Antijargon Project

Coining new jargon words (neologisms) is an alternative to formulating unusually precise meanings of commonly-heard words when one needs to convey a specific meaning.

A Marxist may use the term "surplus value" to specifically mean the difference between a worker's productivity and wage. If they say "surplus value" to someone who does not recognize this specific meaning, that person may think the Marxist means "surplus" in the sense of "unnecessary excess". They may think the Marxist means that the worker's productivity is wasted, and respond accordingly. This may baffle the Marxist, who will point out that "surplus value" (in their sense) doesn't have much to do with "overproduction" (another word that has a specific meaning in Marxist economics).

Using neologisms has the advantage that it conveys readily, to someone unfamiliar with the neologism, that they are unfamiliar with it and need to ask for clarification. Using existing words with unusually precise meanings runs the risk of letting someone go past a misunderstood word without realizing that they are doing so.

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.

Maybe this should be in the Open Thread?

Nonetheless, I feel that if you can't explain it without using jargon, that gives some evidence for you not understanding it in the first place (whatever it is).

This is very related to something my friend pointed out a couple weeks ago. Jargon doesn't just make us less able to communicate with people from outside groups - it makes us less willing to communicate with them.

As truth-seeking rationalists, we should be interested in communicating with people who make good arguments, consider points carefully, etc. But I think we often judge someone's rationality based on jargon instead of the content of their message. If someone uses a lot of LessWrong jargon, it gives a prior that they are rational, which may bias us in favor of their arguments. If someone doesn't use any LW jargon (or worse, uses jargon from some other unrelated community), then it might give a prior that they're irrational, or won't have acquired the background concepts necessary for rational discussion. Then we'll be biased against their arguments. This contributes to LW becoming a filter bubble.

I think this is a very important bias to combat. Shared jargon reflects a shared conceptual system, and our conceptual systems constrain the sort of ideas that we can come up with. One of the best ways to get new ideas is to try understanding a different worldview, with a different collection of concepts and jargon. That worldview might be full of incorrect ideas, but it still broadens the range of ideas you can think about.

So, thanks for this post. =) I hope you will discuss the results of your attempt to speak without jargon.

Examples? I'm not sure I understand what sort of jargon you particularly want to cut. The kind of jargon I use in my day-to-day work (mathematics) is more or less indispensable.

I've found "machine problem-solving" goes over with laypeople better than "machine intelligence."

10-4

I cringe a little every time I see someone here write, "Suppose Omega told you X," when, "Suppose X," works just as well.

Jargon and terms of art have their uses and abuses. Clearly, it's very handy to have short references to complex concepts to communicate more information faster.

Unfortunately, it's also a tool of control and status, used to exclude and pretend.

For me, I tend to hate jargon. Only so many concepts fit in my head at once. That' one of the reasons for my preference for Jaynes. What is the probability of X? That works much better for me than the endless sea of special purpose names and concepts in conventional statistics.

Slightly side-tracked:

I had several objections to this, and then did some standard debiasing and came up with an obvious-in-retrospect obvious solution within less than five minutes, here to anchor your judgment for my dark-artsy pleasures! Unfortunately, the original idea I had relies on technologies and their widespread use that are barely being hinted at by obscure high-tech lab projects like Steve Mann's EyeTap and Google's Glass, so here's the toned-down version that at least fixes some of the issues for internet discussion boards. [1]

The obvious solution I mention is to write a (browser) script that maintains a database of jargon terms or keywords or unconventional definitions or abstract concepts, along with links to places that explain them, and an easy and convenient way to add new jargon to it. This script would unobtrusively (based on my scripting experience, this "unobtrusive" part and the "easy to add new jargon" are probably the two tallest orders and most difficult parts of such a project) suggest linking / referencing (or perhaps also allow for one-click substitution / inserting an explanation of the concept) whenever it detects the keywords.

The base concept would be that it work like the automatic spell-checking dictionaries (e.g. the one integrated in most versions of Firefox), but instead of suggesting corrections to common words, it would suggest links and references for specialized jargon and obscure terms.

1: (The original idea I had involved automatic personal databases and inter-device communication that compared those databases and offered automatic substitutions or transmitted link references when there were mismatches between two users' data, so that you'd just keep on using jargon and terms that you understand differently from your audience would be automatically (or by suggestion) adjusted for possible misunderstandings or have explanatory notes / links to references attached to them, even during normal in-person conversation. I take my living-in-the-future ideals very seriously. )

How about discussing the jargon piece by piece? Some words could perhaps be replaced by already existing words with the same meaning but larger audience. Other words could remain if we feel they add enough value.

This seems like a great way to keep from accidentally alienating new members to a group.