[Aachen]

I'm one of those dumb people that didn't have much math or greek in school, so this weird-looking o in the title was quite literally Chinese to me. Now it turns out that people in the know also misunderstood its intended meaning because it's in a different field.

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

[cshimmin]

It is just a convention, specifically for interpreting and presenting experimental results. We also use sigma to represent standard deviation in other contexts, of course. Sometimes it represents Pauli spinor matrices. Sometimes it's an index for spacetime tensors.

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".

[jacquesm]

Those APL people may have been on to something after all!

[indymike]

Looking up from my screen filled with sanity saving conveniences like having to type /sigma to get a really smart looking lower case greek character to display so the masses can't make sense of my math.

[BlueTemplar]

Could be "Alt+G + s" :

http://norme-azerty.fr/en/

[nine_k]

Much of these formulae used to be handwritten, and still are handwritten at a blackboard / whiteboard in physics classes.

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.

[Aachen]

> Much of these formulae used to be handwritten, and still are handwritten at a blackboard / whiteboard in physics classes.

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.

[_moof]

If you don't know what the Greek letter sigma means, you aren't going to know what the phrase "standard deviation" means, either. The notation isn't the issue. The issue is you can't fit stats 101 into a headline, and there's no getting around that.

[bigbillheck]

When you see a symbol you don't recognize, like 'σ', you can just paste it into google and it'll tell you.

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.

[ajkjk]

Don't agree with this, it took a few weeks of physics classes to get used to using greek letters as variables, and without them you'd drown in re-used letters.

[Aachen]

> it took a few weeks of physics classes to get used to using greek letters as variables

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.

[ajkjk]

well the abbreviated names include the letters, you can get in trouble when questions tend to have many symbols appended together.

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?)

[enchiridion]

I disagree with the parent post about the use of Greek letters, but it seems like a valid point worth of discussion. Certainly in the spirit of HN.

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.

[tzs]

> 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.

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.

[doliveira]

Do you want to go back to writing equations with words?

[Aachen]

Just like I code in a programming language, I'm not proposing to turn everything into English prose. Rather, using (abbreviated) names for variables and perhaps a bit more common language in papers (but that's maybe a separate topic).

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?

[doliveira]

Yeah, imagine making a calculation or transforming a complex formula with words and full sentences. Algebraic notation was a pretty big invention for a reason. For instance, the reason why we use single letters and indexes is so it's not confused with products. Try to write and manipulate the Schrodinger equation with words. Imagine solving the hydrogen atom, it already takes like 50 pages with algebraic notation...

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.

[oscargrouch]

I guess its all coming down to mnemonics, aiding our memories and communicating.

Sure this is the "state of the art", but despite the fact that pure language notations might be even worse, i cant help to think that people thinking like the parent might find something even better.

Maybe something inspired by braille notation or something that is invented while trying to understand how our brain works (just speculating here) will be even more expressive.

I actually like seeing an adult be bothered by the fact that the same symbols that turn science more expressive are also the reason that there's a big ladder for newcomers to understand whats being expressed given its all very arbitrary (someone in the XVI century choose a random greek letter to represent X).

Imagine how much science would improve with more "brain power" being also able to try to solve some problems given there are less arbitrarity..

[Aachen]

> imagine making a calculation or transforming a complex formula with words and full sentences

... that's why I said "I'm not proposing to turn everything into English prose. Rather, using (abbreviated) names for variables"

[doliveira]

Anything other than a single letter variable with at most subindexes, bold, upper/lower case simply doesn't work in maths and science. And because we only have 26 letters, you do have to go to Greek.

Actually, that might be a good exercise: try doing some moderately abstract equations with variable names such as you'd write in a programming language and you'll find yourself shortening them pretty quickly. We literally do it sometimes when modeling an equation for a new domain: we start by writing words and at the end of the blackboard they already became a symbol.

[pm90]

It’s funny; when I was reading the HN comment I was just saying to myself “it would be so nice if the person had used the symbol for phi (φ) rather than spelling it out”. So my reaction was the opposite to yours since my brain comprehends that notation more easily than 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.

[doliveira]

Yeah, don't we have the mantra "less code is better code" or something like that? Too many verbosity and our brain turns off. I did type it out the Psi because I couldn't be bothered to type it in mobile, but yeah, it's so weird.

Chinese people learn dozens of thousands of ideograms, I am pretty sure the problem with understanding the science has nothing to do with a few Greek symbols.

[Aachen]

We've all already paid that price for English, though. Why make everyone pay extra?

[pm90]

The price that was paid for learning the language of math is something that everyone who needs to work with these things are happy to pay. If the notation doesn’t make sense, it’s discarded for ones that does.

It may not make sense for layperson but that’s not really the audience.

[mhh__]

Writing formal mathematics as programming languages is basically what automated theorem provers do. The proofs are mostly unreadable.

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.

[LudwigNagasena]

Notation is the easiest (and a very helpful) part of physics, statistics and probably all other scientific areas. That just sounds like an excuse.

[Aachen]

I've heard my complaint be called an excuse before, but consider that it's also the first barrier. Not a big one when you already decided to take a course, when you're seriously interested, when you just look them up and soon enough you know the conventions in the field. That's different from casual reading on HN, though. And tell me, are scientists not a class that is looked up to where you live? The common Joe might not explicitly say so, but if someone is a "scientist" then you don't expect them to be stupid or muck out stalls; they do have some real status. This doesn't come from doing things that seem like any common Joe can do it, yet a lot of the work is just that. Once you start paying attention to how often "new research" in the news amounted to a big survey and very basic statistics, or playing around with a Kinect in a train station to learn about walking patterns, it doesn't seem so different from what regular HN readers do for a living. If you take the paper behind such a survey, it'll turn out to be full of complexity that is a lot harder to get through than necessary. It could be a lot more accessible, but then they would lose status.

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.

[LudwigNagasena]

Why does opaque bad research form psychology, social sciences or paleoclimatology constantly gets media attention and support? I absolutely do not believe it has anything to do with notation.

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.