Arts Speak
Coming from more of the natural/computer sciences, I can often find myself stumbling through what I like to call ‘Arts Speak’, especially in multidicinplary spaces.
What I mean by this is invoking 4 or 5 broad concepts, followed by a couple of philosophers’ names as adjectives, and finishing the sentence.
This has implications for the ecological biotopological nature of the Platonic dynamics of the system.
I get why this is done. Arts is a field that rewards nuance, critical thought, and building connections. And these words have meaning that carries weight in their fields and shows the breath of concepts that are being covered. But at the same time, I end up needing to throw people’s slides into a chatbot to try and decode what was just said.
And it can be frustrating for me in these spaces because I am always told that I am never allowed to use too technical language. But I feel like the technical language of the Arts is the same thing.
I could say:
The system learns a compressed latent representation that supports robust prediction under distributional uncertainty.
But what I end up saying is:
It spots patterns and makes decent guesses, even when the data is a bit of a mess.
So I am very willing to avoid jargon. I just think this rule should perhaps also apply to anyone about to describe a chair as “ontologically unstable”.