this idea that when something is hard its always _unnecessarily hard_ is connected to the general anti-intellectual stance that things should be easy for everyone to understand and if something is difficult to understand someone is wrong, lying to you, or bad at communicating - ThreadSky

oddletters.bsky.social • 103 days ago

this idea that when something is hard its always _unnecessarily hard_ is connected to the general anti-intellectual stance that things should be easy for everyone to understand and if something is difficult to understand someone is wrong, lying to you, or bad at communicating

Reposted from Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis

I think because so many things have become unnecessarily hard we've conflated all hard things with being unnecessarily hard. And that's not true.

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oddletters.bsky.social•103 days ago

this annoys me in particular when it comes to the humanities, where laypeople are constantly encountering quite advanced stuff, pulling it out of context, and either cynically or genuinely saying "this doesnt mean anything bc i dont understand it, thus advanced work in the humanities is meaningless"

oddletters.bsky.social•103 days ago

but i also see this coming out of the mouths of other academics all the time, who have bought the line that if you cant explain something cleanly to an undergraduate, the idea is bad and you are also bad at your job

oddletters.bsky.social•103 days ago

which : sigh, headache face : i dont know about you but i didnt drown myself in higher education for : counts on fingers : thirteen years to be constantly reducing my ideas down to where they can be easily swallowed by an 18 year old who hasnt read anything yet

oddletters.bsky.social•103 days ago

i recently was in a room (at an elite fucking institution) with someone (who worked there!!) who loudly identified as a leftist activist and also loudly declared that all "experts" did was use specialized and exclusionary language to justify not caring about people on the ground

oddletters.bsky.social•103 days ago

the degree to which people (who! are! trained! experts!) seem willing/eager to roll the fuck over in the face of a deeply cynical & fucking dangerous attack on the idea that reality is complex, our understanding of it should be complex, and it's Actually Fine For That To Be Hard, is insane to me

oddletters.bsky.social•103 days ago

i'm watching @foldablehuman.bsky.social's latest vid on fake fossils & the resonances b/t young earth creationists privileging hypersimplistic takes on theology as "good" *bc* they are easily understood by laymen and ppl who say expert-level material is bad *bc* it's difficult were, uh, really loud!

tcarmody.bsky.social•103 days ago

So @jamellebouie.net recently took on something similar (on his TikTok, naturally): the phenomenon where when people encounter something new (like the high standard of living in China), they protest that "we've been LIED TO" about it, rather than figuring out "oh, I just haven't done that reading"

lu.is•103 days ago

I just finished “Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo”, which is mostly about how the MIC ended up relying on a bra company for spacesuits because humans are too complicated. Punctuation: the chapter at the end where lots of ex-NASA people go into urban renewal and fail because… humans are too complicated.

blkantagonist.bsky.social•103 days ago

How would you define hard/easy to understand? As I think abt it, I find I can only define it by measures external to the person (e.g. hard bc it's a lot to figure out in short time). In this sense, I don't think understanding anything is hard/easy, just external factors allow some to over others 1/2

blkantagonist.bsky.social•103 days ago

And given that it is external factors at work, I'd then say yeah, everything sold be "easy" in the sense that structures shld be in material favor of everyone understanding 2/2

akvbroek.bsky.social•103 days ago

I feel this deep in my bones! I now discuss this in all my grad courses—especially when reading foundational texts (or really new texts) from when ideas were new, being articulated without the benefit of decades of vocabulary and conceptual work to make ideas accessible to non-experts.

hollyzijderveld.bsky.social•103 days ago

Theres also a lot of value to writing in a difficult and maybe confusing manner I think. Of course not all the time, but leaving room for interpretation through vagueness and tricky language is a beautiful way that ideas can come about

akvbroek.bsky.social•103 days ago

There is a very common conflation of "academics need to do better at communicating to the public" and "all academic texts must be for the public"—erasing the creative, innovative, and necessarily messy spaces where emergent knowledge is discussed, debated, and critiqued by experts for experts.

oddletters.bsky.social•102 days ago

am i currently dealing with a bunch of CS people saying "your theory of psychoanalytic agency and participatory governance and the inherently corrosive nature of ai to those processes is too dense and you should simplify it"?

YES I MIGHT BE

ahundt.bsky.social•103 days ago

I largely agree. I think I can also add there are hard topics that become more digestible and widely accessible once they’re reworked by some of the smart people who are very good at breaking things down.

In STEM at least there’s also a complexity bias where making papers harder helps them get in.

rachelernst.bsky.social•103 days ago

100&
I feel like the fallacy of "blank slate" promotes this as well: that somehow all of us are bringing the same mental schema with us and everyone is processing everything the same. So if it's "too hard for me" than it's universally too hard. But that's literally not how brains work.

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