Tom, I have been a generalist from hell in my life- its been a blessing and a curse. I have studied rather deeply maters as concrete and dry as logic and software engineering to as esoteric and heady as Existential and Ancient philosophy. As Empirical as Biology to as theoretical as Cognitive Science. Its like some sort of Existential ADD that strikes every 3-4 years. The thing that I have stuck with the longest is Software, and thats just because it pays the best and is always hard-but-not-insanely-difficult.

While I have 'mastered' (prolly too strong a word) maybe only one or two areas, I have become pretty good at a several endeavors. One thing I have learned, is to be VERY careful in what one dismisses as Jargon. Its usually there for a point, and it usually exposes a subtlety that can really knock your socks off when you finally get it.

I will say that Scientific truths are nearly always stated simply- the proof of the halting problem can be expressed (in some formulations) in three lines. E=MC^2 takes all of five symbols. Heavy stuff about the nature of the universe and the fundamental limits of the knowable. Pretty compact: But thats the beauty of the fields that have been formalized/are formalizable.

But that don't make it easy to learn, understand, transmit or discover.

Not all fields lend themselves to the purity of mathematics (Take Anthropolgy for example!), but still have a lot of profundity packed into them.

As far as the Jargoneers go, I think they are actually fairly easy to spot, once you have seen enough of 'em.

BTW: did you keep a link to the thread in which we wandered in to Copernicus, Newton, Heidegger and Ayn Rand? That was one worth saving, and I didn't unfortunately.

Davin L.