I think what makes the relationship between jargon, complexity, and gatekeeping just so insidious is often jargon is really necessary and has nothing to do with gatekeeping, sometimes it’s pure gatekeeping, and probably more often than either of those it’s a bit of both. And if you’re an outsider, you by nature lack the knowledge to distinguish these things. The more complex the society it seems the worse this dynamic will become.
Absolutely went through this too, and basically gave up on trying to appeal to the TikTok brains. It has somewhat crippled my output because I spent 5 years trying to dumb it down, refine, refine, dumb it down even more... simplify it, use analogies... until I realised it wasn't about a lack of understanding. It was a lack of caring about understanding.
As a person who had career in UX and accessibility, I am obviously a stickler for explaining things *as simply as possible*, and knowing when you're talking bollocks using big words because you're pompous... and trying to explain.
I think like anything, its about degrees. I absolutely believe in plain english legal language, for example. It doesn't mean we should spend 16 hours trying to explain what a contract is. ya know?
The subliteracy problem in the US is... significant. It makes me sympathetic, and the problem is socioeconomic... but it is also a choice.
Can the issue also be that people, especially younger people, are receiving so much information that they just can’t process it? People are over saturated with information and—to use your example—their hard drives can’t store the data. They then become overloaded and thus can’t compute new information, or fully process what they’ve already received.
In addition, you could also look at science and how scientist in the same subject but different fields have trouble understanding each others work.
Up to the mid-1800s you had people who were knowledgeable in many different subjects, probably because society was still on the low end of the exponential curve of information.
I guess one of the hopes of science is that even with more information we can come up with laws that explain it, but this seems less true as things have progressed.
This makes sense. I hope my comment didn’t make it seem that I thought it was the sole factor, or even the dominant factor. Especially looking at elites, your analysis seems correct to me (not that you need any assurance of that). My mistake was widening it beyond elites.
David, this is actually ONE but only one of the sources of cognitive load exhaustion. That said, it does not explain totally why elites are also less useful outside of their narrow specializations (even in jobs in their field). My point though is this makes it sound like just an internet problem, and it isn’t. But you are most likely correct that this plays a major part.
I think the old “explain it to me like I’m a child” trope isn’t just about dumbing things down or simplifying; it’s often a way for someone to demonstrate a real grasp of underlying principles—far transfer concepts versus near-transfer, rote learning. In that sense, it’s also a way for non-experts to gauge whether the person they’re speaking to is truly knowledgeable or just bluffing.
One thing about the ubiquity of smartphone culture is that it’s created an exponential increase in vicarious experience in place of actual experience—generating a false sense of reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence. When everything comes in through the same sensory channel, triggering the same dopamine spikes, how do you meaningfully differentiate, analyze, or develop mastery—let alone true understanding?
Contrast that with something like the “Hole in the Wall” experiment in India (1999), where Delhi street kids, without any formal supervision, learned surprisingly complex subjects—like molecular biology—just by exploring publicly accessible computers. They may not have had the advantage of a “good” education, but they arguably had richer, more grounded life experiences—something very different from today’s much more insular existence (a big part of the learning were the children would teach each other).
Or the episode in The Wire where the kids are incentivized to learn probability through playing dice—learning through context and lived experience, not abstraction. For a teacher being able to simplify a concept gives you a framework that can incentivise your students as to why they would want to learn this other than argument from authority, it’s the capacity to make learning fun or exciting.
I don't think the shift to oral communication helps with cognitive load, nor does the drop in people using writing to think through their thoughts. But even before the shift to video, the UX on computers has been a limitation. Most of the tools that people use to write only allow for a linear flow of text where it is difficult to get a bird's eye view of what you're working on. It has only been more recently that tools like Scrintal have come out that allow you to "mind map" or lay out ideas on a canvas, move them around, make connections.
Going further down this line, at least in the science field, most search is keyword based. With papers being behind paywalls, it's difficult to search for concepts or ideas across disciplines because the text is not searchable (outside of titles and abstracts) and because tools like pubmed aren't made for that kind of search anyway. So you end up with clusters of papers linked together and academics who are not linking their work to work outside these clusters.
And quickly going back to social media, on platforms like TikTok (and now X and increasingly IG), your videos don't go out to subscribers, they just either go viral or so no new views. So viewers see content untethered from the rest of that creator's feed or ideas. Even if you did want to dig deeper, there is no easy way to click a podcast clip and jump straight into the longer episode, no easy way to ask "what else has this person said about this topic." And then even if you decide to do that leg work yourself, most people consume and create ideas on their phones. There is no easy way to watch clips and take notes at the same time, to set aside related clips and watch them together later.
