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.
If you're communicating with another scientist about the actual work you're doing then sure there are times when you need to be specific.
If you're publishing official documentation on something or writing contracts, then yes, you also need to be extremely speciific.
But if you're just providing a description of your work to a non-specialist then no, there's always a way of simplifying it for the appropriate context. Same thing goes for most of specialist to specialist communication. There are specific sentences and times you use the precision to distinguish between two different things, but if you insist on always speaking in maximum precision and accuracy then it is simply poor communication skills where you are over providing unnecessary detail that detracts from the actual point you're trying to convey.