kasdeya
kasdeya
I hate the academic style of writing that seems to value concision over clarity. because it ends up so terse and choked with jargon, with no clarifications or examples, that it’s basically unreadable to me. I bet even serious academics have trouble reading this style of writing
like for example I tried reading the standard for the Scheme language, which was very interesting in the places that I could understand, but it was also filled with phrases like “lexical syntax” – without any context to infer what that means
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this is also how I feel about math notation because math notation is:
- extremely terse
- extremely cryptic
- impossible to google unless you already know what the notation means
- effectively a secret language that can only be learned through {cost-prohibitive college courses} or {multiple $100+ textbooks and lots of free time and energy}
it reminds me of how Medieval nobles would speak and write in Latin so that they could only be understood by other nobles, as a form of social exclusion. because no one else had access to the leisure time and money for tutoring costs that it would take to learn a skill like that
so yeah kas’s hot take of the day is that math notation is a classist secret language and knowledge of math is deliberately inaccessible to the working class
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and speaking of writing in Latin so that only other nobles can understand, isn’t it interesting how academic language almost exclusively uses Greek and Latin roots? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if speaking in plain/vernacular English was shamed as “unprofessional” or “uneducated” in academic circles, and I think it comes back to this same mechanism for excluding the working class
anyway yeah I suspect that this “secret language” thing is a widespread problem in all branches of academia - not just math
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a while ago I posted a criticism of the word “idempotent” and this is what I was trying to say. in order to understand this word you have to either:
- memorize what it means
- google it every time
- know Latin
obviously googling a single word isn’t a problem on its own, but it becomes a problem when you’re reading an article that uses one fancy academic word after another and you can’t even get a clue about what the words are supposed to mean without - again - knowing Latin
now imagine if instead of “idempotent” we said “change-once”. as in, a change-once operator. it still doesn’t get the exact meaning across but it’s drastically better than “idempotent”, and it’s much easier to memorize too!
obviously what I’m implicitly saying is that academic words should be in English by default, instead of Latin or Greek, and I don’t like that (I wish we were speaking Esperanto or an even better conlang than that) but I think it’s the pragmatic choice because it’s the most-spoken language in the world
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