The Weekly Sift

If you think the way to communicate with less-educated people is to dumb down your ideas, you’ve been misinformed.

The commenters on last week’s post about Trump voters made me proud. They were almost uniformly civil and thoughtful. They fixed some of my mistakes, and added worthwhile points of their own. But that post also sparked a few discussions on social media, and there I ran into one of my least favorite phrases: dumb down.

It’s a simple notion, and I’m sure you’ve come across it before: The ideas in my brain are just too big for yours, so if we’re going to have a conversation about them, I’ll need to dumb them down, i.e., shrink my thoughts to the size of your brain. What I end up saying will sound stupid to me, and probably won’t quite be true, but that’s your fault, not mine. You should be smarter.

I just said it in as offensive a way as I could, because that’s how I hear it. The term only makes sense inside a frame that I find arrogant and disrespectful. Explaining things can be hard, but in my experience the problem is rarely that people are just too stupid to understand.

There are a handful of exceptional circumstances where the term is appropriate. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a conversation about quantum mechanics that wasn’t dumbed down to a certain extent, often because I was the one who couldn’t have participated otherwise. And if I had to explain the thesis that got me my math Ph.D., we’d be here a long time. (Given how long ago that was, I’m not sure I could still do it.) But not much that happens in the public arena is quantum mechanics or algebraic geometry. The information that you need to take an informed position on a political issue is just not that complicated.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed — if I did my job perfectly, most of you wouldn’t — but The Weekly Sift is accessible to people at a wide range of educational levels. I know that some kids of my friends read it, probably because they want to understand what their parents are talking about. I don’t quiz them for comprehension, but the questions I get tell me that high school (and sometimes even middle school) students are following the discussion well enough that they keep reading. Maintaining that accessibility hasn’t stopped me from talking about why it’s so hard to see your own privilege, the difference between bigotry and hatred, how the Fed creates money, how liberal reporters can wind up slanting the news in a conservative direction, and a bunch of other fairly complex topics.

Explaining things to people who don’t have the same background you do can be challenging. But if you can’t do it, that’s not entirely your audience’s fault.

My writing style and overall attitude about explaining things was strongly influenced by somebody you probably wouldn’t guess: sports geek Bill James, who is now recognized as the godfather of modern baseball statistics. Back in the 1970s and 80s, he published a book-length Baseball Abstract that would come out every year about the time spring training started. On the surface, the Abstracts were about all the usual spring-training topics: players, teams, and their prospects for the coming year. But woven through that project were all kinds of new ideas about how you figured out who was better than who, and why certain perennial baseball debates actually had objective answers. Along the way, he ended up explaining a lot of statistical and sometimes even epistemological ideas. But most of his readers probably didn’t realize they were getting an education in anything but baseball; they just wanted to know whether a home-run hitter like Mike Schmidt was more or less valuable than a high-batting-average hitter like Pete Rose. (Answer: more.)

But if he needed anything more complicated than a graphing calculator, he’d explain it, sometimes so seamlessly that if you did have the background, you had to take a step back to realize what he’d done. (OMG! He just explained standard deviation, what a mathematical model is, or the difference between uncertainty and risk.) Most of the time, any junior-high student who could read and cared enough about baseball could follow what he was doing. (Mythbusters played a similar role for a more recent generation. Viewers learned that if you have proper scientific technique, you can answer questions rather than just argue about them.)

What James understood is that communicating an idea from one mind to another is more about caring than about IQ or college degrees. The Abstracts worked because James and his readers all cared about baseball. James cared enough to explain things and his readers cared enough to understand them.

When you can’t explain something to somebody, it’s usually not because their brains are too small. More likely, it’s either that

• you haven’t grounded the conversation in something they care about, so as soon as things get difficult they don’t bother to follow you, or
• you haven’t won their trust; they don’t believe that you know something valuable and want to communicate it.

Dumbing down doesn’t solve either of those problems. If I don’t know why I should care about, say, systemic racism, then I’m certainly not going to care about a dumbed-down version of systemic racism. And if your dumbed-down explanation comes wrapped in a superior and condescending attitude, then I’m even less likely to trust that you want me to understand something real and true.

Conversely, educational miracles happen when motivation changes. Kids who are flunking Introductory French pick up the language pretty quickly if they get stuck in the French countryside for a few months. During World War II, people with the most unlikely backgrounds acquired all sorts of skills, because the government suddenly needed to teach them and they saw good reasons to learn. (Abstractly, you may not care how diesel engines work, but if your tank breaks down and the enemy is drawing closer, you’re going to want to get it moving again.)

That’s why the first step in explaining is understanding — not just understanding the idea you want to communicate, but understanding the people you want to receive it. Why should they care? Where in their lives does their lack of understanding screw them up, or screw up people they care about? What mysteries that they already wonder about would be solved if they grasped what you want to tell them? How would the knowledge you are offering give them power in situations where they currently feel helpless, or confidence in situations where they feel vulnerable? [An aside: That’s usually the angle to take on racism. A lot of whites believe that not being viewed as racist involves learning an endless list of rules that are constantly changing, so they feel vulnerable whenever they deal with non-whites in any context. If racism is actually simpler than that, and you can explain to them how to navigate those waters safely and confidently, you have something valuable to offer.]

It’s really hard to answer those questions if you can’t make yourself care about the people you’re talking to. If you just think of them as evil or stupid, and you can’t imagine that they have any motives you can empathize with, well, guess what? All your explanations are going to sound like aggressions against them. You want them to understand how evil and stupid they are. News flash: They don’t want to understand that, and you can’t make them. (Remember Sun Tzu: “The worst strategy of all is to besiege walled cities.”)

Once you have a why you can move on to a how: The idea is probably not going to fit into their worldview the same way it fits into yours. They have different experiences and know different things. They may be ignorant of something that is key to how you think about the idea, but so what? Everybody is ignorant about something. Do they really need to adopt your entire worldview to grasp this single point?

The particular bias of educated people is that we rely too much on our vocabularies, and think that other people can’t grasp an idea until they learn all the words we use when we think about it. (Goethe: “When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.”) Academic papers usually start by defining a bunch of terms, and only eventually get around to showing what they’re good for. But good popular explanations often turn that around: Through examples, metaphors, and stories, you put an idea in someone’s head, then tell them what it’s called. (Once people see the use of an idea, they’re usually grateful to find out that it has a name.)

In general, it’s a symptom of immature understanding to believe that some bit of knowledge can only be approached via the path I used to learn it. People who fully understand something can approach it from any direction. There are a bunch of Einstein quotes about this, most of them apocryphal. But this one from the great German mathematician David Hilbert (from the generation just before Einstein) is genuine: “A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.”

As a graduate student, I remember hearing this (possibly also apocryphal) quote from a nameless professor trying to cover a difficult concept: “I explained it to the class, and no one understood it. So I explained it again, and still no one understood it. Finally, I explained it a third time, and this time I understood it.”

So that’s what I suggest as an alternative to dumbing down: See if you can care about your listeners or readers enough to understand why they should want to know this and what direction they can approach it from. Then work on your own understanding of the subject until you grasp it well enough to approach from that direction yourself. In the short term, that may not be as satisfying as ridiculing their stupidity, but in the long term I think it works better.