[bright_light]

Thought train:

  - 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.

[adhesive_wombat]

> 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.

[1]: or maybe this is just https://xkcd.com/2501 on my behalf

[SamoyedFurFluff]

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.