For years I've argued foreign symbols and single-letter variable names mainly seem to serve to keep a walled garden around the sciences, and this was cemented when I eventually went for a master's degree and I was expected to do this as well in compsci to get a better grade even if there is no advantage. If we could just write what we mean, I suspect people would find that more useful even if it makes it look less cultivated and more mainstream.
(To be clear, this is not criticism on the person I'm replying to, but split between the author of this specific title and most of the sciences as a whole because it's a universally supported barrier (if only ever implicitly), aside from a few science communicators.)
Edit: scrolled further in the thread. Looks like I'm not the only one, though this person at least knew to name the sigma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30955621
Life would be hell for any practitioner without single-letter abbreviations. In fact, we like them so much, that's why we adopted the greek letters (we ran out of alphabet). And, for better or for worse, convention runs deep in scientific literature. In practice it reduces a lot of redundancy, makes it more efficient for researchers to skim and understand results. But the cost is a years-long learning curve to break into any scientific field's literature.
FWIW, the linked article is from the journal Science, which is a technical publication. Often "sigma" is omitted in sci-comm articles, or at least is translated for the reader. They will say something like "there is a one in X million chance this is a fluke".
It's much easier to draw a fancy symbol by hand than write several simple letters quickly and legibly, and it also takes much less space.
We've been having the privilege to write using computers for last 20-25 years, when PCs became widespread, relatively cheap, and running good enough software. And this is outside the lecture hall settings anyway.
That is honestly the best argument I've ever heard (you're the first I see mention it). With as much as I hate writing rather than typing, I can see the point there actually. Maybe this practice is not as wholly stemming from elitism as it first seemed.
I personally don't see why greek letters are such a big sticking point, there's only 24 of them, and unlike Greek children you don't have to learn them all in one go.
That's a very small price if you're actually involved with physics regularly, but HN is a relatively mainstream place.
I had physics for 4 years in school but this wasn't part of the curriculum. At some point I asked why we were told (seemingly-to-me falsely) that there were only 3 phases of matter when on google videos I had seen something about superfluidity. The teacher made a joke about my stumbling over that word and then the buzzer went so... that's the kind of physics we had.
And that's for someone who went to school in one of the richest (GDP per capita) and most-developed (HDI) countries in the world. I don't know what it's like for anyone tuning in from a less well-off place, or for someone who had physics decades ago without refreshers (for me it's only a bit more than one decade now).
Something tells me I should have looked for a statistics paper that replaced GDP and HDI with some random symbol and used that instead. That's the kind of thing you're promoting and I just don't see why. TLAs aren't everything but they're better than single letters.
> without them you'd down in re-used letters
eh, literally the opposite? Using (abbreviated) names you'd not drown in re-used letters.
I should clarify, though, that I was thinking of college physics classes, which are definitely more mature, both about exploring new knowledge instead of memorizing facts, and about learning to actually speak in the experts' language.
Using symbols for common concepts without defining them is, however, absurd. (Not counting a few -- c, e, hbar, m, maybe q?)
I’ve seen an increasingly worrying trend of using downvotes to voice disagreement, rather than as the intended purpose as a kind of crowd-based moderation. And before anyone lambasts me for complaining about downvotes, I’m complaining about the trend, where the above comment is just a exemplar.
Actually Paul Graham did intend downvotes to express disagreement. The theory was that if people could express disagreement by downvoting there would be less people posting insubstantial comments to disagree.
Also I'm not sure what you mean by "back", is it referring to what we iirc called story exercises in Dutch primary school ("Jan goes to the store and buys seven ladders, then sells three..." etc.) or was this a thing a few hundred years ago or so?
And I don't really understand the "I didn't do math and Greek in School". I barely had a foreign language, but if you're actually learning the concept you memorize the letter as well. You can't understand what a wave function is and then not remember that its symbol is Psi. And if you don't know what a wave function is, it won't help to write derivate_2nd_order(waveFunction, time).
EDIT: obviously we're not talking about stories to teach newcomers, you're talking about writing equations in scientific articles and books with words.
Using symbols reduces the amount of text your brain has to parse. It makes it much easier to reach consensus on a shared understanding of things. The price to pay is to learn this new notation or language.
Mathematical notation really isn't that hard as long as you treat it as its own thing and learn it properly rather than trying to use a likely imperative model of computing programming as a reference point.
It seems to me that brevity is the real excuse here. Moreover, if it were just about symbols but papers were otherwise accessibly written (to reasonable extents, obviously), that would be different still. This is not the case.
Appearances are probably also important for funding. I'd bet that if you submitted same proposal twice, once phrased in a convoluted way and once phrased in a "we're gonna blow up some material multiple times and see how far the shards fly" style, a number of times to independent funding committees, there would be a statistically significant correlation with which proposal gets funded.
And let’s be real. If you couldn’t understand sigma notation in school, the chances that you would comprehend complex science are very low no matter what kind of verbiage or, as it often would be more apt to say, verbal garbage it is wrapped in.
I absolutely agree with you that oftentimes bad research is disguised with ten dollar words. And oftentimes it is disguised with convenient agenda (no matter how true or good this agenda is by itself). But I don’t believe it has anything to do with Greek letters.
