Teaching.

I disagree with the OP of http://dis.4chan.org/read/sci/1173802068/1-, however I agree that science sometimes uses unnecessarily complex language to describe things. I often find myself coming across some garble that I have to spend 5 minutes looking up to decipher, only to discover the concept I was worried over was in fact wee easy and could have been explained using layman's language and often with less volume of text.


It takes 4 steps to teach someone a concept.

Ensure background knowledge (if anything is lacking simply teach someone the concept they are unaware of using these 4 steps).

The smallest explanation possible of that concept. By this I mean abbreviated, not over-simplified or abridged.

Examples to help the student illsutrate, remember and prove the function of the concept.

Problems to solve using that concept for the same reason.


I just came up with these 4 steps on the spot based on how I usually explain something by explaining the concept first and giving and example then adding 2 more steps following how I learned things as a student. I decided to post this in a new thread because although the OP of http://dis.4chan.org/read/sci/1173802068/1- was wrong most of the time he did bring up the point that some concepts in science are actually quite easy but tend to be distorted from the normal understanding by scientists and when the new distorted form is presented to laymen and students it can be confusing. This point needs to be distinguished from the OP's conspiracy theory. Indeed some people misunderstand this confusion and believe it to be stupidity when in fact the student may well be perfectly capable of understanding the concept if it was presented in layman's terms, but this is due more to experienced scientists creating abbreviations and additional concepts of their own which people are not familiar with. There is a difference between knowing the elemental symbols for the actinides and understanding the lorentz transformation. One depends more on memory and the other depends more on cognitive ability.

I believe there is a superior form of education which can follow these concepts with a clear structure from base concepts that 4 year olds are aware of all the way up to university level analytic skills and knowledge. What do you think?

I think the problem may be that many scientists are - either intentionally or unintentionally - writing merely for their peers and not for the common person. Or perhaps it has to do with some scientists being better at math than written communication?

It seems it would be helpful if scientists would feed their reports through an interpreter who is just exposed to the information in the report, but has the background knowledge needed to understand it. This interpreter could find things that are phrased in a way that is more difficult to understand than it should be and suggest corrections. This actually may already be done for some reports and studies, but I doubt all of them use this method. Even the so called experts could benefit from a more simply put explanation of the same concepts, that is not as taxing to understand as more complex and veiled language that needs to be almost "decoded."

Well thing is some people just think and learn differently than others. There is no end all solution to teaching methods. Even segregating based on learning methods wouldn't be viable as it's not a black and white thing (no pun intended). There are also a lot of people who simply don't take it seriously (which is understandable since a lot of skills aren't really necessary in most career choices. Either way, I really don't think rote learning methods are helping anyone (unless you're learning a language).

Isaac Asimov is dead. There currently isn't anyone that I know of who can take some of the most complex math and science concepts and make them understandable to dummies like me.

THer is me, I am ral good at wring and makeing you get it

when you write a textbook, you get paid by the page-count.

>>6
Yea, it's bullshit. Especially considering that a lot of recent mathbooks have been re-issued with the only changes being the order of the problems/chapters. If you want to listen to some authors that'll teach you the content in layman terms then look for intuitionist authors.

For example, the professor Michael Starbird working with "The Teaching Company" (TTC) has created a pretty good set of videos for explaining calculus.

fuck you guys, fuck you