In science jobs? No, get a grip. You can’t effectively communicate sufficiently-technical ideas without using some jargon. The reason for that jargon is so that instead of describing a concept every time, you have a single precise word which means that concept. Because science is not everyday life, a lot of these concepts get words that are either not used in everyday life, or which have different meanings to their everyday ones.
Almost all fields of science can be simplified and then explained to a lay person by someone who is good at communicating. But in so doing, there are crucial aspects that end up necessarily getting simplified out. That is fine - good even - when you’re describing it to a schoolkid or in a news interview, but it is not fine when you’re actually doing the work.
Okay but you don’t have to turn everything into an acronym like Redditors and business people do, then pretend you’re smarter than everyone for knowing it.
The worst are corporate internal acronyms.
Okay but you don’t have to turn everything into an acronym like Redditors and business people do
I have never uttered the term “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol” outside of a basic networking lecture and I never will. Alphabet soup can be taken too far, but there are good and real reasons why some of this stuff exists.
It’s in our deoxyribonucleic acid to make alphabet soup.
People use acronyms because referring to things by their verbose names is slow, and those names get used day-in day-out.
There’s not a weird superiority complex; that’s you inferring things that aren’t there IMO.
Actually, having been on reddit for over a decade before I left, I’d agree that there is a superiority complex present on reddit when someone asks for clarification on an acronym.
Without fail, if someone used acronyms that might be considered by some to be “common knowledge”, and another user asks what that means, they’ll get down votes and sometimes even a “are you joking? Everyone knows it means blah blah blah” or similar comment.
I once saw a person get over 50 down votes for asking “what does ETA mean?” when the OP meant “edited to add”. I had never seen anyone use it to mean something other than “estimated time of arrival” and was mildly confused by the “ETA” at the top of the comment. Not one single person explained what it meant. Just down votes. I had no idea either at the time, and didn’t care enough to do some light searching.
I’d say the business ones are dependent on where you work. I’ve never worked in a corporate setting where I’d imagine they’re more common, so I can’t really comment on that part.
This.
I’m not talking about science, who knows what those wizards are doing, unless you’re talking about computer science which I am.
the problem is when you abbreviate something or use three letters or a number to represent something it gets forgotten over time, the protocol changes but more importantly it is impossible to remember what all those 3 symbol representations actually mean.
In the old days we had a good reason for this, literally only so many letters could fit on a line, but now if you’re doing it you’re just a dick.
There are many papers that try to sound smarter by using the formal names/concepts of otherwise ubiquitous things, and those can be annoying. At least that’s my impression in compsci. E.g. no need to write a whole paragraph about the definition of an N-norm if you’re just using L1/L2
That’s definitely a thing in pure maths as well, and physics from what I can tell. That does not invalidate the need for jargon and e.g. the usefulness of the full generality of N-norms in other places. (But I am not saying that you implied otherwise).
The problem with the very real attitude you describe, is that it’s partly responsible for some people thinking this meme is actually true and that technical people only ever pretend to do complicated stuff. That’s just anti-intellectualism.
This. Plus what @[email protected] added.
Good communication should be approachable, succinct, complete, and accurate. But those four things are mutually exclusive; if you focus too hard on 1+ of them, the others get worse. With jargon being a tool to make things more succinct, at the expense of approachability.
(Weirdly enough, I noticed this once I tried to make a Fediverse poster.)
If you properly understand something you should be able to explain it precisely to a lay person using straightforward language. Depending on the level of detail, it may take awhile, but nothing need be lost. Jargon is a useful shorthand to accelerate communication between experts, all to often employed to buttress the position of the insecure or gatekeepers
There are topics which just can’t be explained without prerequisites. Maybe you can get across the gist or a flavour if it, but not the core ideas in a sufficient level of detail to distinguish your area of research to that of a colleague working on something similar.
Those prerequisites then mean that “it may take a while” in practice means “it may take several lecture courses”
There is a difference between “using the proper word that conveys that exact idea” and “fad pidgin”. Hint: “the ask”, “the spend”, “literally” and “emails” are words pushed on us by people with small brains and potentially a used-car sales quota to meet, and not something coming out of proper word use.
It seems I hate management pidgin that resembles used-car salesman try-hard mimicry.
In many fields the ones in the middle are doing most of the work.
From the qualia a subjective sentence structure when articulated in a non-decipherable manifestation of specialized sonic expression is non abstract in the absolute sense but merely a representation of absolute inner cognitive functions, an inverted abstractification of the sub-cognitive average neuro pathway Trace however it is an indelible absolute truth of the others external observation of the selves communicative abilities that we derive meaning from the qualia this creates an abstractification between the two selves desiring an efficient exchange of information with low losses, as such the self must negotiate an abstraction level that is suitable between both the self and the subject he is negotiating an exchange of information with but this leads to the all too likely scenario of unevenly yoked bandwidth analogous to a Fifty Six kilobyte telecommunications data transfer protocol with a database more modern hosting a jQuery framework with torrential use of portable network graphics and joint photographic experts group graphical representations of information that is to say the protocol of an expected recipient would be insufficient for proper data transfer.
Punctuation is as important as words used to be comprehensible.
It’s just one sentence, don’t worry.
Dude… It’s SALT.
Sometimes there just isn’t a simple set of words to convey the proper idea.
Laughs in computer science.
