5 ms·

It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way.

by 2019-nCoV 7y ago

foldr 7y ago
You are seeing conspiracies where there are none. The average humanities professor has spent their life reading books and has a bigger vocabulary than the average programmer. They’re not trying to pull a fast one on you. They just know more words than you do, and are used to talking to people who are familiar with said words. The sad thing is that none of the words in the quoted passage are obscure at all. If you don’t know at least most of these words, it’s safe to say that you have a poor vocabulary. This is really, really easy to fix if you just change your attitude. Instead of being angry with someone for knowing more words than you, just look up the words that you don’t know. Then you can respond to what the person is actually saying, instead of unfairly assuming that they're a charlatan.
- 2019-nCoV 7y ago
  You need to realise that the only thing a career academic can really teach you is how to be a career academic.
  - foldr 7y ago
    Meh, I’ve been in and out of academia and can be as cynical about academics as the next person. But taken literally, what you are saying is obviously untrue. I was taught by career academics all through my undergraduate and graduate education. How to be a career academic is the one thing that I failed to learn from the experience. I learned lots of other interesting stuff, though.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Think instead of the Feynmann Lectures. Part of his genius was being able to boil advanced stuff down to a freshman level. When he couldn't, he said "That means we don't really understand it." The humanities should aspire to that, rather than (or at least in addition to) "big words for big ideas".
  - foldr 7y ago
    Yes, Feynman was the first person in any discipline to give lectures accessible to a popular audience. Goodness knows why no-one in the whole of the humanities has ever done this. (There is actually a much longer, and arguably more successful, tradition of humanists engaging with popular audiences. We remember the scientists who were good at it because they were so exceptional.) I suspect you haven't read the article, which in fact is at the level of a freshman humanities student. Not everything has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Feynman also wrote plenty of stuff vastly less accessible than this article that you and I wouldn't understand - at least not without investing a lot of time and effort. But God forbid that anyone in the humanities write something that requires you to (gasp!) use a dictionary. The sheer arrogance and imbecility of the typical attitude towards the humanities on HN is really something to behold. Oh, why can't you all be more like this cool physics dude who we think is God's gift to literature because he dictated some amusing anecdotes about strip clubs and colored paint?
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Feel free to try to un-press your condescension button; it's not helping you present your case at all. You just come across as rude and hostile. Let me try to restate a bit better. Feynmann wasn't the first, even in physics (Faraday may have been). But for Feynmann to do what he did in his lectures, he had to find a simpler way to present it - not because the words were hard, but because the mathematics was. What I want from the humanities is a bit different. Not easier words, but fewer. There's an article about a fifth the length of this one waiting to be written. It would have the same content, too, and would be far more readable (and read!) by non-humanities types. I suspect that even many freshman humanities students would appreciate the difference. (If you're a humanities major, you don't lack for pages to read.) Now, if you want to say that this wasn't written for the HN crowd, that's probably true. But it got posted here, and here we are. I assert that there is a possible way of writing that 1) is acceptable within the humanities, 2) does not "dumb down" the content trying to be communicated, and 3) is much more accessible to the non-humanities reader. But I'm not a humanities person myself, so I could be dreaming. 1) might be fundamentally opposed to 3).

It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way.

You are seeing conspiracies where there are none. The average humanities professor has spent their life reading books and has a bigger vocabulary than the average programmer. They’re not trying to pull a fast one on you. They just know more words than you do, and are used to talking to people who are familiar with said words. The sad thing is that none of the words in the quoted passage are obscure at all. If you don’t know at least most of these words, it’s safe to say that you have a poor vocabulary. This is really, really easy to fix if you just change your attitude. Instead of being angry with someone for knowing more words than you, just look up the words that you don’t know. Then you can respond to what the person is actually saying, instead of unfairly assuming that they're a charlatan.

2019-nCoV 7y ago
You need to realise that the only thing a career academic can really teach you is how to be a career academic.
- foldr 7y ago
  Meh, I’ve been in and out of academia and can be as cynical about academics as the next person. But taken literally, what you are saying is obviously untrue. I was taught by career academics all through my undergraduate and graduate education. How to be a career academic is the one thing that I failed to learn from the experience. I learned lots of other interesting stuff, though.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Think instead of the Feynmann Lectures. Part of his genius was being able to boil advanced stuff down to a freshman level. When he couldn't, he said "That means we don't really understand it." The humanities should aspire to that, rather than (or at least in addition to) "big words for big ideas".
- foldr 7y ago
  Yes, Feynman was the first person in any discipline to give lectures accessible to a popular audience. Goodness knows why no-one in the whole of the humanities has ever done this. (There is actually a much longer, and arguably more successful, tradition of humanists engaging with popular audiences. We remember the scientists who were good at it because they were so exceptional.) I suspect you haven't read the article, which in fact is at the level of a freshman humanities student. Not everything has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Feynman also wrote plenty of stuff vastly less accessible than this article that you and I wouldn't understand - at least not without investing a lot of time and effort. But God forbid that anyone in the humanities write something that requires you to (gasp!) use a dictionary. The sheer arrogance and imbecility of the typical attitude towards the humanities on HN is really something to behold. Oh, why can't you all be more like this cool physics dude who we think is God's gift to literature because he dictated some amusing anecdotes about strip clubs and colored paint?
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Feel free to try to un-press your condescension button; it's not helping you present your case at all. You just come across as rude and hostile. Let me try to restate a bit better. Feynmann wasn't the first, even in physics (Faraday may have been). But for Feynmann to do what he did in his lectures, he had to find a simpler way to present it - not because the words were hard, but because the mathematics was. What I want from the humanities is a bit different. Not easier words, but fewer. There's an article about a fifth the length of this one waiting to be written. It would have the same content, too, and would be far more readable (and read!) by non-humanities types. I suspect that even many freshman humanities students would appreciate the difference. (If you're a humanities major, you don't lack for pages to read.) Now, if you want to say that this wasn't written for the HN crowd, that's probably true. But it got posted here, and here we are. I assert that there is a possible way of writing that 1) is acceptable within the humanities, 2) does not "dumb down" the content trying to be communicated, and 3) is much more accessible to the non-humanities reader. But I'm not a humanities person myself, so I could be dreaming. 1) might be fundamentally opposed to 3).