Think instead of the Feynmann Lectures. Part of his genius was being able to boil advanced stuff down to a freshman level. When he couldn't, he said "That means we don't really understand it."

The humanities should aspire to that, rather than (or at least in addition to) "big words for big ideas".

Yes, Feynman was the first person in any discipline to give lectures accessible to a popular audience. Goodness knows why no-one in the whole of the humanities has ever done this.

(There is actually a much longer, and arguably more successful, tradition of humanists engaging with popular audiences. We remember the scientists who were good at it because they were so exceptional.)

I suspect you haven't read the article, which in fact is at the level of a freshman humanities student. Not everything has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Feynman also wrote plenty of stuff vastly less accessible than this article that you and I wouldn't understand - at least not without investing a lot of time and effort. But God forbid that anyone in the humanities write something that requires you to (gasp!) use a dictionary.

The sheer arrogance and imbecility of the typical attitude towards the humanities on HN is really something to behold. Oh, why can't you all be more like this cool physics dude who we think is God's gift to literature because he dictated some amusing anecdotes about strip clubs and colored paint?

Feel free to try to un-press your condescension button; it's not helping you present your case at all. You just come across as rude and hostile.

Let me try to restate a bit better. Feynmann wasn't the first, even in physics (Faraday may have been). But for Feynmann to do what he did in his lectures, he had to find a simpler way to present it - not because the words were hard, but because the mathematics was.

What I want from the humanities is a bit different. Not easier words, but fewer. There's an article about a fifth the length of this one waiting to be written. It would have the same content, too, and would be far more readable (and read!) by non-humanities types. I suspect that even many freshman humanities students would appreciate the difference. (If you're a humanities major, you don't lack for pages to read.)

Now, if you want to say that this wasn't written for the HN crowd, that's probably true. But it got posted here, and here we are.

I assert that there is a possible way of writing that 1) is acceptable within the humanities, 2) does not "dumb down" the content trying to be communicated, and 3) is much more accessible to the non-humanities reader. But I'm not a humanities person myself, so I could be dreaming. 1) might be fundamentally opposed to 3).

It's much more condescending to tell everyone in the humanities that (a) they should all follow the example of a physicist who never even wrote a book length work himself, and (b) that they are obliged only ever to work in the service of extremely impatient and poorly-read readers outside the humanities, whose preferences are the only ones that matter.

Imagine if someone in the humanities expected the sciences to operate under such constraints. Why do you keep using these complicated "equations"? Why is this book about fluid dynamics packed with obscure terminology and strange diagrams? (I guess it must just be padding.)

You seem to be looking to find grounds to criticize what I say, rather than first trying to understand it. This is leading you to creating strawmen - to the point that it begins to look deliberate. In case it's not, though, I'm going to try this one more time.

You are putting words in my mouth that I did not say, and I deny you the right to do so. Did I say "ever"? No. I said that, when talking to those outside the humanities, they should talk differently. (And what is the humanities if they only ever talk to themselves? Physics makes a difference to the world by what it enables us to do, so if the physicists talk only to themselves and to the engineers, they still can change the world. But if the humanities talk only to themselves, that's... not very helpful to society.)

And, despite me explaining it, you continue to misunderstand what I said about Feynmann. When talking to those who aren't at your level in the discipline, can you still make it understandable to them, without making them first have to get to your level? How far can you go to do so?

The problem that I see is that the humanities no longer seem to know how to talk to the culture at large. That's a real problem, because if the humanities are what they think they are, the larger culture needs them. The humanities need to talk to those outside the humanities, and to do so in a way that those outside can understand.

The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a bit of patience and a decent vocabulary (or the will to use a dictionary). I'm not in the humanities and I had no problem understanding it. I think it's really weird to use this particular article as an example of some kind of disconnect between the humanities and the culture at large.

Pop science is fashionable, but 90% of it is fluff or pure nonsense. The level of scientific knowledge of the general public remains miserably low. Are the humanities doing so much worse in engaging the public? This is not obvious to me.

I'm confused now about why you brought Feynman into this. Initially, you seemed to be contrasting successful pop science with unsuccessful attempts by the humanities to communicate with the general public, and suggesting that humanists should ape the communication style of Feynman and other famous scientists. I found this odd, since humanists communicate with the general public all the time, to a much greater extent than most scientists. Just read any high quality newspaper or magazine and you'll find lots of accessible articles by humanities professors, authors, critics, etc. (The article we're talking about is one example!)

Perhaps it would help if you could just give an example of some work in the humanities (not necessarily recent) that you actually like. Presumably you don't think that there's never been any good or accessible work in the humanities. So rather than pointing to Feynman, why not tell us which humanists other humanists should be emulating?

