‘When people speak in a very elaborate and sophisticated way, they either want to tell a lie, or to admire themselves. You should not believe such people. Good speech is always clear, clever, and understood by all’ - Leo Tolstoy

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‘If you can’t explain a phenomenon in simple language to a 10 year old then you don’t understand it’ - Richard Feynman

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Tolstoy was wrong and Feynman never said this. There is at least one example of good speech that isn't understood by all. This is speech with a high concentration of jargon.

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Jargon is good because it allows you to compress more ideas into fewer words. That's important because it allows you to have conversations with a higher density of ideas. But it comes at a cost: those who don't understand the jargon can't understand the speech.

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That sounds quite abstract: it makes more sense with an example.

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JK Rowling first introduces Harry Potter by telling us that he's a skinny boy, with messy hair, round glasses, green eyes, a thin face, knobbly knees and a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead.

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Later on when she wants to describe this character sitting on a bench she can just write ‘Harry Potter sat on a bench’ and an image of that boy on a bench pops into your mind. She doesn't have to re-write the description each time she wants to refer to him, instead she simply grabs the handle ‘Harry Potter’ and relies on the description she gave us at the start. In this way the 28 word description of the character Harry is compressed into just 2.

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This is clearly necessary. It would be just about doable to write a Harry Potter book where every instance of ‘Harry’ was replaced with ‘Harry Potter, a skinny boy, with messy hair, round glasses, green eyes, a thin face, knobbly knees and a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead’. It certainly wouldn't be possible to write a scene where Harry is having a conversation with Ron and Hermione. [1]

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Jargon is the same.

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Nassim Taleb defines Black Swans as events defined by three criteria:

1 - They have a very large impact on world events

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2 - They are unpredictable in advance

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3 -They are rationalised afterwards

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This is an initial compression of 18 words into 2. However unlike the simple description of Harry Potter, each of these leaves some room for ambiguity and might not be entirely clear at first. But as Taleb unpacks and defines them, giving us examples to illustrate them, they become clearer. 9/11 was a Black Swan because it fulfilled these three criteria. It had a huge impact on world events, shaping US foreign policy for over a decade. It was completely unexpected when it happened. And it was rationalised afterwards, with dozens of books and thousands of column inches written on why US foreign policy and the decline of the USSR had made such terrorism inevitable.

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As he does this he compresses more and more information into the two words 'Black Swan'. A reader who reads those words at the end of his book is accessing far more information than they were at the beginning. Hundreds of thousands of words of descriptions, examples and analysis are squeezed into the same handle, all of which can be summoned at will into the head of a reader at the end of the book.

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By contrast, someone who simply opens the book on the last page won't understand it, no matter how smart they are, because they haven't done the work to understand the underlying ideas that are compressed into jargon.

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This is what makes Tolstoy wrong - Taleb's speech on the last page of his book is elaborate, sophisticated, clear and clever to the right audience all at the same time but certainly not understood by all. [2]

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Jargon Abused - a Terrorist Swan

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So far so good, jargon can be very useful. But it's got such a bad name because it's so often abused.

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If you say Black Swan and I don't know what you mean then we're in trouble. You grab that handle hoping to pull the idea of one of Taleb's events into my mind, but instead summon up the idea of an ugly looking bird and make me very confused.

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Even worse, you might not notice that confusion. You can't read my mind so you're relying on me to tell you that I think I might misunderstand something. But the problem is that I probably won't.

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This is because using and understanding jargon is seen as high status. Using these words implies you understand the ideas that they compress. Therefore the more of these words you use the more complex and complete your knowledge of interesting ideas must be. This, in turn, implies you're a clever, well-read and knowledgeable person.

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The thing that should actually be high status is understanding the complex underlying ideas themselves. But it's a lot easier to observe the use of jargon than it is to work out how deep someone's understanding truly is, so the use of jargon takes its place as a proxy. [3]

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This means that when you start talking about Black Swans with me you're implicitly assuming I understand the same complex ideas as you. Being the status seeking monkey that I am, I'm much more likely to try and bluff my way through the conversation than admit that I don't understand what you mean because I haven't read Taleb's book.[4][5]

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And just like that, a potentially great conversation between the two of us has been torpedoed because I don't share your jargon. It's like trying to read Harry Potter without understanding what magic is. You’re talking in nuanced detail about rare and important events and I’m building up an increasingly confused picture of birds with some connection to Al-Qaeda. Instead of jargon increasing the density of ideas in the conversation it brings it down to zero.

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Jargon Abused Again - The Tide of Bullshit

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So a potentially great conversation can be torpedoed if you use jargon that I don't understand. But it can get much worse. What if instead, I'm talking to you and I use jargon that even I don't understand?

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It's much easier to pick up on the pattern that conversations between smart people are often full of unusual and clever sounding words that most people don't understand, than it is to understand the complex ideas they compress. [6]

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Of course we all want to be seen as smart. So sometimes we find ourselves copying the visible pattern of speech, but without the underlying understanding. I.e. we fill our speech with unusual and clever sounding words that we don't actually understand. [7]

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That's disastrous, because jargon that doesn't compress complex ideas isn't clever, it's hollow. And when you string a bunch of hollow words together you get hollow speech.

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Me alone speaking in hollow jargon is bad. It means anyone listening to me won't be able to understand me clearly. But that's not that bad. The listener can simply ask me to explain these odd words. Either they'll learn something new or it'll quickly become obvious I don't know what I'm talking about.

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But the real problem is that people don't do this, just like I didn't ask you what a Black Swan was, because they too want to be seen as smart.

