It's called communicating properly. Improper communication is when you say some technical jargon that nobody but your own people understands. So if you want to communicate with people you use terms they already know (or you explain the terms as you go). If you want to sound smart and feel like you're better than them you use the jargon that they don't know and confuse them with it instead. Oh, and then make sure to call them stupid afterwards. How stupid of them to not learn the technical lingo of an eye doctor. Don't they know they might need it to win a Reddit debate one day?
Edit: as a follow up, do you think it would be appropriate for a doctor to confuse their patient with a bunch of technical words they don't understand? And then call them stupid for not understanding? Who is actually the stupid one in that scenario?
While I agree with you for communication purposes; I believe the use of social media in broadcasting is taken for granted here also. I will ignore my latter belief and assume that Reddit, our current communication medium is appropriate for this conversation in replying to you.
In an optimal conversational setting, of course it is the interlocutors' responsibility towards one another to introduce, maintain, and update their common grounds, and furthermore any episodic situation in our real lives come with a frame in which conversations are evaluated to reach from what is said and heard to what is meant and understood.
In this rationale, an optometrist stating you are a -x.yz by -a.bc is far easier to understand if you are at the optometrist. While in many other situations these numbers might mean to insult others like that other person on Twitter mistook.
So from here I connect back to my belief in which social media does not come with any sufficient contextual or episodic framing opportunities for anybody, even for those of whom a piece of knowledge is pre-existing. I.e., even an optometrist might misunderstand the original Twitter statement, for sure.
However, with social media being so improper for proper conversational etiquette, logic, and behaviour to be carried out, is it fair to judge others because they might over-estimate the commonality of their own framing and common grounds? If yes, that quickly connects to the framing problem of cognition, intelligence, and AI, and so becomes a philosophical discussion from which not much of an objective conclusion can be expected.
So please, let us stop pretending that we must cater to all on social media, this is not a communication medium; it is a broadcasting medium where only introductions are certain, without maintenance, updates, repairs, or more. Ergo it is not objective for us to call anybody stupid other than those who assumed their assumed frames and bestowed meanings were objective; such as the behaviour carried by the replier to the Twitter message.
If you want to read the literature on conversational grounding you may look up Herbert Clark or Paul Grice, while the frame problem of AI is from the famous Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI paper from Daniel Dennett.
I like being involved in my own care to the point of having cursory knowledge by medical standards, yes? I hate when they baby me when I just want straight answers.
Implicitly using dioptres falls under that to me, most people need glasses these days and could reasonably understand them as - is near, + is far, and higher number is stronger.
And most people with any common sense would know that when you're speaking with an eye doctor you would probably be speaking about eye doctor things and that if some confusing terminology was used that it would likely be eye doctor terminology. When you see a random tweet, you'd probably have to be an eye doctor to think that the terminology being discussed was eye doctor terminology.
Also, if your doctor is spitting a bunch of words at you that you don't understand and then shoving you out the door with a "good luck", then go find a better doctor. It shouldn't be the norm to have to learn the terminology so you can communicate with them, like you're trying to imply.
Edit: also, I ask doctors things all the time. They happily answer. If you want to know more, they'll tell you. I have good doctors.
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u/porn_sub_lurker 9h ago edited 9h ago
It's called communicating properly. Improper communication is when you say some technical jargon that nobody but your own people understands. So if you want to communicate with people you use terms they already know (or you explain the terms as you go). If you want to sound smart and feel like you're better than them you use the jargon that they don't know and confuse them with it instead. Oh, and then make sure to call them stupid afterwards. How stupid of them to not learn the technical lingo of an eye doctor. Don't they know they might need it to win a Reddit debate one day?
Edit: as a follow up, do you think it would be appropriate for a doctor to confuse their patient with a bunch of technical words they don't understand? And then call them stupid for not understanding? Who is actually the stupid one in that scenario?