Episode 144 - Listen To This If… You Want To Explain Your Science Without "Dumbing It Down"

Transcript

Jen (00:00:10)

Hello everybody, I'm so pleased to welcome you to another episode of Listen to This If where Jen and Michael, that is me and my wonderful friend Dr Michael Wheeler, we come together to tackle one problem that you might currently be facing in the world. So we are the Let's Talk SciComm team and we think this is something that you might be grappling with in the world of communicating about science.

And today that is, what do you do when you want to explain your science without dumbing it down? Now Michael, that's a phrase you and I hate. It gets leveled at us often when people say, "I'm happy to talk to different audiences, but I don't want to dumb down my research". And we get annoyed. Why do we get annoyed? And what's our advice for how to explain something without dumbing it down?

Michael (00:00:55)

Yes, it is such a common saying. And it does frustrate me a little bit because I think it really hits on one of the biggest pitfalls that a lot of people can fall into when thinking about trying to communicate their science. Because they might think, you know, I really have to dumb down the science here, dumb it down enough that people can understand it.

I mean, first of all, it really just doesn't respect the intelligence of your audience, you know, to think that I've got to make it really dumb for other people to understand it. I think that perhaps the way we should reframe it or rethink about it is that it's not about dumbing down the ideas. It's about simplifying the language.

Jen (00:01:43)

Absolutely.

Michael (00:01:43)

And if you can simplify the language but retain those nuanced ideas, that is the goal, you know. It's... the goal is really, it's not about trying to sound smart, but it's about trying to make your audience feel smart by explaining things in a way that they go wow, like No one's ever explained it like that to me before. I feel like I understand some level of nuance about this. I feel like my intelligence has been respected. So that is the goal. Simplify the language. Don't simplify the ideas.

Jen (00:02:22)

Yeah look, I couldn't agree with you more Michael. And I just think, you know, our goal as people with the privilege of kind of high level knowledge about topics, you know, we have to be inclusive. So when you say it's not about sounding intelligent, absolutely.

And it bothers me that in our science training somewhere along the way, a lot of us have picked up this message that we need to try and somehow sound smart? You know, we need to write long sentences. We need to use big words. And of course, that's the opposite of what our goal should be.

Our goal should always be to use ways of expressing ideas that are as simple as possible. And you know the quote that I share with people all the time from Tim Radford, an amazing journalist. And the quote that I come back to over and over and over again from Tim Radford is, "Don't overestimate your audience's knowledge and don't underestimate their intelligence". And I just think that's gold.

Because this whole idea of dumbing it down makes it sound like we think the audience we're communicating with isn't [intelligent], which is just obnoxious and arrogant. You know, most people out there are pretty intelligent in my experience. They just have different backgrounds to me and they are experts in different things to me. So just like my plumber doesn't assume that I understand everything about what he's doing when it comes to fix something in my house. You know, he respects me, I respect him. He has all of this amazing expertise. So we just can't assume that people know stuff.

So I think my golden piece of advice is: think about explaining it to someone who is very smart. Think about capturing their attention so they'll be willing to really engage with your ideas by starting with getting them to care. So, you know, connect to their life, connect to some real world impact, something that will inspire questions in them or awe in them. You know, get your audience to care.

And then once they care and you recognise that they're smart people. Then, as you say, use simplified language and don't assume prior knowledge to then tell them about your research in a whole lot of you know, a whole lot of glorious complexity, if that's what you want to do. It's really about clarifying I think, rather than simplifying. We're not making things simple. We're clarifying why this matters, why this is interesting.

I don't assume you have any background knowledge. I'm going to take you out... You know, I'm going to take you through it piece by piece. But then I am going to share a whole lot of really interesting detail with you because I know you're smart enough to listen and to be interested.

Michael (00:04:51)

I also think that it requires you understanding what you're talking about deeply as well.

Jen (00:05:00)

Definitely.

Michael (00:04:59)

And sometimes it can be a challenge to explain something simply and very accurately and convey a lot of that nuance without, you know, understanding it deeply. So umm, yeah...

Jen (00:05:12)

Which is why many of us find when we start teaching content to students, we suddenly realise, Oh my gosh, I don't think I understood this as well as I thought I did. Because when you are explaining it, you realise you have to really understand it yourself.

Which I guess is why we think communicating with different audiences is such a useful thing because it helps you to engage with your own science ideas more deeply and more effectively.

Michael (00:05:38)

Yeah, definitely. What a great catalyst to learn a little bit more about topics that you're interested in. So go forth and simplify the language and convey those complex, nuanced ideas. We know you can do it.

Jen (00:05:52)

And don't dumb anything down. That's our message.

Michael (00:05:58)

Good luck.

Michael (00:06:10)

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, we'd love you to tell a friend about the podcast or leave us a review. And you can reach out to us on social media.

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And also a big thank you to our production team, Steven Tang and Madeleine Kelly.