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James_Miller comments on Antijargon Project - Less Wrong Discussion
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Part of being an effective communicator is optimizing what you say for your audience. You shouldn't take pride in not trying to do this. Train your brain to make optimal use of jargon given your audience, not to minimize your use of jargon.
New college professors often have trouble teaching "down" to the level of their students, but the solution for them is not to lower the complexity of their conversations with everyone, but rather to train their brains to respond differently when talking to students as opposed to colleagues.
This seems nonresponsive to jkaufman's stated reason for trying to minimize jargon instead of using it optimally, namely this:
I agree with you that it's useful to optimize communication strategies for your audience. However, I don't think that always results in using shared jargon. Deliberately avoiding jargon can presumably provide new perspectives, or clarify issues and definitions in much the way that a rationalist taboo would.
But good jargon reduces the time it takes to communicate ideas and so allows for more time to gain new perspectives.
Unless the jargon perpetuates a false dichotomy, or otherwise obscures relevant content. In politics, those who think in terms of a black-and-white distinction between liberal and conservative may have a hard time understanding positions that fall in the middle (or defy the spectrum altogether). Or, on LessWrong, people often employ social-status-based explanations. We all have the jargon for that, so it's easy to think about and communicate, but focusing on status-motivations obscures people's other motivations.
(I was going to explain this in terms of dimensionality reduction, but then I thought better of using potentially-obscure machine learning jargon. =) )