3 ms·
>In an ideal world we'd be able to educate everyone to a certain level of scientific literacy which would at least enable the everyman to decipher some of the m
by whiddershins 10y ago
>In an ideal world we'd be able to educate everyone to a certain level of scientific literacy which would at least enable the everyman to decipher some of the more arcane jargon of respective scientific field
Is it ever accurate to say "hey, many of these papers are written in an excessively jargon-filled way, because the intended audience is very narrow?"
- stan_rogers 10y agoSteven Pinker doesn't think so (see any of his talks or articles relating to his book The Sense of Style and the curse of knowledge). It would be much closer to the truth to say that many of these papers are nearly opaque to other specialists in the same field. There is, of course, the jargon of precision, which is at least in a sense unavoidable, but most of the problem actually stems from failing to understand that most people, even in your own narrow field, haven't been recently immersed in the same small body of highly-specific literature, etc., that you've been swimming in for the past several weeks, months or years.