Comment by paperpunk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paperpunk | Hacker News Reader

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I can't speak for the natural sciences, but I'm an academic in an engineering department at a major university in the UK. My main criticism of the article is that it sort of lets non-humanities off the hook.

I've been sat in seminars in my group (on computer science or engineering topics) and had the same feelings as the author. People invent jargon to describe simple ideas and then convince themselves that it's more precise when it rarely is or, when it is precise, the precision isn't necessary. All it ends up doing is reducing the impact of the research. But it does help with the imposter syndrome of being an early-career academic – everyone else is using all this complicated jargon and you feel a bit like a fraud, so you need to get to grips with it quickly.

This isn't a problem unique to academia though it might be more severe there. There's a section on the gov.uk's 'Writing for GOV.UK' [1] article that I like:

"Government experts often say that because they’re writing technical or complex content for a specialist audience, they don’t need to use plain English. This is wrong.

Research [2] shows that higher literacy people prefer plain English because it allows them to understand the information as quickly as possible.

For example, research [3] into use of specialist legal language in legal documents found:

- 80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English - and the more complex the issue, the greater that preference (eg, 97% preferred ‘among other things’ over the Latin ‘inter alia’)

- the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English"

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

[2]: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/17/guest-post-clarity-is-kin...

[3]: http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&co...

Of course people prefer plain, simple English.

But jargon isn't limited to academia. Cults have their own languages, so do cultural scenes, so do generations. (Ask a teenager for details.)

So do businesses, start-ups, VCs, and so on.

IMO the original article doesn't go far enough. These jargon systems are identity markers. They're primarily intended to manage status, identify insiders, and exclude outsiders.

Arguably most academic and technical systems are designed to do this - including software. There's an argument that sometimes systems are unconsciously designed to be obscure and hard to use (e.g. Unix) for tribal reasons, not because they're a good practical solution to a given problem.

That aside, you can excuse jargon in science because it's actually useful. E.g. You won't get far trying to explain cellular biology by pointing at things and saying "This bit here. No, not that bit. This bit."

It's less useful in the humanities, because the philosophical and academic content in the modern humanities is as much an identity marker as the jargon is.

It's not there to provide creative insight or to wield political power. (It doesn't score high on either count.) It's there to provide evidence of tribal membership.

Clearly, if academics then decide they want to talk to the public, they immediately have a problem, because you can't talk to the public using thought and language systems that are designed to exclude the public.

This is the first piece I've seen by an academic that understands this.

> Clearly, if academics then decide they want to talk to the public, they immediately have a problem, because you can't talk to the public using thought and language systems that are designed to exclude the public.

> This is the first piece I've seen by an academic that understands this.

Understanding of this is implicit in every book an academic writes for a general audience.

People will prefer plain language - as someone famous whose name eludes me at this point said, if you can't explain something to a grade schooler (or something to that effect), you don't understand the problem. But if you know your field, and if your audience knows your field, I'd argue that you can convey ideas more rapidly, and more accurately than if you were using plain english.

It's like using strings when a more specific, constrained type would provide more type safety I guess.

There's obviously some middle ground between self-aggrandizing jargon and Up-Goer Five [1]. I think most disciplines will come to the necessary jargon over time, just as "plain English" comes to the necessary words. But it will always be a messy process.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1133/

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