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masque wrote (edited )

I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure I agree. Focusing on calculus (since my background is in math), I can't think of anything specific about how it's taught now that seems to be a holdover from a deliberate barrier. Sure, the formalism might seem opaque to a beginner (e.g. the "d/dx" notation and the limit definition of the derivative are arguably not useful at the introductory level), but this stuff persists because it serves a real purpose for more in-depth study of calculus, and part of the role of an introductory course is to start introducing the stuff that will pay off in later courses.

Sure, we could probably totally redo our notation and formalism from the ground up in a way that would make it more accessible to beginners while maintaining the same utility for experts working in the field, but that would be a pretty big undertaking. We could probably also create a more accessible "introductory-only" course specifically focused on explaining the ideas of calculus to people who have no intention of going beyond the introductory level, but I'm not sure how much demand there is for something like that.

I think it's a bit like using vim. It seems unnecessarily complicated when you're learning, but the complexity does pay off with efficiency later once you become proficient.

EDIT: I guess tests etc. could be holdovers from deliberate barriers, as you pointed out, but I'm talking about the language specifically.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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masque wrote

Yeah, I've definitely seen mathematicians and computer scientists expressing the opinion that "if it's written in Microsoft Word it's probably not worth reading," which is not great.

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arv wrote

i think all the theories and formulas bring named after people instead of having more descriptive names is a serious barrier. maybe not to someone like you but definitely to people who don't have as much of an affinity for math. it makes people view it as a memorizing game.

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[deleted] wrote

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arv wrote

yeah that's true i didn't read closely

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[deleted] wrote

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masque wrote (edited )

I know that early acadamia did want to make barriers for the non academics to get into it. I wouldn't be surprised if that idea influences how they create specialized terminology.

I think that early academia didn't need to create special terminology as a barrier, because the use of Latin was already an effective linguistic barrier, and there were also tons of economic barriers.

Tho, I think it's just as presumptuous to assume that most or all of such barriers are added solely for convenience and with no malice.

I tend to believe that not attributing something to malice when it can adequately be explained without malice is a) usually more reflective of the real world, and b) less likely to get written off as an "absurd leftist conspiracy theory."

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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masque wrote (edited )

I & many others find it implausible that Brahe would consciously think to himself "I need to publish in Latin and invent new words in order to keep the poors from understanding astronomy, as part of a more general policy of maintaining class divides." It seems like an unnecessary assumption for explaining how an oppressive convention like publishing in Latin could persist and benefit the elites.

It's a particular case of the whole "individual vs. systemic" divide in terms of how people think about racism, misogyny, class divides, and so on. Systemic oppression arises in ways that are obviously affected by individual views and actions, but it is also more than the sum of its parts and can often be created or perpetuated by people who are oblivious to (or even opposed to) the oppressive results. This is something that a lot of people don't get or are resistant to believing, and it causes a lot of pushback against activists criticizing systemic problems. So I generally try to emphasize this view of systemic oppression over language that implies specific planning on the part of the oppressor class, except in cases where the planning was very explicit (e.g. redlining).

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[deleted] wrote

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masque wrote (edited )

They could write their works in a way that is easier to understand but they choose not to. I do and it's not difficult.

What field are you in?

In many fields, many works are of such an incremental nature that it's not clear what someone who isn't already familiar with the field would be hoping to get out of it. In that case, you might as well use language tailored to be clear to the target audience.

The exclusion is more caused by trying to only include the in the in group rather than exclude those in the out group.

That's kinda what I'm saying. There's a difference between "deliberately erecting barriers" and "engaging in a behaviour for unrelated reasons that nonetheless acts as a barrier." And the reason for the behaviour in this case (i.e. using the language that will be the most useful to the audience you expect to be most interested in your work) is not inherently unreasonable and shouldn't be attributed to malice.

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[deleted] wrote

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masque wrote (edited )

I'm in computer science

Ah, of course. I was too busy thinking about results in the vein of "Slightly tweaking the pretraining step for insert trendy architecture allowed us to beat SOTA on SQuAD by 0.7%" that I kinda forgot about how many (possibly more applications-y) papers would actually be of interest to the general public.

Tho, I can't imagine it being too interesting to tell someone with an ego as big as mine that I'm wrong. Thx

I was eager to defend myself largely because you've made me think about whether I'm inadvertently being exclusionary in the context of my own academic writing (which really is something I should think about), so it's not like I'm not also a big-ego-haver.

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