Hypogene speleogenesis: hydrogeological and morphogenetic perspective
April 8, 2021 6:14 AM   Subscribe

 
That probably explains why we're not all coding in Haskell.
posted by acb at 7:10 AM on April 8, 2021 [3 favorites]


Yeah, "hypogene speleogenesis" could easily be replaced by "underground cave formation."
Hydrogeology is an actual science and one that you're all going to be hearing a lot about over the next few decades. Morphogenesis is a term of art in a host of disciplines.
Weirder is the dumping on the word "karst" in the article. It's a word that describes a very specific kind of landscape (heavily eroded limestone roughly) that is good for cave production. If you're in the cave business it's a word you should know.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:34 AM on April 8, 2021 [17 favorites]


My experience is that marginal/incremental results are often prettied up with jargon to make them look more important than they actually are, which would also track with this trend.
posted by beepbeepboopboop at 9:39 AM on April 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


If I’m reading correctly, the issue with “karst” was about getting funding from people outside of the cave business. I made it all the way through a PhD in not-geology without learning that “karst” is the technical name for what my family calls “sinkhole country.” Jargon adds friction.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 9:41 AM on April 8, 2021


"sinkhole country" is also jargon and elides the fact that sinkholes are not part of the definition of karst.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:48 AM on April 8, 2021 [7 favorites]


Oh, man. I am taking a class on dinosaurs right now and reading the academic journals is such a slog. Which is weird, considering how fun and interesting the subject matter is to learn and think about.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 10:01 AM on April 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


Isn't mastering all the new vocabulary half the fun of studying a new field?
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:28 AM on April 8, 2021


That probably explains why we're not all coding in Haskell.

In the sense that Haskell is mostly syntactic sugar, Haskell is just jargon. If you get rid of the jargon all you're left with is C!
posted by Alex404 at 10:35 AM on April 8, 2021


I also think that if you're looking for a fancy word for "underground" choosing "hypogene" is weak when "chthonic" is like, right there.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:47 AM on April 8, 2021 [10 favorites]


A friend of mine was recently in an online presentation with an author of a book about my friend’s particular activity. Before the presentation I looked up the book and was able to read the first chapter, an Oxford University Press edition. It was that heavy, jargon ridden, neologismic, postmodern French style. I personally can’t read that stuff. During the presentation, the author was introduced to talk about their book. They began by immediately apologizing for the “academic” style of the book. There seems to be this expectation that in academia, to be taken seriously, you have to write in this style. I was early influenced by ol’ Nietzsche, who said, more or less, in one of his books, “If you can’t write simply and clearly, you probably don’t know what you’re talking about.” Maybe in academia, people are just writing to each other in their field in some secret code showing their membership in an exclusive club. It’s not meant to communicate, just to bond together.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:50 AM on April 8, 2021 [1 favorite]


Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
If you believe you have identified a way to define a thing or collection of things as different in precisely set-out ways from other things or collections of things in the world you are going to be tempted to start with the naming. It's pretty much what we're famous for.
There's a lot of arrant gatekeepery as well, of course.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:59 AM on April 8, 2021 [1 favorite]


Karst is also an excellent name for a dwarven adventurer.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:28 AM on April 8, 2021 [6 favorites]


It’s not meant to communicate, just to bond together.

A generous admixture of mucilaginous rheopectic sequipedalia can achieve fast grab on a grants committee even with relatively poor surface preparation.
posted by flabdablet at 12:15 PM on April 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


I read this headline exactly opposite of how it was intended because I pictured Flavor Flav saying "YEAAAHHHH BOYEEE" after reading it. I'm droppin' the jargon like Bush drops bombs, etc.
posted by GuyZero at 12:28 PM on April 8, 2021


When my wife was in her Masters of Education program she would occasionally send me some of her readings to help make sense of. English isn't her first language and she wasn't always sure if the readings were supposed to be understandable to her or not. Between studying philosophy for my undergraduate degree and a big part of my work now being reading really long contracts I'm good at reading and extracting meaning from documents so me spending 20 minutes looking them over and translating the trickier bits into normal English could save her hours. Some of her readings would make me so angry because it was painfully obvious that the writers were throwing jargon around for no good purpose except to show that they know how to use said jargon and make their paper sound "smarter".
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:50 PM on April 8, 2021 [4 favorites]


What's the jargon-free way of saying "cave scientist"?
posted by storybored at 4:45 PM on April 8, 2021


My experience is that marginal/incremental results are often prettied up with jargon to make them look more important than they actually are, which would also track with this trend.

My experience with my physics PhD thesis would put the cause and effect the other way around. You need to use a lot of specific and narrow jargon to avoid giving the appearance that your specific and narrow incremental results are more broadly applicable than they actually are.

