ShakaUVM's Journal: Simplicity and Understanding

This is in reference to the following post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178269&threshold=5&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=14782984

  A critical part of the full understanding of a concept is the ability to express it simply.

As soon as you use jargon, you lose your audience unless they also understand the specialized vocabulary of your field. With such a simple question they are blatantly not physicists, so you're just (perhaps intentionally) talking over their heads, making yourself sound smart. /shrug

Not a big deal, most professors do it, but it's a bad habit, and one I hope academia will someday break. My fiancee is at UCSF, so I have to constantly tell her to use plain English. Skin works just as well as Epidermis, honey. She works with the public, so she has a more critical need to break that habit than most academes.

Just recalling my high school physics, if I'd have written it (and you were responding to a troll, IMO), I'd just have said that all electrical waves are electromagnetic in nature. Maybe talked about the history of ether, and how the electrical and magnetic components provide the medium for each other.

Perhaps the worst field is Philosophy, though. Philosophers are especially bad at it. Or especially good, depending on your perspective, of taking something that can be stated clearly and simply, and loading it up with propositions and jargon until only they know what they're arguing about. And sometimes not even then. Kant took an idea that could be stated in a sentence, expanded it out to hundreds of pages, and ended with something not even his other contemporaries could understand. Ditto Wittgenstein (whose thesis Bertrand Russell couldn't understand), ditto Hegel, etc.

Not a criticism of you, but a criticism of your defense of your post.

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2nd post on the subject
in response to
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178269&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=14783558
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>>In general most modern applications are not expressed clearly or simply to
>>normal every day people and programmers or advanced/expert users (i.e. much of
>>the Slashdot crowd) simply make fun of them. Why should we expect any better
>>when we don't understand something? Pot, meet kettle.

I majored in computer science with a minor in writing. I hold nothing but contempt for people that take a simple idea and make it complicated. For people that 'understand' a complex concept but cannot express it with less complexity, again I hold low regard for their intellect.

I flip it around see it rather as a challenge. If a person asks me, say, what the advantages are of a hyperthreading chip, and I found myself unable to reduce the issue into a correct, meaningful, and jargon-free response, I'd see that as a sign that I didn't understand it well enough, and would hit the books again. Defending a baroque explanation of divs, grads, and undefined variables to someone who obviously hasn't taken basic physics with this:

"I can only report the truth. I do not have the ability to explain it better than Einstein, Bergmann and Wheeler themselves (Covariant 4-vector formalism is their work mainly)... This person is clearly ignorant about many things, and too arrogant to admit it and try to learn something interesting and relevant to the discussion. (American? Nah! That's just a stereotype)."

is indefensible. Again, giving an explanation that only someone who already knows the answer can understand is no explanation at all. Perhaps you would call it a proof, or some such, but certainly not an explanation.

>>My Jargon vocabulary was highly limited until I entered the business world.
>> At University we used the specific, word that concisely and precisely
>>describes what we are talking about. The Epidermis -> skin point you use is
>>actually a good example as skin generally covers multiple layers as aspects,
>>while epidermis is precise.

Do you really think that you should tell people to apply a creme to their 'epidermis' instead of their 'skin'? Is Mrs Jones at risk of pulling back her epidermis and dermis so she can apply her antifungal creme to her hypodermis? Hey, you said "skin", after all.

No. Use terminology only when the difference is important, and if you must, define your terms before unleashing them. Call it a bruise instead of a hematoma, so they don't get a heart attack thinking they have cancer.

Even when my fiancee is explaining things like pharmokinetics to me, as long I stop her from using terms like AUC, MEC, MTC, etc. I can understand her lectures.

The key defining factor, of course, is your audience. If I am conducting technology training with K-12 teachers, which I do on a fairly regular basis, I have two options: 1) Use big fancy words to make myself look and feel smart, or 2) Express the exact same concept in words they understand and can use. There's a reason why I get universally good reviews on my workshops: I don't have an ego to get in the way of a clear explanation.

It doesn't just apply to the general public either. At my university, people applying for professorial positions and people giving defenses of their theses wuold generally talk for an hour or so on their respective areas of expertise, and then would be asked questions. Almost always, the first question was: explain your thesis in three sentences or less. If the person stumbled, or even worse, couldn't answer, they were almost sure to not get the position (graduating students were obviously given a little more leniency, but at the same time the dept chair would tell them they'd better damn well have an answer for that question ready when asked).

This is a fairly common trend from what I've seen. Some say, for example, the genius of Einstein was not in his theory of relativity, but in his E=mc^2.

It's a movement I wholeheartedly support.

>>Is that the simplest explanation? Could I take that to an average 5 year old
>>and explain electrical and magnetic energy fields are related and have them
>>understand? I'd guess not. Which of course is the problem, simplicity is in
>>the eye of the beholder.

Simplicity is entirely dependent on the audience. The very worst workshops I like to give are to audiences of mixed backgrounds. I once gave a talk on "Tips and Tricks in UNIX Shell Script". Was advertised around the department and held in a department lecture area. So when I got into the talk and started talking about setting up neat little autocompletion tricks in TCSH, I noticed only blank stares coming back. I trailed off and asked the audience for their background. 25% of the audience were UNIX experts, 75% had never used UNIX before. How do you lecture to that? How can you possibly satisfy all of your customers, so to speak? You can't. So I simply gave an hour long lecture on an introduction to UNIX, and by the time the hour was over, all the UNIX hackers had long since walked out.

>>I'm sure his answer is a pretty simplistic one for someone in his position. I
>> bet post-grad physicists call people losers when they don't understand basic
>> physics.

I agree, if he was addressing an audience of physicists, he could give divs, grads, curls and super duper 4-dimensional tensor flux capacitors all day long while he realigns the main deflector dish to catch hypertachyons in his n-dimensional subspace receiver.

His audience was one person, and one who obviously hadn't even taken an introductory physics class. Hence his mistake.

But to come back to my original point, my main criticism of him is not that he gave an incomprehensible, jargon loaded response, but that he defended it by saying that the other person was stupid, and too lazy to learn something new. As I said, the fault in this case is entirely in the bad and lazy explanation of the physicist, a trend altogether too common in academia, and which reveals the academics own lack of undertsanding of the subject.