> The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a bit of patience and a decent vocabulary (or the will to use a dictionary). I'm not in the humanities and I had no problem understanding it. I think it's really weird to use this particular article as an example of some kind of disconnect between the humanities and the culture at large.

The culture at large doesn't have the patience. (They may not have the vocabulary either, but they definitely don't have the patience. And if they don't have the vocabulary, they don't have the patience to look the words up in a dictionary, either. One word, maybe. A bunch of them, no.)

> Pop science is fashionable, but 90% of it is fluff or pure nonsense. The level of scientific knowledge of the general public remains miserably low. Are the humanities doing so much worse in engaging the public? This is not obvious to me.

Fair point. But the sciences have an alternate path to "engage" the public. We use Maxwell's results, even those of us who don't understand Maxwell's equations. Science gives us ideas and things that use them. Those who don't understand the ideas can still use the things (within limits). But the humanities just produce ideas. (And, I suppose, cultural artifacts. But the cultural artifacts are primarily a vehicle for ideas.) If the ideas aren't penetrating the surrounding culture, the humanities have in a sense failed.

Feynmann wasn't doing pop science. He was taking the real thing and making it accessible to people who, by any normal standard, didn't yet have the tools to access it. I wasn't making a plea for the humanities to ape his style - nobody could do that - but rather his drive to make the ideas of physics available to "outsiders" (motivated outsiders, outsiders who were on a path to become insiders, but still at the moment outsiders, at least for the topics being discussed).

> The article we're talking about is one example!

The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a college vocabulary and perhaps 15 minutes of undivided attention. The college vocabulary may be not all that common, but in my view it's the 15 minutes of undivided attention that's the real dealbreaker. That has become a much bigger barrier in the days of 140 characters. People will read things that take 15 minutes, but they read it with a different mindset. If what they're reading doesn't pay them back for their attention, quickly - in the first 30 seconds, say - they're out of there. They're not going to invest 15 minutes for a payoff that may or may not be there.

So, like Feynmann in the sense of reaching out to communicate the ideas of a field to those who don't seem to be ready for them, can the humanities communicate to people like that? Maybe so, but not with articles like this. They take too long to get to the payback.

(In fairness, though, while Feynmann was talking to freshman, he did probably have an hour. But the issue in his case wasn't time, it was mathematical and scientific maturity.)

For examples that do what I'm asking for (not that I necessarily like it), would you accept rap music? I specifically picked rap because you can get a lot of lyrics in a rap song. You can actually say something there. And you can still do lots of allusions and metaphor and imagery. And people actually listen - not just college kids and people that read "high quality" newspapers.

For a completely different example, see Francis Schaeffer's "He Is There and He Is Not Silent". Schaeffer is a Christian philosopher. The book in question is a philosophical sketch, really, not a fully-fleshed-out in-depth argument. But he connects basic things to very deep things in a very simple way, and he takes very few pages to do it. You don't necessarily have to agree with his conclusions to see the density of his writing.

Of course, density also takes a long time to read. But he meets my "payback in a hurry" criterion. (He does it by making me stop and think for several minutes, but he didn't take long to get there...)

>The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a college vocabulary and perhaps 15 minutes of undivided attention.

Ok, we agree then - I am just baffled that you consider this a problem.

There's something to be said for meeting 'the kids' at their level. So sure, super accessible stuff is great. But there's also the possibility of a downward spiral. The abundance of accessible, no-effort fluff wears down people's attention spans until it's impossible to have any serious public discourse about anything. If people are objecting to an article which takes 15 minutes to read and requires some level of literacy, then I think we might be well into the inner grooves of that spiral.

True. And 'the kids' will read the super accessible stuff and think that that's all there is to understand.

I think the super accessible stuff needs to be written in a way that says "There's more here to understand, and it's worth the effort to do so." So that someone who reads it is tempted to reach for the 15 minute article, or the several-hour book. (In fact, links at the bottom would be helpful in this. "For more information, go here...")

The need to dress up any idea in colourful vocabulary serves only to distract from the lack of substance and to impress other BS vendors.

The linked diatribe could be distilled to a 100 word paragraph and nothing would be lost.

You need to realise that the only thing a career academic can really teach you is how to be a career academic.

Meh, I’ve been in and out of academia and can be as cynical about academics as the next person. But taken literally, what you are saying is obviously untrue. I was taught by career academics all through my undergraduate and graduate education. How to be a career academic is the one thing that I failed to learn from the experience. I learned lots of other interesting stuff, though.