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Yeah, it’s an in-group exclusivity signifier.
Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there’s 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.
edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
I understood every word of that, and I hate you.
In defense of jargon:
coming up with new ideas and expressing them to others requires new vocabulary. You can’t simply say things in “plain English” especially when you want to communicate with peers.
This is why academia is so often refereed to as a discipline; you must train yourself in new ways of thinking. Making it accessible to the layperson is the job of scientific communicators, not scientists at large.
And it’s not like this is a unique issue with acedemia, every organization I’ve ever participated in had special vocabulary if it was necessary or not.
Jargon is only legitimate when it clarifies more than plain English. If it does, fine, use it.
inhales
Complex 1a was prepared according to well-known synthetic procedures. The reduction potential of the complex was increased due to the nephelauxetic expansion of the occupied FMOs induced by photolytic epimerization of the auxiliary tetrahydrophosphazolidine sulfide ligand to enable a strongly σ-donating dihaptic coordination mode.
translation: we made molecule 1a, we shouldn’t need to tell you how, it’s obvious, lmao, git gud. the molecule became less likely to gain extra electrons because shining light on it made one of its weird-ass totally-not-bullshit parts wiggle around a bit so that it could bind more strongly to the metal atom through two of its own adjacent atoms, making the metal atom’s relevant electrons floofier.
‘floofier’ should be standard academic jargon
I asked ChatGPT to convert the text to common words:
“Academic writing is often hard to understand because it uses complicated words specific to a particular field, making it easier for experts to communicate with each other but harder for outsiders to follow. This keeps certain knowledge limited to a small group of people and maintains a cycle where only the educated or ‘in’ crowd can fully engage, while others are left out.”
You should ask ChatGPT to generate some porn so you can go fuck off with it. Sick of hearing about these LLMs.
They can absolutely be useful tools if you use them right. They’re just quite overhyped at the moment.
Nah they’re useless. They do a worse job than a human and cost more power than cryptocurrency.
Shut them all down.
I understand; I was just being transparent with the fact that I’m a lazy motherfucker and that I used it to “translate” the text.
If I might interject.
One word mean many thing to not same people.
Use special word for special job. Special job doers no get dizzy. All know special word mean same thing.
Special words job help make many people with not same word skill talk gooder.
If you need an example of this read republic book 1.
Socrates essentially just dunks on these guys that are trying to define justice.
One of them says that justice is doing good to your friends and evil to your enemies
The way that socrates reubuts this argument is that the fella in question doesn’t define friends, enemies, good, or evil, so how can he expect to come up with an idea of what justice is before first defining these other concepts that are meaningful to us because of their common usage, but can be twisted greatly in logical argumentation.
I dated a girl who acted like writing / talking like that made her better / smarter than other people. She got off on the elitism. I’m no academic slouch, but my philosophy is if you can’t break it down in basic terms that anyone can understand, then you don’t understand it enough yourself.
I would go so far as to say that knowing and understanding something is only half of the issue. The other half is being able to clearly convey it to others. And that’s where a lot of people (myself included) fall short.
I think any scientist should able to convey at least the high level concepts that they’re working on at the level that a smart 12th-grader can follow. If you can’t do that, I think that’s a sign that you’re probably not thinking about your work very clearly. Being able to distill things and context-switch back to a birds-eye view of your work is critical for knowing what direction you’re heading in.
(I say this from the perspective of a climate scientist - our field has a pretty active public/lay conversation and lots of science comma, but I think the concept still applies to other sciences, and social sciences.)
I understood all of that.
That’s what half a year of city college will get you.
In my first year of uni, I had to write a 20 page paper, so I wrote it about how academic writing sucks.
Cheeky as hell, but I got a good grade, and my teacher liked it
It’s something that people, in least in my field of microbiology, have been recently aware of and are trying to correct. The problem is not just an in-group signifier, since everyone, even experts, finds the author insufferable and difficult to understand
The loser research paper vs the chad blog tutorial
^ literally anything related to buffer overflow attacks lol
I am unable to differentiate between the signal and the ambient stochastic background.
“Academia is being esoteric” or in other words “academia is a pompous twat”.
- insert Terry Davis quote *
Laughs in Pierre Bourdieu
