is inherently easy, and finance workers are misleading people into thinking it’s hard (because of their scarcity mindset, to protect their job security, etc). Jargon is an incredibly weak way to implement anti-finance populism, a stronger form of it says that the instruments and processes themselves are overcomplicated (for shady reasons or whatever).
Moreover, emphasis on jargon complaints implies a destructive worldview. The various degrees and flavors of “there are no hard open problems, people say there are hard open problems to protect their power, me and my friends have all the answers, which were surprisingly easy to find, we’ll prove it to you as soon as you give us power” dynamics I’ve watched over the years seem tightly related, to me.
I actually don’t think that many steps are involved, but the presentation in the articles I’ve read makes it seem as though there is.
I do get frustrated when people tell me that “clear writing” is one thing that definitely exists, because I think they’re ignoring tradeoffs. “How many predictable objections should I address, is it 3? 6? does the ‘clear writing’ protocol tell me to roll a d6?” sort of questions get ignored. To be fair, Arbital was initially developed to be “wikipedia with difficulty levels”, which would’ve made this easier.
TLDR
I think the way people should reason about facing down jargon is to first ask “can I help them improve?” and if you can’t then you ask “have they earned my attention?”. Literally everywhere in the world, in every discipline, there are separate questions for communication at the state of the art and communication with the public. People calculate which fields they want to learn in detail, because effort is scarce. Saying “it’s a problem that learning your field takes effort” makes zero sense.
I don’t have an overarching theory of the Hard Problem of Jargon, but I have some guesses about the sorts of mistakes people love to make. My overarching point is just “things are hard”
This is a deeply rare phenomenon. I do think there are nonzero places with a peculiar mix of prestige and thinness of kayfabe that lead to this actually happening (like if you’re maintaining a polite fiction of meritocracy in the face of aggressive nepotism, you might rely on cheap superiority signals to nudge people into not calling BS), or in a different way I remember at when I worked at home depot supervisors may have been protecting their $2/hr pay bump by hiding their responsibilities from their subordinates (to prevent subordinates from figuring out that they could handle actually supervising if the hierarchy was disturbed). Generalizing from these scenarios to scientific disciplines is perfectly silly! Most people, a vaster majority in sciences, are extremely excited about thinking clearly and communicating clearly to as many people as possible!
I also want to point out a distinction you may be missing in anti-finance populism. A synthetic CDO is sketchy because it is needlessly complex by it’s nature, not that the communication strategy was insufficiently optimized! But you wrote about “unnecessary jargon”, implying that you think implementing and reasoning about synthetic CDOs is inherently easy, and finance workers are misleading people into thinking it’s hard (because of their scarcity mindset, to protect their job security, etc). Jargon is an incredibly weak way to implement anti-finance populism, a stronger form of it says that the instruments and processes themselves are overcomplicated (for shady reasons or whatever).
Moreover, emphasis on jargon complaints implies a destructive worldview. The various degrees and flavors of “there are no hard open problems, people say there are hard open problems to protect their power, me and my friends have all the answers, which were surprisingly easy to find, we’ll prove it to you as soon as you give us power” dynamics I’ve watched over the years seem tightly related, to me.
I do get frustrated when people tell me that “clear writing” is one thing that definitely exists, because I think they’re ignoring tradeoffs. “How many predictable objections should I address, is it 3? 6? does the ‘clear writing’ protocol tell me to roll a d6?” sort of questions get ignored. To be fair, Arbital was initially developed to be “wikipedia with difficulty levels”, which would’ve made this easier.
TLDR
I think the way people should reason about facing down jargon is to first ask “can I help them improve?” and if you can’t then you ask “have they earned my attention?”. Literally everywhere in the world, in every discipline, there are separate questions for communication at the state of the art and communication with the public. People calculate which fields they want to learn in detail, because effort is scarce. Saying “it’s a problem that learning your field takes effort” makes zero sense.