I've always believed in the idea that fields of study - whether we're talking Biology, Physics, Marketing, Conflict Resolution, or Papier Mache - all suffer from a kind of blindness. It's a blindness that can be blamed on jargon. As an undergrad, you feel pressured to choose a major. From there, the bulk of your learning experience is the molding of your brain to think in terms of your chosen field. This is most evidently done through the learning of a new sub-language, a matrix of jargon used to rapidly exchange ideas specifically relevant to that field. For instance, having been a computer science major, these two sentences make perfect sense to me:

"Dude, the reason your code is hosed is because you're trying to instantiate an abstract class. Polymorphism requires that you first inheret from that class, extend that class, and then try to instantiate."

The effect on people left outside of this jargon game is a sense of awe and wonder that you speak in such elevated language. The reality is that someone who was a highly formative contributor to the field came up with a concept which was then, for the sake of efficiency, given a fancy term which encapsulates this concept. This fancy term is nothing more than jargon, a vacuum bag compacting an ideology down into a nice, portable word.

Collapsing ideology down into jargon is useful for having conversations with people inside of the field. Unfortunately, this jargon becomes a barrier to the outside world which inhibits the influx of any radically new ideas. Equally damaging is the fact that if one aspect of the ideology comprising a particular jargon word is flawed or incomplete, it becomes difficult for a field to change direction. The flawed concept is part of their vocabulary and literally becomes how they think about a problem.

Western dualism is a perfect example. Ingrained in the way we speak is this divide between body and soul, subject and object, epistemology and ontology, eternal and transitive. This subject has been fascinating for a couple of centuries now for philosophers and artists.



What if the original concept on which all of this jargon is based is flawed? What if instead of two isolated entities in dialogue, we are comprised of a core similar to the idea of the Imago Dei which then extends up through socially constructed layers in order to manifest itself perceptually as something individual and entirely unique? The language of dualism becomes a hindrance to understanding this new concept. It is not some complicated relationship between body and soul, it is something altogether different. In this new model we are both "one with the universe" and completely unique.



Regardless of how accurate the above model is, it serves to illustrate that jargon can make it difficult to think out of the box. So what's the solution? In a word: Wikipedia. Whenever someone contributes to Wikipedia, they are (or should be) writing to someone they assume is outside of their field. There is an act of translation, an unpacking of jargon. Wikipedia can then act as a portal or common area for every participating field. Ideological blindspots can be pointed out, and new ideas can be injected into incomplete concepts.

I'm not saying we need to get rid of jargon, but by exposing the concepts hidden and locked away by jargon, people from the outside can directly learn and critique, thereby increasing the probability of things like:

A company working on ATM cameras stumbles upon a possible exception to one of the laws of thermodynamics.

An Israeli restaurant owner comes up with the world's most elegant algorithm for machine translation.