From Philosophical Research
- [P] (pronounced [P]) "Dirac test" [rating]
Characteristics in draft[edit]
Properties[edit]
- alias (en)
- Is this description or argument unnecessarily opaque for its intended educational level?
- Is this description or argument unnecessarily opaque even to educated people?
- "Dirac test" (communication question 03)
- QID references
- P200 rating / communication rating level
- color swatch references
- quantum mechanics
- Property data type
- item
- instance of
- communication rating level
Usage notes[edit]
- This test is intended for works aimed at relatively educated audiences, such as interviews about cutting-edge physics hypotheses or theoretical guidance for Marxist organizers. For these kinds of works which cannot be assumed to be aimed at everyday people, many other tests on the rubric will not be appropriate and may be skipped.
- A work fails the Dirac test if it is unintelligible at first sight to highly educated people even though it claims to be an introduction to the topic it is about.
- A work fails the test if a college-educated person not educated in its particular field would be unable to locate any way of learning a quick overview of the building blocks of the theory or proposition being presented in a reasonable amount of time and for a reasonable amount of money.
- A work failing the test for this reason will not necessarily be "fatal" to it receiving a good rating if it happens to be the case that it really is instructive behind all the "spaghetti".
- If the work is strictly intended to follow works which pass the test and these works are not difficult for ordinary people to find, then it does not fail.
- The question of whether ordinary people can find or obtain the introductory works does not require that ordinary people can understand them. If an ordinary person can pick up a book they find unintelligible at a used book store and drop it on the desk of an educated person and it is understandable as an introduction to a topic, that book passes the test, and any book strictly following it is able to pass the test.
- A work fails the test if it is entirely composed of "ontological spaghetti" in which every word in an entire book requires learning about the full depths of the entire model being presented in order to understand any word in the entire book. Notorious examples include works by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek.
- A work does not fail the test if it consists of a core text which is difficult to parse and a commentary which makes it more understandable. In this case, the test should be applied mainly to the commentary.
- This is apparently a significant problem for Bordigist texts. The original works may fail the test, but commentaries directly including them may pass.
- This test is named after the Dirac equation for computing interactions of fermions using Lorentz transforms and matrices. If you do not understand what this equation actually converts into what after skimming an entire hour-long Wikipedia article about it, then you understand why the Dirac test is necessary.
