this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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My point being that for some stuff, you just can't describe things as bags within bags, irrelevant of where you are on the scale, at least not without being quite intellectually dishonest and oversimplifying.
I am not saying I am on top of the scale, I am saying I've met and worked with people on top of the scale (and couldn't keep up), and they don't explain things with bags within bags.
EDIT: for clarity, there are things that are too complicated for everyone right now. One day we may understand them well enough that someone can explain it in layman's term without loss of precision, but to get to that point, we must accept that we need to work with complex notations and lingo. Example: in the past, only Newton and Leibniz and a handful of others understood calculus. Now it's taught in high school. Newton and Leibniz were not in the middle of the bell curve, nor did they overcomplicate their theory to make it sound fancy.
Eh I don't really agree, depending on how simple you're talking. Bags within bags, or dumbing things down to a grade school level, then sure, there are topics that can't be described succinctly.
But if you're talking about simplifying things down to the point that anyone who took a bit of undergrad math/science can understand, then pretty much everything can be described in simple and easy to understand ways.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen many people at the top who can't, but in every case, it's not because of the topics' inherent complexity, but either because they don't actually understand the topics as well as they may seem, or because they lack the social skills (or time / effort / setting) to properly analogize and adjust for the listener.
The meme is about technical science jobs. There are absolutely technical science jobs where you cannot communicate key ideas and concepts without a) the person you're describing it to needing more than "a bit of undergrad math/science" and b) if you try to explain it without using specialist terminology, you'll spend an unnecessary hour for every quarter hour of content recalling the specialist definition of things because, for some reason, you refuse to use the precise word that the scientific community have agreed means exactly that.
I've progressed quite far in the technical science part of my job. I'm at the top end of the graph and encouraging my junior staff to simplify their language and message. Some things absolutely need technical terms, but they don't need to use overly complicated words to say "this has moved up" or "this thing is bad". More often meaning gets lost in using euphemisms instead of being clear about the message.
I've moved up the management role as well and really can't bring myself to move from the bottom end of the meme graph. Management really has its own language so they can say lots of words in meetings with very little meaning. We're in the business of doing shit......are we going to do shit or not?
Well yeah, but that's business bullshit speak, nothing to do with science!
Their literal entire first paragraph is about scientists doing it.
Using jargon for "this has moved up" or "this thing is bad" is not specific to science in any way.