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.
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