And a lot of what's confusing is understanding the jargon if it's in an unfamiliar field, and what all the symbols represent.
One of the first things I do when I start reading up in an unfamiliar area is create a glossary of terms and symbols, so I can actually understand what I'm reading.
That's not entirely true even if it has that effect. It can be useful to convey a lot of information to people with comparable expertise in a concise way.
If I'm talking to colleagues I use it. If I'm not or I'm not sure, I don't. Issue comes when people aren't able to say what they mean without using the jargon. Sadly those people exist.
Patent jargon, on the other hand, is supposed to scare you off. Even patent lawyers have trouble decoding that shit.
Jargon does serve a useful purpose in general, including gatekeeping, but it can also serves as circumlocutious abstruse obfuscation for power-hungry liars. The MIT paper on "COVID Skeptics“ you posted is the clergy straight up lamenting that the lay man can read scripture.
I heard somewhere that if you can't explain something to a layman, you don't truly understand it enough. I've always tried to have that level of understanding if I seek to speak with any authority on a subject.
It takes practice, like anything. I work with some people who I know know their stuff, but because they never have any need to explain it to people who aren't also experts they are terrible at explaining what they're doing to non-experts.
That said, there definitely are people who hide that they don't know what they're talking about in a bunch of jargon. I work with some of those. They use the jargon to convince people who know nothing about a topic that they know something in an attempt to climb up the totem pole.
I've spent much of my career explaining things to people who aren't experts, so that is something I'm pretty good at, at least in comparison to others I work with. Though I work with a PhD geologist who's an absolute master at it, and it's a joy listening to him explain stuff. But he's from an older breed of academic who took that as a source of pride.
And a lot of what's confusing is understanding the jargon if it's in an unfamiliar field, and what all the symbols represent.
One of the first things I do when I start reading up in an unfamiliar area is create a glossary of terms and symbols, so I can actually understand what I'm reading.
The jargon is supposed to scare you off. They are degenerate clerics in white robes speaking dog latin.
That's not entirely true even if it has that effect. It can be useful to convey a lot of information to people with comparable expertise in a concise way.
If I'm talking to colleagues I use it. If I'm not or I'm not sure, I don't. Issue comes when people aren't able to say what they mean without using the jargon. Sadly those people exist.
Patent jargon, on the other hand, is supposed to scare you off. Even patent lawyers have trouble decoding that shit.
Jargon does serve a useful purpose in general, including gatekeeping, but it can also serves as circumlocutious abstruse obfuscation for power-hungry liars. The MIT paper on "COVID Skeptics“ you posted is the clergy straight up lamenting that the lay man can read scripture.
I heard somewhere that if you can't explain something to a layman, you don't truly understand it enough. I've always tried to have that level of understanding if I seek to speak with any authority on a subject.
It takes practice, like anything. I work with some people who I know know their stuff, but because they never have any need to explain it to people who aren't also experts they are terrible at explaining what they're doing to non-experts.
That said, there definitely are people who hide that they don't know what they're talking about in a bunch of jargon. I work with some of those. They use the jargon to convince people who know nothing about a topic that they know something in an attempt to climb up the totem pole.
I've spent much of my career explaining things to people who aren't experts, so that is something I'm pretty good at, at least in comparison to others I work with. Though I work with a PhD geologist who's an absolute master at it, and it's a joy listening to him explain stuff. But he's from an older breed of academic who took that as a source of pride.
I prefer jargon to terms overloaded beyond any useful meaning.
Just try to guess if number 2 is normal.