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Worse still, people often copy each other's speech and vocabulary, meaning that this hollow jargon can spread without challenge through groups, eventually giving rise to monstrosities like this: ‘It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness — rather than the will to power — of its fall into conceptuality’.

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Even if this example seems a bit extreme we all know at least one person who seems to have swallowed the corporate thesaurus, regularly urging us to 'lean into blue sky thinking in order to catalyse and leverage our strategic vision to empower collaborators and creatives'.

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None of the words here are compressing complex ideas precisely. They're just empty. They're a hollow imitation of what a parrot might think clever people sound like. But they come to exist when people try to imitate surface features of clever speech without thinking that hard about what's beneath. [8][9]

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The Solution

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So jargon can be used and abused. Thankfully there's a simple rule to help us cut through the bullshit -

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When speaking - assume you're speaking to the cleverest person you know, but imagine they only speak English as a second language [10]

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I love this test because it makes you focus on the ideas rather than the words you use to communicate them. It also makes you take responsibility for the other person's understanding because it removes the excuse that they're just not smart enough to understand. The very smart person will clearly understand any set of ideas as well as you. They just have a different set of words for pointing at those ideas. It's your responsibility to build a shared vocabulary with them so you can communicate properly.

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When it's your turn to listen try flipping the above on its head

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When listening - act as if you're that same genius who only has a basic grasp of English

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This can be hard. There's nothing better to prove to yourself what a status seeking monkey you are than trying to force yourself to do it. But it's usually a win-win. Either you get to unpack some interesting ideas behind jargon that you don't understand or you get the great pleasure of asking a naked emperor where their clothes are. [11]

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Does This Even Matter?

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Is this actually worth talking about? At some level obsessing over this feels like splitting hairs. But it isn’t.

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It's a tragedy that jargon is misused, intentionally or not, by people to signal their own status and exclude others. To signal that they're insiders and important and clever and know things that you don't, at the expense of communicating well.

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It's such a tragedy because, to state the obvious, language is one of the most important tools we've created. And our ability to extend and mould that language to compress ever more complex ideas is vital for our ability to keep making progress. The extent to which we can outline, test and build upon new ideas, is directly proportional to our ability to describe them. And for that we need jargon. Without it we simply can't compress important complex new ideas into sufficiently few words to talk about them. And that means we can't collaborate on anything truly novel, difficult and important.

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You can say 'Bad! Tiger in that bush!' without any jargon, but you'll struggle to build a fusion reactor.

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Ironically Feynman got this all along. Sure, he had an incredible ability to communicate many ideas in science clearly to anyone. But he also knew that some were sufficiently complex that they could only be explained in terms of other ideas that only experienced physicists would understand. Ideas that need names, that become the jargon of the field.

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So while we should fight the rising tide of hollow jargon wherever we find it, we should also channel our inner Feynman and recognise that not every idea is simple, and that the most complex ideas need correspondingly complex jargon to handle them. After all, in his own words:

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‘Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.’

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Notes

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1 - There's actually a beautiful irony in the French version of Harry Potter where the direct translation of 'he who must not be named' is so long that it spans several lines. So the single word 'Voldemort' is expanded to such an extent that it makes it hard to read the passages with him in.

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2 - I'm probably being harsh to Tolstoy here, I'm sure he didn't actually mean this literally. It's also true that the bulk of ideas can be explained clearly and cleverly to anyone, even if some can't.

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3 - Feynman certainly had a lot to say about this. He talked frequently about what it meant to know something rather than to just know the name of something. Ironically his example was about knowing the name of a different bird, the brown-throated thrush rather than the black swan.

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4 - In the worst case scenario I can probably pick up a bit from context, giving me just enough to be dangerous by looking like I know what I'm talking about but not enough to actually understand. This is the worst case scenario because I'm now at risk of fooling myself that I understand what a Black Swan is. That's fine until I make a mistake because of that fake knowledge which eventually comes back to bite me. Ironically this kind of fake knowledge and the harm it can cause is one of the core ideas in Taleb's book.

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5 - It's also possible that your motives might be less pure, rather than using jargon in the hope of compressing more ideas into a conversation you might be trying to deliberately hide the meaning of what you're saying. Medicine has some of the worst examples of this. Rather than saying 'we made a mistake and it harmed you', doctors say 'the harm was iatrogenic'. And rather than saying 'we don't know what's wrong with you' doctors say 'you have an idiopathic disease'. That's bonkers. Rather than admitting a lack of knowledge or a mistake doctors instead reach for some Ancient Greek to both signal how well educated they are and to hide the meaning of what they're saying from others.

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6 - A good bit of jargon for this is a high-bandwidth conversation: one where there is a much higher than average number of ideas exchanged per second. Notice here that Altman uses the jargon and then immediately defines it.

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7 - This is yet another Feynman idea: he frequently talked about it in the context of cargo cult science. ‘In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.’

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8 - While we sometimes do this unthinkingly, in the worst case I suspect people do it deliberately. Perhaps they feel they have to in order to be taken seriously: ‘In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.’ - Michel Foucault on this idea - as reported by John Searle.

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9 - Various people have built on these ideas in proposing a kind of 'reverse Turing test', where a machine writes articles with no informational content, and people are asked to identify these from a lineup also including jargon-filled texts written by humans. Douglas Hofstadter includes a notoriously difficult one of these in his book Godel, Escher and Bach.

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10 - I first came across this idea in a slightly different form in the Paul Graham essay 'Write Simply.

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11 - This piece by Dan Luu is a really excellent description of this point. It's incredible how much of an advantage there is in being willing to look stupid and ask simple questions about ideas that you don't understand.

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Thanks to Lydia Field, Lawrence Newport, Jamie Strachan and Ruairidh Forgan for comments.