Another thing to say about embracing "dumbness" is that, although hard for some experts, speaking in simple English makes them much more approachable. Many tech

Another thing to say about embracing "dumbness" is that, although hard for some experts, speaking in simple English makes them much more approachable. Many technical experts, like specialized programmers, or academics, will speak with so much jargon and context-specific language, that it becomes difficult to work with them. It takes a bit of bravery to stop doing that, and there is a reputational cost sometimes, as the author says: > For example, if you are in a professional environment and you are expected to have a certain level of expertise, pretending to be dumb might damage your credibility. Still, it helps everyone in the end. You as the expert can connect with people outside your field better, and learn new things, others will have a good time working with you. Just to be clear, here are two examples of the same statement: > The process segfaulted after a race condition dead-locked threads on a mutex fread resource. Neither thread initialized a pointer to the read data buffer before use, so the pointer was garbage. > Two parts of the program got stuck fighting over a file, so the program couldn't read it and failed. Both statements might sound the same to a software engineer. Maybe the first one even sounds more informative and "better". But even to a computer-literate colleague, so long as they are not technical enough to code, the first could just as well be white noise. They wouldn't know what the issue is, how serious it is, how hard is it to fix, how much time it will take, what parts of the operating system or the computer were involved, is it something within the grasp of their engineer colleague or should third parties be involved, what is the damage that's done to a system running this code, and so on. I've read a lot of academic papers filled with excessive jargon, too. Sometimes they write about the most mundane, day-to-day things, but it's difficult to make heads or tails of even just their abstracts. The purpose of an abstract is to tell an uninformed reader if the paper is relevant to them. If the average reader is expected to be informed about the paper's contents to the same extent as the author, what's the point of even publishing what everyone knows? The jargon-filled language can be self-defeating, and certainly often defeats the whole purpose of communication.