This is the first time I read that someone uses an acronym for ragebait purposes. The acronym "RL" is very well known. Dwarkesh's podcast is mostly AI related, so it's not a surprise that he will freely use acronyms. I think your take is very cynical.
That is a bizarre take. Dwarkesh Patel is publishing in a very specific domain, where RL is a very common and unambigous acronym. I'd bet it was immediately clear to 99% of his normal audience, and to him it's such a high frequency term that people finding it ambiguous would not even have crossed his mind.
(Like, would you expect people to expand LLM or AGI in a title?)
Ok so now it's stupid or malicious to use RL as reinforcement learning on a blog about AI where everyone in the field has been referring to it as RL forever? Even wikipedia puts (RL) after reinforcement learning.
That's the normal way to introduce an acronym in an article.
Anyway, I was just saying that however irritating, it's likely just an omission out of forgetfulness, not deliberate clickbait. A minor application of Hanlon's razor.
Seeing the downvotes and even a flag, it appears I'll have to lower my expectation of people's cultural baggage here.
Additionally, replying to "in the field" in GP: this is about the article title. You first have to know which field the article is in, which simply is not clear if you are an HN reader that happens to not be in that field.
Counterpoint: much of academia is creating and learning these shorthands. They are genuinely useful - humans have limited context space in their heads, so this compression allows them to work in larger problem spaces. Classic example: Einstein and tensors.
Upshot - don’t hate - pick up the vocab, it’s part of the learning process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning