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[edited:re read and changed my opinion]
by iorrus 9y ago
[edited:re read and changed my opinion]
- veddox 9y agoI think you missed the point of the article. The author isn't talking about the language scientists use when talking to each other, but about the communication between scientists and non-scientists. The way we speak and write in the scientific community is optimized for precision and succinctness. Within the confines of a talk or paper, we just don't have the time or the space to go into all the fundamentals of our work. And neither do we have to, because everybody in our audience has spent years of their life accumulating the necessary background knowledge to understand what we're saying. But when it comes to talking to outsiders, that doesn't work anymore. Whether we are explaining our research to politicians or our grandmother, we need to find new ways to express complex topics. The aim is for the explanation to be readily understandable but not oversimplified. And that is the conflict the author of the article is aiming at.