I think what makes the relationship between jargon, complexity, and gatekeeping just so insidious is often jargon is really necessary and has nothing to do with gatekeeping, sometimes it’s pure gatekeeping, and probably more often than either of those it’s a bit of both. And if you’re an outsider, you by nature lack the knowledge to distinguish these things. The more complex the society it seems the worse this dynamic will become.
Absolutely went through this too, and basically gave up on trying to appeal to the TikTok brains. It has somewhat crippled my output because I spent 5 years trying to dumb it down, refine, refine, dumb it down even more... simplify it, use analogies... until I realised it wasn't about a lack of understanding. It was a lack of caring about understanding.
As a person who had career in UX and accessibility, I am obviously a stickler for explaining things *as simply as possible*, and knowing when you're talking bollocks using big words because you're pompous... and trying to explain.
I think like anything, its about degrees. I absolutely believe in plain english legal language, for example. It doesn't mean we should spend 16 hours trying to explain what a contract is. ya know?
The subliteracy problem in the US is... significant. It makes me sympathetic, and the problem is socioeconomic... but it is also a choice.
Anyway love your work.
Can the issue also be that people, especially younger people, are receiving so much information that they just can’t process it? People are over saturated with information and—to use your example—their hard drives can’t store the data. They then become overloaded and thus can’t compute new information, or fully process what they’ve already received.
In addition, you could also look at science and how scientist in the same subject but different fields have trouble understanding each others work.
Up to the mid-1800s you had people who were knowledgeable in many different subjects, probably because society was still on the low end of the exponential curve of information.
I guess one of the hopes of science is that even with more information we can come up with laws that explain it, but this seems less true as things have progressed.
This makes sense. I hope my comment didn’t make it seem that I thought it was the sole factor, or even the dominant factor. Especially looking at elites, your analysis seems correct to me (not that you need any assurance of that). My mistake was widening it beyond elites.
David, this is actually ONE but only one of the sources of cognitive load exhaustion. That said, it does not explain totally why elites are also less useful outside of their narrow specializations (even in jobs in their field). My point though is this makes it sound like just an internet problem, and it isn’t. But you are most likely correct that this plays a major part.
Isn’t the problem also ego. Your work is really sophisticated- aka “fucking hard”. A lot of people lash out when they feel inferior intellectually.
In my case sure, but the increase in this style of engagement dovetails with decline in both general and media literacy.
I think the old “explain it to me like I’m a child” trope isn’t just about dumbing things down or simplifying; it’s often a way for someone to demonstrate a real grasp of underlying principles—far transfer concepts versus near-transfer, rote learning. In that sense, it’s also a way for non-experts to gauge whether the person they’re speaking to is truly knowledgeable or just bluffing.
One thing about the ubiquity of smartphone culture is that it’s created an exponential increase in vicarious experience in place of actual experience—generating a false sense of reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence. When everything comes in through the same sensory channel, triggering the same dopamine spikes, how do you meaningfully differentiate, analyze, or develop mastery—let alone true understanding?
Contrast that with something like the “Hole in the Wall” experiment in India (1999), where Delhi street kids, without any formal supervision, learned surprisingly complex subjects—like molecular biology—just by exploring publicly accessible computers. They may not have had the advantage of a “good” education, but they arguably had richer, more grounded life experiences—something very different from today’s much more insular existence (a big part of the learning were the children would teach each other).
Or the episode in The Wire where the kids are incentivized to learn probability through playing dice—learning through context and lived experience, not abstraction. For a teacher being able to simplify a concept gives you a framework that can incentivise your students as to why they would want to learn this other than argument from authority, it’s the capacity to make learning fun or exciting.
Anyway thanks subscribed and all that
I don't think the shift to oral communication helps with cognitive load, nor does the drop in people using writing to think through their thoughts. But even before the shift to video, the UX on computers has been a limitation. Most of the tools that people use to write only allow for a linear flow of text where it is difficult to get a bird's eye view of what you're working on. It has only been more recently that tools like Scrintal have come out that allow you to "mind map" or lay out ideas on a canvas, move them around, make connections.
Going further down this line, at least in the science field, most search is keyword based. With papers being behind paywalls, it's difficult to search for concepts or ideas across disciplines because the text is not searchable (outside of titles and abstracts) and because tools like pubmed aren't made for that kind of search anyway. So you end up with clusters of papers linked together and academics who are not linking their work to work outside these clusters.
And quickly going back to social media, on platforms like TikTok (and now X and increasingly IG), your videos don't go out to subscribers, they just either go viral or so no new views. So viewers see content untethered from the rest of that creator's feed or ideas. Even if you did want to dig deeper, there is no easy way to click a podcast clip and jump straight into the longer episode, no easy way to ask "what else has this person said about this topic." And then even if you decide to do that leg work yourself, most people consume and create ideas on their phones. There is no easy way to watch clips and take notes at the same time, to set aside related clips and watch them together later.