- 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.
