Up Goer Your Law Review Article

To those faculty hiring committees who asked me to explain my PhD dissertation, Finitude, Transcendence, and Ethics: Sartrean-Niebuhrian Resources for Understanding Difference and Dominance, in layman’s terms: I regret that this explanation is coming so late, but here it is, using only the most commonly used 1,000 words in the English language.

Cedar Riener (follow him @criener), an enterprising psychology professor, has begun a Tumblr, Up Goer Your PhD, collecting doctoral dissertation abstracts written in layman’s terms, as described above. His project is a riff on this brilliant layman’s diagram of Saturn 5, otherwise known — when one is limited to the most common 1,000 words — as “Up Goer 5.” People using Up Goer to explain a variety of other complicated concepts can be found on Twitter at #UpGoerFive. Many Up Goer projects turn out to be hilarious, and they’re fun to create, too.

But there’s a serious point here as well. Jargon (including technobabble, neurobabble, and other babbles) can be efficient shorthand when conversing among other experts. But let’s be frank: it can also conceal some serious B.S., not only from our readers, but also from ourselves. Why? We often believe that we understand concepts better than we actually do — sometimes called the Illusion of Knowledge (disclosure: the interviewee is my husband), or the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. Many studies have found that people often overestimate how well they understand complex phenomena (even distinct from general overconfidence bias). In one set of experiments, subjects were often unable to draw a functioning bicycle, despite having previously reported that they understood bicycle mechanics. In another, subjects displayed similar overconfidence in their understanding of devices, procedures, natural phenomena, and movie plots.

In addition to being fun, being forced to “up goer” your writing on a complicated subject is an extraordinarily useful exercise. It’ll keep you honest. Try it with this handy text editor that lets you type your layman’s explanation into a box, and tells you when you’ve used a verboten word. When you’re done, there’s a button to click that lets you permalink your Up Goer creation and tweet, Facebook, or blog it — but the button only appears when you have avoided all verboten words. In some contexts, this could also be an excellent teaching tool. Give it a try: it’s harder (and more illuminating) than you think.

Postscript 1: The original dissertation abstract from which I was working is here. It's been a while since I wrote it, and I confess that as I began to up goer it, even I wasn't sure, at points, exactly what I'd been talking about. (When you live and write long enough, I suppose you have this out-of-body experience more and more often.) With some effort and recollection and the help of the Up Goer text editor, however, I satisfied myself that my dissertation was not, in fact, B.S. There was a there, there after all. On the other hand, I now sort of feel like my 5-year-old could have written it. Tradeoffs.

Postscript 2: A bit of nerd humor about empirical versus non-empirical methods. 

Comments

[Alfred Brophy]

This is very, very great.

[Vicky Saker Woeste]

I can't wait to run some of my prose through Up Goer!

[Tamara Piety]

It is very, very great!

[James Grimmelmann]

I did the Up-Goer Five thing with the paper I have been working on. Here is what I came up with.

This would be a good thing to do with students to help them learn how to write well in a way that they (and we) will enjoy.

[James Grimmelmann]

Oh, no! It took out the thing that tells you where the other thing that I wrote is. It is in the place where I put lots of things that I write. Search for my name and it is easy to find.

[Matthew Reid Krell]

My dissertation elevator speech, Up Goer-ed. Can you figure out what I'm talking about?

"When people decide to take things from each other, they do a thing where they take it, and then they pay for it. Usually someone decides to let the people take the thing and pay for it, but sometimes they don't. If that happens, the people who want to take the thing, if they are the people who run things, can make the owner let them take it and pay. But sometimes, the people who run things decide they don't want to make the owner let them take it and pay. This book is about how people decide to take or not to take."

[Michael Risch]

Well, I'm out at patent...

[Michelle Meyer]

@Michael: I had the same experience with "anxiety." And "anthropology," and "finitude," and "transcendence," and....

Try again. By "patent," you just mean "a right that the state gives to people who make new things that help all of us so that they and others like them will make more new things that help all of us" -- or whatever (needless to say, if you take a darker view of patents you might word this a bit differently).

If you're really stuck, click on the Hint link in the text editor, which will tell you how to use proper names (use Mr. or Ms. as a prefix) and jargon (put the word in quotes). Judicious use of these techniques (which I didn't discover until after I'd finished) can make for a better product (i.e., one that is appropriately simple and transparent, rather than awkwardly using 20 words in the place of one fairly common word that just doesn't happen to be in the top 1000).

[Michelle Meyer]

@Matthew: Um, something, something, something, eminent domain?