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malcolmocean comments on Use unique, non-obvious terms for nuanced concepts - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: malcolmocean 20 February 2016 11:25PM

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Tags: jargon

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Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 21 February 2016 06:33:06AM 4 points [-]

I've always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity. I plan to add a lot of jargon to an Anki deck, to avoid hand-waving at big concepts quite so much.

However, there are still some pretty big drawbacks in certain circumstances. A recent Slate Star Codex comment expressed it better than I ever have:

One cautionary note about “Use strong concept handles”: This leans very close to coining new terms, and that can cause problems.

Dr. K. Eric Drexler coined quite a few of them while arguing for the feasibility of atomically precise fabrication (aka nanotechnology): “exoergic”, “eutactic”, “machine phase”, and I think that contributed to his difficulties.

If a newly coined term spreads widely, great! Yes it will an aid to clarity of discussion. If it spreads throughout one group, but not widely, then it becomes an in-group marker. To the extent that it marks group boundaries, it then becomes yet another bone of contention. If it is only noticed and used within a very small group, then it becomes something like project-specific jargon – cryptic to anyone outside a very narrow group (even to the equivalent of adjacent departments), and can wind up impeding communications.

Comment author: malcolmocean 21 February 2016 10:02:26AM 3 points [-]

"I've always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity."

:)

Feels good to change a mind. I'm curious if there were any parts of the post in particular that connected for you.

Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 23 February 2016 04:06:54AM *  1 point [-]

Although compressing a complex concept down to a short term obviously isn't lossless compression, I hadn't considered how confusing the illusion of transparency might be. I would have strongly preferred that "Thinking Fast and Slow" continue to use the words "fast" and "slow". As such, these were quite novel points:

  • they don't immediately and easily seem like you already understand them if you haven't been exposed to that particular source

  • they don't overshadow people who do know them into assuming that the names contain the most important features

The notion of using various examples to "triangulate" a precise meaning was also a new concept to me too. It calls to mind the image of a Venn diagram with 3 circles, each representing an example. I don't think I have mental models for several aspects of learning. Gwern's write up on spaced repetition gave me an understanding about how memorization works, but it hadn't occurred to me that I had a similar gap in my model (or lack thereof) for how understanding works.

(I'm not sure the triangulation metaphor lends much additional predictive power. However, an explicit model is a step up from a vague notion that it's useful to have more examples with more variety.)

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