I’m sorry but this is one of my biggest pet peeves. If you want academica to exist, academics CANNOT be held responsible for making sure every publication and talk is comprehensible to someone with a middle school education in their field. That is an impossible ask and you are blaming the victim - ThreadSky

iid.bsky.social • 8 hours ago

I’m sorry but this is one of my biggest pet peeves. If you want academica to exist, academics CANNOT be held responsible for making sure every publication and talk is comprehensible to someone with a middle school education in their field. That is an impossible ask and you are blaming the victim

Reposted from Rory

The failure of academia to explain things in layperson terms (up until some efforts recently) is one of the reasons for anti-intellectualism.

When you make science inaccessible, people will opt for those who sell easier solutions.

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stairwaytokevin.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Yeah I think it’s about time to start blaming the anti-intellectuals

iid.bsky.social•8 hours ago

When you have classrooms taught by grad students working their asses off to reach totally disconnected and aggrieved students turning in AI homework, the fault is not in the TA or the lecture notes or the same textbook that’s been in use for 60 years.

iid.bsky.social•8 hours ago

On top of that, we are living in a golden age of accessibility for academic works—in theory! You can go and take an online course from some of the best universities in the world, right now. You can download any textbook on libgen. Nearly all research papers have been uploaded around paywalls

iid.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Never in the history of humankind has academic work been more accessible to more people. And you are sitting here and demanding that because somewhere, some academic, once said something you didn’t immediately get—well, thats why we have anti-intellectualism. I wonder why she lets him hit her!

iid.bsky.social•8 hours ago

If anything, one can make a very convincing argument that anti intellectualism has been furthered by accessibility, that allowing people access to research papers is worse for society than gatekeeping them, because of those who refuse to acknowledge that some things do require training to understand

hiiiikat.bsky.social•6 hours ago

i want to scream when i see some chud sagely say like 'oh, very low n, we can't trust those findings' (for a study design that logistically can't have a high one) (because disciplines have varied context) (but all the better to get off a dunk on something you already decided you didn't like, right?)

waningibbous.bsky.social•8 hours ago

the rise of "untrained journalist reads a working paper and Vibes about it" content at Vox, the NYT, the Atlantic, etc., has always struck me as terrifyingly anti-intellectual.

waningibbous.bsky.social•8 hours ago

one of the things you learn in grad school is that papers are rhetoric, embedded in context.

actual researchers know that "oh don't trust the empirics in that paper, no one believes them but it got published because the theory is nice and his advisor was the editor" happens all the time!

iid.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Anyway I love the quote tweets where non academics struggle to somehow synthesize that they understand this is an anti intellectual victim blaming stance and yet, fuck eggheads, right? Why DO they use all those big words?

SOMETIMES THINGS ARE HARD TO UNDERSTAND. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO PUT IN WORK.

iid.bsky.social•8 hours ago

Mathematicians are not writing three pages of definitions for their health, it’s because they want to express something very precise, and are relying on centuries of practice and knowledge to do so. You coming in like a child throwing your blocks across the room because you don’t get it is absurd.

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