this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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I dated a girl who acted like writing / talking like that made her better / smarter than other people. She got off on the elitism. I’m no academic slouch, but my philosophy is if you can’t break it down in basic terms that anyone can understand, then you don’t understand it enough yourself.
I would go so far as to say that knowing and understanding something is only half of the issue. The other half is being able to clearly convey it to others. And that’s where a lot of people (myself included) fall short.
I think any scientist should able to convey at least the high level concepts that they're working on at the level that a smart 12th-grader can follow. If you can't do that, I think that's a sign that you're probably not thinking about your work very clearly. Being able to distill things and context-switch back to a birds-eye view of your work is critical for knowing what direction you're heading in.
(I say this from the perspective of a climate scientist - our field has a pretty active public/lay conversation and lots of science comma, but I think the concept still applies to other sciences, and social sciences.)
I could break stuff down to you but I won't because I have shit to do and there's textbooks. Also your eyes would glaze over 2% of the way in. So in that sense, I can't, because I can't make you actually want to understand it. Best I can do is hand-wave and rely on you not understanding why my explanation falls short of actually being one, making you think you understood something.
Talking shop and obfuscation are not the same thing but are generally indistinguishable for the uninitiated. I guess what I'm mostly miffed about is the implication that's going on in OP's erudite thesis and your anecdote: That people who talk about stuff you don't understand do it to exclude. Maybe, you know, stuff is just complicated and needs years of study and practice to understand. It's not a status thing, someone with a Ph.D in chemistry will have quite a task ahead of them understanding what hair stylists are talking about when talking shop about chemicals unless they themselves happen to specialise in that area. Now try explaining conditioner chemistry to a philosopher, instead, it's probably hopeless.
I don't agree, there's a reason why we need people like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining things in simpler terms and that they're not the people doing the research itself...
I don't think that's relevant. People like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have also done great at explaining science to the general public.
Sure, but not being able to explain it in layman's terms doesn't mean you don't understand what you're working on and in fact the majority of scientists and engineers and programmers and highly specialized individuals aren't very good at vulgarization for the simple reason that they don't need to do it when they're accomplishing the work and outside of that they're not required to explain their work to laymen since there are people specialized in doing just that.
I also disagree with the original comment you replied to. I was just responding to the part I quoted. I agree most specialists in a field don't know how to explain things to non-specialists and I agree it's important to have people who know how to explain things in layman terms, I jusy don't think it's relevant if those people are also the ones doing the research or not.