Interesting Links for 17-06-2017

[andrewducker]

If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

(tags: teaching Education science )

Decoding the Morse: The History of 16th-Century Narcoleptic Walruses

(tags: animals history myths arctic )

Tim Farron's resignation

(tags: libdem politics lgbt )

Amazon is buying Whole Foods

(tags: food amazon shopping )

Volvo Delicately Dances Into the Semi-Autonomous Future

(tags: cars driving automation )

Tories have blocked Labour legislation make rented homes safer – but it’s complicated.

(tags: housing politics labour Conservatives uk safety )

How international law could scupper a Tory deal with the DUP

(tags: law uk NorthernIreland ireland politics Conservatives OhForFucksSake )

Coconut oil as unhealthy as beef fat and butter

Personally, I love beef fat. And butter. Mmmmmmmm.
(tags: food viaSwampers fat )

Transgender actors effective in teaching new doctors to provide respectful care

(tags: lgbt healthcare )

Black women adopt white accents more readily than black men, in post apartheid South Africa

(tags: southafrica race language gender )

I really am getting close to not caring about Doctor Who.

The second comment makes a great point too
(tags: drwho review )

British Internet providers already censor political opinions they don't like

(tags: censorship uk internet )

Sun journalist impersonated Grenfell Tower victim's friend at hospital

(tags: media newspapers RupertMurdoch UK OhForFucksSake )

"Because I Moved 5 Shirts"... Portrait Of An Unexpected Twitter Storm

(tags: Twitter feminism science NASA )

Comments

[cmcmck]

But only so called 'experts' say they are unhealthy. All things in moderation surely?

[andrewducker]

Including arsenic and trepanning?

[jack]

I agree there are some things you don't want ANY of, but I think those two things might still be used in medicine occasionally :) only for specific problems though, not for everyone

[cmcmck]

I meant in terms of nutrition :op

[andrewducker]

And arsenic's nutrition value is...not good. So eating it, even in moderation is a bad idea.

Meanwhile, World Health Organization, Health Canada,the US Department of Health and Human Services, the UK Food Standards Agency, the Australian Department of Health and Aging, the Singapore Government Health Promotion Board, the Indian Government Citizens Health Portal, the New Zealand Ministry of Health, the Food and Drugs Board Ghana, the Republic of Guyana Ministry of Health, and Hong Kong's Centre for Food Safety all think that the nutrition value of saturated fat is...not good, and that you should keep it as low as possible.

[amaebi]

There are people who get trepanned for fun, though.

[calimac]

I think what the first article is saying is that, if an expert who's also good at explaining things in simple terms can't explain it in simple terms, then we (i.e., in this case, the scientific community) don't understand it. It doesn't apply to individuals. People who understand things very well often have trouble explaining it in simple terms, not for not understanding it but because they lack the born teacher's talent at boiling it down.

There's also another factor. Explain things simply, and you may oversimplify complex concepts, or eschew proper technical terms. Then if other experts hear you do this, they may not realize that you're talking that way deliberately, and doubt your own knowledge. I get this all the time in comments. I simplify something because it's complicated and irrelevant, and someone pops in to explain it in a "I know this, but I guess you don't" tone of voice. Happened to me recently right here.

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced the "born teacher's talent" is a real thing. (Although I'm sure that genetics has some party to play, as it does in many things.) But I do agree that some people are really bad at boiling things down. I sometimes wonder how well those people _really_ understand things, and if you spent time breaking it down with them, and working things into simpler and simpler bits if you'd find gaps.

Totally with you on people leaping onto simplified explanations. Very annoying when it happens, particularly from people who are just looking for a way to attack.

[armiphlage]

In "Thing Explainer", simplification is carried to extremes, using only the 1000 most common English words.

https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

Quite effective, it helped me fully understand both special and general relativity for the first time ever, despite having been able to do the math for decades.

We are now re-writing all of our documentation at work into Simplified Technical English (ASD-STE100). If we can't explain procedures in simple terms, operators aren't able to follow them consistently.

[randomdreams]

I continue to argue with the "if you can't explain it in simple terms you don't understand it" concept, by making the case that for many topics, by the time you've explained it, you're no longer using simple terms, you've just given your audience enough background to understand the non-simple terms you're now using. I think this discussion comes from a shallow view of language: 'car' is not a simple term, but it's one that almost all of us know, so we think it's simple.

[andrewducker]

If you've broken your complex terms into simpler terms, and those into even simpler, until eventually you've broken everything down into extremely simple terms, then yes, you've now educated them in the meaning of complex terms - but doing that is exactly what is being asked for. Showing that you understand all of the steps necessary to go from "here is a simple concept" up to "and here are the complex results". It's that understanding of the steps/relationships which is lacking if you can't go through the process of breaking the idea into simple terms.

[conuly]

Black women adopt white accents more readily than black men, in post apartheid South Africa

Unsurprising. In general, women tend to be better at codeswitching than men are, and are more likely to use language choices to cement social ties. I don't know why this should be.

[armiphlage]

Sadly, it may be a behavioural strategy (similar to Stockholm Syndrome) that increases survival rates when captured by an aggressor. Rapid integration into a new group and acceptance of the new hierarchy increases value and reduces the risk of death.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12110-014-9216-1

[andrewducker]

Safety, I expect.

(Also, I suspect there's something going on where men band together to form an in-group, and resisting the out-group is a signalling mechanism to show how loyal you are. Whereas women tend towards public compliance, and then working around things in the background.)

[conuly]

(Also, I suspect there's something going on where men band together to form an in-group, and resisting the out-group is a signalling mechanism to show how loyal you are. Whereas women tend towards public compliance, and then working around things in the background.)

No, I don't think that's it. As I recall, men EITHER adopt the prestige dialect OR double down on their native dialect. Women middle-of-the-road it, and are also more adept at codeswitching, as I said. (But this is long time, so I could be misremembering?)

Another "simple terms" comment

[amaebi]

It seems to be (maybe mostly) past now, but it used to be common in the US to claim that every short explanation is better than every longer explanation, that any explanation that takes more than one double-spaced page must be arcane or what is explained, spurious, which no clear distinctive made between arcane and spurious.

And particularly for systems concepts, particularly to deliver them in everyday terms, more time and space is needed.

But then, it's the pro-short critic's assumption of judgeship, rather than a recognition that understand comes (or doesn't) from an interaction between expounder and reader....

Re: Another "simple terms" comment

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. People who assume that all complex or long explanations are deliberately obfuscatory, or that any use of technical language means that you're just hiding your ignorance are particularly annoying.

I _can_ break down explanations into simple terms. But that doesn't make doing so worthwhile all of the time, or the best way to communicate with other people who share specialist knowledge.