And a lot of jargon can't actually just be reduced to a handful of simple words without giving a false impression about how much of the message you're conveying. For example, looking up the actual definition of hypogene, it doesn't just mean "underground" it means "deep enough underground to be shielded from oxidation and for the pressure to be high enough that chemical processes occur that require water to be above boiling at atmospheric pressure." And using simpler words to disguise the fact that you really mean something more specific and slightly complicated isn't actually good communication.

That said, the paper's title is not great. In fact, the worst word in it is the one non-jargon sounding word.: "Perspective." The title doesn't explain what actually they've found about how water-based processes affect the shape of caves formed in deep, high pressure regions underground, and the word "perspective" is the guiltiest party. It's a cop out. It's saying "uhh, we looked at some stuff." Ok, you looked at how the hydrogeology of an area affects the shape and structure of caves formed down in the hypogene regions. What did you find that made you write this paper?

Also, part of me is wondering if the correlation is partly because broader results need less specific jargon, and if you do find something really big, well you want everyone to know about it so you take the time to explain the terms you're using so people can understand the import.

Whereas if you're writing one of those tiny,incremental advance papers that are about minutiae that maybe only a few dozen people actually care about, the audience of that paper is pretty much just those people, so using lots of jargon that they all know is very much writing for your audience. The people trying to approach the field from further away would be far better served reading bigger papers that might explain all the jargon.

And it's not like these are all pointlessly esoteric - there's a lot of pushing little tiny pieces around that needs to happen before the shape of things is clear enough for bigger discoveries to be made from the pieces, or for finally understand and can avoid all the little minute pitfalls that would make a great idea for a new technology fail to work for reasons that would be very opaque if someone hadn't been poking in all the little cracks and crevices of knowledge.

That said, there's a lot that could be improved in science writing and communication. I just think a laser tight focus on jargon = bad is not a very good way to go about it.
posted by Zalzidrax at 7:43 PM on April 8, 2021 [3 favorites]


It's funny, I was thinking of posting an anecdote about specificity in research on the "purity" thread (it would have made sense, I promise). Well, I didn't. But obviously there is a need for precision in scientific publication, no one with a bit of sense would argue against that.
But. Here is some advise for anyone seeking grants, wider publication or tenure: communicate as if you are writing for a dentist in Minnesota who likes nice art on the walls of his clinic. I did not invent this very specific advice, a colleague within a completely different field of research did. But she is smart as hell and right. The thing is, any editorial board, board at a foundation or hiring committee is going to be made up of people with different specialities than your own. And they like to feel they are invited in on your project. Mostly, they will respect that your field has its own jargon, as theirs have. But they deeply, sincerely want to know what you are doing. Maybe it can even be useful for them to know. Maybe they will call you years later in the hope of involving you in a cross-disciplinary project.
I write this as someone who has been on different committees and boards for over 20 years now, but I am not describing my own opinion. I'm on the tolerant end of people like me. I like learning new terms and phrases. But the fact is, jargon only works in very specific contexts and those contexts are sometimes problematic in other ways.
posted by mumimor at 2:43 AM on April 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


In my brief research career it was common for papers to be titled "The first XX", because there weren't that many good theories yet and most results were unique in some category or other. The quality of your result was gauged by how little jargon and qualification you needed to use to accurately describe whatever you'd found the first of
posted by doiheartwentyone at 3:40 AM on April 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was chatting with a friend who wrote a paper back when they were in university whose message was basically "the Nazis are coming back."

They were studying semiotics, though, so nobody but other semioticians had any idea what the paper meant.
posted by clawsoon at 5:54 AM on April 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


Underground cave formation

As opposed to above ground cave formation?
posted by hypnogogue at 10:04 AM on April 9, 2021


Is a cave in the side of a mountain underground or above ground?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:25 PM on April 9, 2021


The way I learned this was from Feynman. In biographies he was held as being a clear writer who didn't need complex writing, or famously, wrote his textbooks with only 2 levels of indentation when other books didn't. It's just being a good writer, period; if you asked Margaret Atwood or whoever, they'd say the same about diction and vocabulary in general writing.

What's ironic is that all technical writing classes tell students specifically this point, try to avoid unnecessary jargon, but people rarely follow through with such advice. And the reason that happens is that industry anti-incentives are not geared to value the production of good writing. I do think that citation count as an incentive is somewhat problematic; it is a proxy for popularizing one's own work. It is better that people learn about writing, be exposed to lots of good writing, and advocate for time to learn and develop good writing, rather than game a profession through metrics like how much jargon to use will max one's visibility (because that just reinforces the antiincentives).
posted by polymodus at 4:09 PM on April 9, 2021


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