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Comment by Smaug123 | Hacker News Reader

One curious thing I've noticed after completing my master's degree in maths is that the jargon of maths sometimes lets mathematicians communicate with far fewer words than non-mathematicians. Irritatingly, I can't remember any off the top of my head, though I know I've experienced this a few times. Here are some contrived and ineffective examples, where I put context in [square brackets]:

- "To first order, [the intervention turned out badly]" - "Modulo [this error, everything is going fine]" - "[The situation is] symmetric on interchanging [me and you]" - "[They are in] the same class under the equiv. rel. of…"

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I think this extends to jargon from scientific fields in general–e.g. "on the margin" from economics, "failure mode" from engineering, "significant" vs "substantial" (statistics), "system 1/system 2" (psychology), etc.

See also 100+ Concepts To Add To Your Cognitive Toolkit (including all comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819355

Signal v. Noise is also priceless.

Every discipline and even hobbyist/fan-group seems to have their own little “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”s.

See.

Just curious, what's the difference between significant and substantial?

Significant, as in "statistically significant", usually that you've got sufficient evidence to conclude that your result is not simply due to random chance.

Substantial means that your result is big enough to have any practical import. In other words, is there any substance to the result?

For an example of a result that is significant but not substantial, suppose you find after surveying millions of people that members of demographic group X score 1/10 point higher than average on an IQ test.

For an example of a result that is substantial but not significant, sales figures are often so variable that it's impossible to determine with confidence whether even a 100% jump in revenues is due to a recent ad campaign or just a random fluke.

Significant - it matters. Substantial - of large magnitude.

This is true, but mathematical jargon is more broadly applicable. (Though at this level of detail I would roll stats in with probabilty and hence pretend it is part of maths).

I've been a physicist and am now a software engineer. I can use the maths based jargon in both those fields, but not vice versa.

That's partly because everyone in a STEM field had to learn at least some maths. But more importantly: maths is about the logical interconnection of things, while the things themselves are substitutable. So it is no suprise that its jargon can be applied in many fields.

https://xkcd.com/435/

Made me remember this. If only the 'upper' fields adopt mathematical naming where applicable :D

This phenomenon is just a facet of having a robust, shared vocabulary. Words can be shorthand for complex ideas. Knowing more words allows you to express intricate matters with ease. This fact is why in 1984 the regime is trying to shrink the dictionary and simplify the language.

The totalitarian authority in 1984 actually has the exact opposite goal. They wanted to control creativity, self expression, and thinking of new ideas as much as possible, and one of the methods to achieve this goal was to try to reduce the number of words being used in the general vocabulary of the public.

The same is true of programming. I also can't remember specific exchanges off the top of my head but I know I've used "it's a FIFO" and "do a binary search" to refer to non-programming related tasks.

Latency throughput tradeoffs is the one I always seem to be trying to explain to non CS people.

My partner has (she says) treasured my comment to her once that the second derivative of her emotional plane is very low. I meant that she is very stable and doesn't suddenly fly into some weird emotional state. I couldn't think of any other way of putting it.

There's a joke in there about third derivatives of displacement (jerk).

What's the term for encountering some relatively unlikely concept multiple times in a short period? I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for the physics-variant of "jerk".

That's the same one. I meant third derivative of position which is the derivative of acceleration, which is "jerk".

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

I'm frequently frustrated when I'm trying to do chores, or something else, with someone who doesn't understand the concept of parallelization.

Haha, I once got into a rather frustrating discussion with my partner when discussing the optimal order and partitioning of laundry loads so that we spent the least amount of time babysitting the washer and dryer. After our third digression into understanding the concept of pipelining I decided that saving 30 minutes per week wasn't worth it :)

Laundry is the exact chore I was thinking of. Mine folds (e.g.) a few pairs of shorts, and then takes them to the dresser and puts them away. Then later, she folds more shorts, and puts them away again.

I fold everything, once, and then make one trip per handful-of-piles-of-items. Precious seconds saved! Seconds that I can use to have pointless arguments about saving precious seconds with my wife!

Yeah, but with her agile, small batch approach, if she makes a mistake on any one folding, she minimizes the amount of rework.

Similar to your third example: "Without loss of generality, [ our argument can proceed with the following assumption... ]

Same goes for the field I know well, Poetry.

Would you mind giving a couple of examples (even if they're hastily-constructed like mine)?

Take the word Love which immense ink has been used to describe. When it is used by a Poet he/she tends to have a very specific meaning that other poets understand without need of elaboration. Poetry has been in conversation with itself for a long time that it has developed strong general abstractions. I can see that in Maths as well, but I am an outsider so I could be off.

I am a poet and I have learned some advanced math. It seems like what you mean by "love" in poetry is more standardized to the subset of people that you have friends with instead of a general term that people can use like the above poster uses modulo.

Oh cool, I don't normally meet math trained poets. Any links to your work? (I am not a poet myself, just highly involved, publishing, editing, etc).

This is a book of poetry that I have self published. It is available on Kindle unlimited or you can get a sample to your device. https://www.amazon.com/Within-all-us-Joshua-Herman-ebook/dp/...

Equivalence classes aren't just jargon, they really are an important nonobvious concept.

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