This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1051097280030396417 …
Bloomberg Opinion writer. Elected "top neoliberal shill" of 2018. Occasionally posts anime gifs.
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Noah Smith Retweeted Jeffrey Sachs
This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1051097280030396417 …
Noah Smith added,
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.
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...
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.
@Undercoverhist has written about this problem:https://beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/what-price-did-economists-pay-for-tractability/ …
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)
1/Well, this is tricky. Some barriers are unavoidable. Methods that have proved useful over time in a particular discipline, may require technical expertise, and there's a whole vocabulary attached to that expertise. What's an algorithm, what's a matrix, what's a derivative,...
2/what's a selection effect? When Romer talks about "mathiness," he's creating his own jargon. My experience in reading Romer was much like what happened when I tried to read Derrida - spend some time on it, and the inevitable conclusion is that you wasted that time trying...
That's the problem with jargon. You can never quite be sure if you're reading bullshit, or you're just not smart enough to understand... ;-)
It's not a matter of who's smart and who's not. Type 1: bad writer. Type 2: good writer. Type 3: seller of snake oil, trying to put one over on you. Type 4: Complicated material. Could be that types 1, 3, and 4 are hard to tell apart. Could be 2 and 3 are hard to tell apart.
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