I’m gonna pin that “they feel they have to” on English teachers, many of whom seem to enjoy taking out their grammar hobby on their students.

How should layman distinguish between the two, if they don’t understand it?

It’s easy to see why conmen use it: if you know, you won’t buy it anyway; if you don’t know you might think it’s legit because the guy sounds like a scientist.

In the lead up to getting fired for being disabled, HR (and everyone I spoke to) switched exclusively to bullshit legal jargon instead of just talking to me like a human. It was confusing and alienating, which I think was the point. Had to pull out a dictionary for every Slack message.

Jargon is great when the word used is the most accurate word for that thing, describing why it exists and what its purpose is.

Jargon is terrible when they start using that as a synonym for a simpler word, and want to sound busy and smart

Corporate abuse of language is frustrating. I’ve worked with a lot of product manager types that really want to use extra words. “Let’s just swag it”. “We need to force rank these initiatives”. “Can you do a research spike this sprint?”

Yes. This is what the term ‘technocratic jargon’ refers to.

I’ve always associated ‘memory’ with RAM. HDDs and SSDs are ‘storage’. (And the average user probably shouldn’t have to know what EEPROMs are.)

I pity psychologists. Imagine how many people want to chew their ear off about narcissism, emotional labor, gaslighting, or whatever self-help pop psychologists are grifting about today.

Honestly, as it relates to academics and papers, psychology isn’t too bad from what I’ve read. There are wildly varying definitions, but papers have had ways to account for that for decades - that being defining terms where needed, and showing your work so others can see the context. For example, if studying depression, they’ll have to specify which scale or metric was used for depression in patients, be it a mood tracker, or a standardize questionnaire. That said, you could always tell when a paper wasn’t well constructed or had little to offer, because thats when the jargon would be front and centre.

That, and more purely philosophical academic papers. They were awful. For example, reading a thirteen-page paper that could wholly be summarised as “Positionality is how people define themselves relative to others. They may have biases based on these definitions.” but written like, “subject-position is based on a subject’s temporal elements to best target the dominant drive in a social confrontation…” I have no problem reading most articles, but those were putting me to sleep.

To be clear, most scientists struggle with reading many papers. So it’s not a problem with technical specificity, it’s a problem with fundamentally bad writing.

In science, unparseable writing mainly comes from the fact that people aren’t told that you need to prioritize being clear. It’s the principle behind the curse of knowledge - it’s easy to forget that people don’t know what you know and don’t think the way you think. So you end up writing in a way that only you can interpret. It takes extra effort and time to read back what you wrote and think about how other people might understand what you wrote. But that’s time that a grad student could otherwise spend being further exploited, so QA ends up falling to the wayside

At least my dad was formally diagnosed, so I’m not bullshitting my therapist.

Yeah I get that people can get defensive when they are overwhelmed by jargon, but thats the beauty of language. We have so many different words that means such complex things. Its what allowed us to keep developing technology based on the layer below it. People need to get over not understanding every single word in a scientist paper, as if it’s an attack on their intelligence.

And hell I know AI gets alot of hate on Lemmy but that shit is very good at helping break down complex scientific papers with the jargon. I work in medical research and the amount of time it’s saved by helping me understand the jargon has been immense.

Yeah that chemistry/physics example at the end of the OP is dog shit as an example. The summary butchers a lot of the actual meaning and if anything makes some of it more vague.

The jargon is precise, the translation can provide intuition. You often need both to get the full depth of a concept across. Good academic communication should be a mix of both, with introductions/overviews/conclusions/remarks interspersed along the way to help and conduct the reader, while the precise elements are also given in parallel to explain the technical aspects. Often in presentations the hardest bit is determining the level of precision that is expected by the audience. And usually, the format is intuition first, precise, jargon-heavy details afterwards.

Maybe the cognitive load for reading jargon (and looking up each word you don’t know its meaning each time you stumble upon them) is higher than when reading text written in simple language

I don’t think it does.

There, we both said as much.

You were right about one thing: that is a legitimately hot take