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Science journals are really hard to consume for the general public A lot of things are difficult to consume for the general public. Every day people "agree" t
by tmalsburg2 11y ago
Science journals are really hard to consume for the general public
A lot of things are difficult to consume for the general public. Every day people "agree" to terms of service that they don't understand. We hire lawyers to interpret the law for us. Doctors interpret the medical knowledge for us and make decisions for us that have serious consequences for our health. And so on. It's a mystery to me why people think that science should be different. It's a complex subject matter and most people will never be able to understand result from Riemannian geometry, systems neuroscience, computational climate research, etc. Requiring that the general public can consume the results of science will produce a dumbed-down Mickey Mouse version of science. What a waste.
- kwhitefoot 11y agoIt's not so clear cut as you seem to think. A lot of science is graspable in its essence by people who would struggle with the mathematics. And a lot of scientific journals are written in unnecessarily difficult prose. As for lawyers interpreting the law, well the law is much more complicated than science in several important respects: it is not a single system based on a small set of fundamental axioms, it is not even required to be consistent, it is continually changing. Also, even if we do get a dumbed down version of science then, so long as it is still science, we can build upon it. I'm glad you put 'agree' in quotation marks because of course people in general do not agree, they have in fact no option but to pretend to agree or forgo the service.