My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/academic-bs-as-artificial-barriers-to.html … If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.
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In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Mathiness.pdf … But mathiness and jargon are not quite the same...
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Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point. Mathiness often does. By forcing you to write your model in a way that's mathematically tractable (easy to work with), mathiness often impoverishes your understanding of how the world really works.
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@Undercoverhist has written about this problem:https://beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/what-price-did-economists-pay-for-tractability/ …Show this thread -
Jargon sounds sillier than mathiness. It looks worse to the public, because most of the public thinks they should be able to understand English but doesn't assume they can understand math. But mathiness, ultimately, is probably more pernicious. (end)
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One person's jargon is another person's precision. The key to good writing is to be as clear as possible, but no clearer. Making complex points sound simple is just as misleading (maybe more misleading) than the opposite.
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That's why jargon works so well as obscurantism. Even if there's a way to express the exact same point in simple language without losing any meaning, an insider can credibly claim that there is no such way, and shake his head at any attempted paraphrase.
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Right. The difficulty lies in knowing where to draw the line, i.e., when a concept actually cannott be made any simpler. We don't want all writing to be like the xkcd Up Goer Five, written with only the 100 most common words). https://xkcd.com/1133/
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Right. If all jargon were transparent, it wouldn't work very well as a barrier-to-entry, right? That's why you need insiders to critique the jargon; outsiders will only ever have suspicions.
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Right! Too much jargon is a barrier-to-entry. But that's not the only function of jargon. Sometimes its necessary to use specialized language to capture specialized ideas.
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As evidenced by the first word of our tweets, we agree here. We're just placing different emphasis on the point where we agree. The tricky question is whether certain fields cross the line between specialization-for-clarity and obscurantism-for-exclusivity more often than others.
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Yeah. And also, I think a lot of people tend to assume that academic bullshit comes with large social costs. But I wonder if confining bullshit to academia actually protects the real world from bad ideas! ;-)
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Me looking at business-jargon and corporate-speak:pic.twitter.com/0rO4WWB391
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that was a heroic attempt, but nah.
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Guy in the thread trying really hard but I'm not buying what he's selling
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Occam's razor
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As an academic, the best way to cleanse your own writing is to co-author with someone outside your field. My work with sociologists, accountants, management, medicine and political scientists have the most de-jargonizing and helpful experiences of my career.
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