A naive take on this is that having a higher average level of jargon usage makes the incomprehensibility bluff easier to pull off against people who don’t know the jargon, so you might think it reduces the legibility of peoples’ knowledge and skill levels overall. But I don’t think it works out this way in practice. My experience is that on subjects where I have medium knowledge (not an expert, but more informed than most laypeople), when I come across laypeople pretending to be experts, they often give themselves away by using a jargon term incorrectly. I also find that glossaries are a good entry point into a subject, and avoiding jargon too much would make the glossaries less useful for this purpose.
I am a bit worried about people invisibly bouncing off our community because of the jargon, but I think the jargon is important enough that I’d rather solve it by making the jargon better (and making its intellectual infrastructure better) rather reduce the amount of it.
My experience is that on subjects where I have medium knowledge (not an expert, but more informed than most laypeople), when I come across laypeople pretending to be experts, they often give themselves away by using a jargon term incorrectly.
Hmm. That is an interesting term to be in the equation.
FYI I see two related things here: one is excessive jargon, the other is unnecessarily wide inferential gaps (i.e. often you need some jargon for the point you’re making but not all of it. In the original sequences, I think it was necessary for Eliezer to bridge a lot of inferential distance, which initially required an excessively-long-braindump. But, I suspect it’s possible to collapse a lot of that down in order to make individual points.
A naive take on this is that having a higher average level of jargon usage makes the incomprehensibility bluff easier to pull off against people who don’t know the jargon, so you might think it reduces the legibility of peoples’ knowledge and skill levels overall. But I don’t think it works out this way in practice. My experience is that on subjects where I have medium knowledge (not an expert, but more informed than most laypeople), when I come across laypeople pretending to be experts, they often give themselves away by using a jargon term incorrectly. I also find that glossaries are a good entry point into a subject, and avoiding jargon too much would make the glossaries less useful for this purpose.
I am a bit worried about people invisibly bouncing off our community because of the jargon, but I think the jargon is important enough that I’d rather solve it by making the jargon better (and making its intellectual infrastructure better) rather reduce the amount of it.
Hmm. That is an interesting term to be in the equation.
FYI I see two related things here: one is excessive jargon, the other is unnecessarily wide inferential gaps (i.e. often you need some jargon for the point you’re making but not all of it. In the original sequences, I think it was necessary for Eliezer to bridge a lot of inferential distance, which initially required an excessively-long-braindump. But, I suspect it’s possible to collapse a lot of that down in order to make individual points.