Jargon
One of the greatest achievements of the internet was and remains making information accessible. Anyone, anywhere at any time can get access to any information for free (virtually). And that’s super cool.
But we could be doing more.
Although access to information has become easier than ever, understanding that information has not.
After running into this problem so many times, at some point I decided enough was enough and decided to do something about it. So we built Jargon — a pretty straightforward chrome extension that converts any industry jargon into plain english using GPT3. The first version focused only on scientific jargon and we assumed that was that. We dismissed Jargon as a small — but fun — side project given how easy it was to build and our lack of a big vision. To put it crudely, it was hardly a product in our eyes.
But then we started to use it for our mortgage contracts, emails, financial news, obscure academic papers and so much more. At some point we realised how crazy it is that we have been going through life basically oblivious to all of this information, how much unnecessary money we have spent paying people to translate this information for us and opportunities missed because of lack of information. We figured we would share what we had with the world given how useful we found it, and it turned out the world felt the same way too.
To our surprise, people started using it for much more than consuming written information, but for communicating it too. It never occurred to us that a lot of people don’t intentionally communicate in jargon heavy ways, and in fact, a non-significant number of people are actively trying to make their words easier to understand. Like most things, everyone had something to sell, whether it be an idea, product or service, and they couldn’t do so effectively if people couldn’t understand what they were saying.
2 months after we had built Jargon I realised Jargon had tangibly changed my life. A concrete example would be its impact on my life as a kidney patient. I had recently begun searching for a more permanent solution to my condition, but I really struggled reading the papers as I did not have an academic background in regenerative medicine. But with Jargon it became a non-issue. As a consequence of self-studying and documenting with Jargon I was able to:
- Get Dr David Cooper as my scientific advisor for the regenerative medicine idea I am pursuing
- Become a co-investigator on 2 research projects at King’s College London
- Receive a scholarship to a regenerative medicine conference in Belgium
- Was publicly endorsed by Professor Guiseppe Orlando at said conference
- Introductions to other top researchers in the field
All of this eventually convinced us that there is actually a lot of room to make information more accessible, and that this is a product worth building, and building properly. So that’s what we are going to do.
We don’t have any bold predictions or mission statement to spew, but if we go by how it has impacted my life, we think it’ll positively impact a non trivial number of other people’s lives too and that’s a bet worth pursuing.
You can install Jargon yourself using this link (we recommend our chrome extension for a better experience), but if you want a low stakes way of testing it first you can always try our web app.
