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gjm comments on Antijargon Project - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: jkaufman 05 May 2013 05:26PM

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Comment author: James_Miller 05 May 2013 06:32:22PM 11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gjm 06 May 2013 12:09:20AM 5 points [-]

This seems nonresponsive to jkaufman's stated reason for trying to minimize jargon instead of using it optimally, namely this:

If we were smart enough to keep up fully independent vocabularies where we would always use the right words for the people we were talking to, this wouldn't be an issue. But instead we get in the habit of saying weird words, and then when we want to talk to people who don't know those words we either struggle to find words they know or waste a lot of time introducing words.