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Academia gatekeeps knowledge by using unnecessarily complex language, alienating formats, makes it so you have to be both dedicated and culturally familiar to understand it. Rationalist writing, by contrast, is extremely accessible Feels like a similar vibe to elon and twitter

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Aella

@Aella_Girl

Dec 14, 2022

there's a way that elon's relationship to running twitter feels hyper direct and transparent; there's no artifice of trying to keep the knowledge away from the peasant class. The downside of this legibility is that people feel more empowered to criticize!

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Aella

@Aella_Girl

I wonder if this is part of why academia evolved away from transparency and legibility; the more you pull away from anybody being able to understand you, the more invulnerable you become; people can't easily tear you down if they don't understand what you're saying.

7:55 AM · Dec 14, 2022

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I'd encourage you to examine this take like reading another language. Academia has a lot of greek and latin root words that have created an extended form of English and then specialized. You don't expect to understand Spanish or German without learning the nuances of those.

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For the hard sciences, jargon is necessary and conveys important, encapsulated, clearly defined information. For the social sciences, if they spoke plainly most people would reject the pseudo-scientific, irrational thoughts promogulated by them.

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As an academic, I think you nailed it.

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Stephen Pinker has some great videos about this. But yeah basically overly complex language is the emperor's new clothes.

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Important point. If I don't understand what a brain surgeon is saying to another brain surgeon, that's good. They should have exclusive knowledge. Humanities especially, but also a lot of social science, should not. Definitely done for power and control.

Pirkka-Joose Sempé 28 5'3''

@pjsempe

Dec 14, 2022

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@Aella_Girl

Iirc there's a famous philosopher (foucault maybe) who basically said he makes his writing intentionally harder to read to prevent students from discussing everything all the time

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Two sides really. There's two levels to most language: colloquial/everyday and professional/specialist. Levels one and two for short. Level two language is necessarily more complex and arcane because it has to precisely describe terms that don't appear in everyday usage.

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I think you've got it exactly right.

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I think this only works because academia is a complex of people with a status- and politically-privileged position, like medieval/enlightenment intellectuals speaking Latin in lieu of the common language. A gnostic cult speaking in tongues or one lone weirdo gets trampled/ignored

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You should read

's book, the "The Death of Expertise. You would probably find it interesting.