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.
FishFace@piefed.social 2 days ago
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.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
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.
osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org 2 days ago
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.
FishFace@piefed.social 2 days ago
People use acronyms because referring to things by their verbose names is slow, and those names get used day-in day-out.
stupidcasey@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
Miaou@jlai.lu 2 days ago
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
TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 days ago
This. Plus what @MoonManKipper@lemmy.world 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.
MoonManKipper@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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
FishFace@piefed.social 2 days ago
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”