I feel this way every time someone recommends a study or a book to me. If you can't summarize it for a 5 year old, then you are either lazy or don't understand it yourself.
For example, instead of telling me to read a 500 page book, you can say "the Big Bang is this really crazy but suprisingly plausible theory that our universe just suddenly exploded from nothing into this really hot and dense and chaotic realm, and now everything is expanding and cooling down and getting farther apart but also clumping together because of gravity. Check it out!"
Becuase at least then you can say "oh wow, why is it clumping together? how do we know gravity is a thing?"
The two-sentence summary is ”Cultures around the world (historical and current) have an incredible variety and richness of traditions/practices related to debt. Debt is of central importance in every human society, predates and provides the conceptual foundation for economic exchange and property rights and many other cultural practices/institutions, and the culture-specific details are fascinating to read about.”
Ability and willingness to oversimplify nuanced text does not imply understanding. Unwillingness to deal with details and nuance of long more accurate text is lazy too.
Calling someone lazy and not understanding, because you want explanation for 5 year old and are not willing to engage with longer text and want him to do the work is hypocrisy and manipulation at its best.
As someone working in cosmological astrophysics, I think that is a very misleading summary of what the big bang theory is... However, luckily for us, people who go around misunderstanding the big bang theory because of bad tweet-length explanations (by experts or non-experts) are not a great danger to the rest of us. They aren't basing their politics or personal finance decisions on that misunderstanding.
The thing with topics like the ones covered in Debt, is that they have been weaponised by our leaders to facilitate social stratification and very unjust economic disparities. I believe this has largely been made possible through simplification of these concepts and making bite-sized claims about how "basic economics" works, where all the detail and nuance has been thrown out. These kinds of 3 sentence summaries can be very dangerous.
Lol then continue to keep your topic of study less accessible.
"A car is a small vehicle that has a motor that turns energy into motion".
"Ummm well ackshually there are smaller vehicles than that, and cars can be electric or oil, so clearly you don't understand the topic unless you start with the factory blueprints first instead of the dictionary definition."
That depends on the person on the receiving end. For an expert on the topic, it may be misleading. For average Joe on the street, it is completely fine.
Do you have a better 5-sentence explanation for what Big Bang is? Joe isn't going to read a book about it.
>If you can't summarize it for a 5 year old, then you are either lazy or don't understand it yourself.
I... kinda feel the opposite? if you feel like you can summarize something complex in 5 sentences to a person without any background, I think you probably aren't fully understanding the thing you are summarizing.
I think this is especially true in fields like economics where even the people at the top of the field who have studied for years don't 100% understand everything.
Everyone is entitled to their own use-case of course, but let me phrase it a little differently:
If you recommend me a dish from a restaurant, but you can't describe the flavors, texture, and quantity in a few sentences, then why are you recommending it?
"It's awesome, the flavor is spicy, salty, and smokey. It is charred on the outside and greasey and chewy inside. It is a very hearty and filling dish."
Actually, I think that's a really good example; I hang out with a lot of foodies, and that's another thing where I'm not very educated. I can understand 'Yeah, you'd probably like it' or "this is like that other thing"
but... when they start going on about the various flavors? Yeah, I have a really hard time translating that into what a thing tastes like, because I lack the background, I lack the education.
Explain the Riemann hypothesis to me, including the contexts and the current work, without using technical language, to a general audience, in three sentences or less. What about the Japanese language? The history of Israeli-Palestine relations maybe?
Some things are complicated and take 200 pages. There's nothing more to it.
"The Japanese language is a very interesting and unique human language. With over 250m speakers and a rich linguistic history, everything from its orthography to grammar to pronunciation provides interesting areas to explore further."
At least now the reader can ask, "what makes the orthography so interesting"? To which a deeper conversation can be had about its symbolic writing method and efforts to romanize and digitize it efficiently.
Now the reader has more reason to check out the book with just 4 or 5 sentences of info. Its like an outline vs a headline.
For example, instead of telling me to read a 500 page book, you can say "the Big Bang is this really crazy but suprisingly plausible theory that our universe just suddenly exploded from nothing into this really hot and dense and chaotic realm, and now everything is expanding and cooling down and getting farther apart but also clumping together because of gravity. Check it out!"
Becuase at least then you can say "oh wow, why is it clumping together? how do we know gravity is a thing?"