- What are the first principles of communication.
- Of what you want to say, what can they hear.
- The more refined (technical) your knowledge, the fewer people there are who can understand it.
- "Language is the interface for describing problems." This phrase makes me rather happy for some reason.
- Do you want to sound clever, or be clever. (It's easier to sound clever.)
- What are all the functions of using more technical language than necessary.
- Understanding what's relevant to another person is an advanced skill. In any context.
- Filtering technical knowledge into a relevant format for a listener to comprehend in real time is a skill that can be learnt.
- More people think they understand than actually do.
- There are infinite layers to understanding even the simplest thing.
- At what point do you tend to decide you've understood.
- Where does the feeling of 'understanding' come from.
> Filtering technical knowledge into a relevant format for a listener to comprehend in real time is a skill that can be learnt.
Sadly, not a skill most "scientific journalists" appear to have learned. There's a difference between "make understandable" and "dumb down to complete context-free drivel"[1].
And that's before the aforementioned "journalist" takes a single press release from a university PR department at face value rather than doing, well, journalism.
My understanding of what might be going on here is broken telephone with intent. A reporter gleans only a subset of information from a given body of research, then ends up reporting only on what portions they consider to be essential. The end result loses nuance and context.
I don’t think reporters want to be doing this, but society doesn’t incentivize serious reporting in of itself.
About 7 years I think (with another account before this one). I appreciate the range I can dip into.
Learning through participation and active application of content is going to be higher than only observing propositional knowledge and feeling like you 'know' stuff.
My understanding is that justified text is harder to read as in order to create the justification, uneven spaces are generated between the words which disrupts the flow of your eye.
Additionally, just like it's harder for the eye to make out a word in all caps due to greater regularity in the image, it's also likely harder to distinguish differences in a paragraph if it's all a 'block' to the reader.
I'd imagine some people rely more heavily on the shapes of words rather than the letters or spelling itself. And then this heuristic might also carry through into the shape of a paragraph.
