Jargon certainly isn't unique to any field. In my view, jargon repackages conceptual or procedural knowledge into shorter phrases for the purpose of more efficient communication. The less familiar another person is with a particular set of jargon, the more it must be "un-packaged" into its fundamental ideas.

Of course, jargon can be nested, so this process may potentially be tedious. On the other hand, this jargon nesting problem can be avoided by approximating ideas with ones that the other party is assumed to be familiar with. An expert knows the jargon, the ideas behind the jargon, and many of the first- and second-order approximations of the ideas.

> Not sure if that's specific to math though... Certainly at a PhD-level there's going to be a specialized language.

That's a good point, and I don't think it even needs to be at the PhD level; just a 3rd yr u/g is probably sufficient. In poli sci, you can talk about phenomena like candidate emergence, for example, or voting systems like FPTP and the like. In phil, you have notions such as fallibility as a premise, phenomenology a la Heidegger, etc.

The big difference, I think, is that STEM tends to be less accessible because those fields tend to have knowledge bases that the average layman won't deal with in their lifetime, whereas with psych, soce, and most other liberal arts fields, people can always draw on personal experience to understand the jargon. There isn't really any such analogy, though, for homomorphisms in a metric space or thermo calculations.

To bring it back to the point I was trying to make: jargon is needed to discuss knowledge domains beyond what the layperson has been exposed to. So although jargon might give the impression of a higher "genius" standard, the standard isn't so much higher as it is different, because reasoning about stuff like the Riemann hypothesis is completely different from discussing the subtleties of, say, negotiation strategies.