Unobvious meaning

At the job where I had to explain to housewives how to wash the floor properly, I lasted two weeks. Now I've disappeared to a decent place and edited normal scientific news. As a result, I myself feel like a housewife, because my correspondents, to my great regret, write not only about biology, but also about astrophysics. Dark matter most likely consists of neutralinos, they write, and therefore it is not the halo that needs to be studied, but the microhalo. Nearby microhalos, they further write, are similar to point sources, and therefore it is their gamma radiation that is easiest to study.

These “therefores” leave me in a state of complete confusion. I don't know why the choice of object depends on the nature of its constituent particles, and point sources give the best gamma radiation. I ask the author of the news - he doesn’t really understand either. I read the original source - it really is written there, but without additional explanations, because they, presumably, were received by all potential readers in the first year. I don’t have time to go to the first course, and therefore all I can do is make sure that there are no obvious contradictions between the news and the article, and reformulate the text somehow so that the misunderstanding between me and the author is not obvious.

By the way, sometimes there are obvious contradictions, so the role of a scientific editor in my performance is not entirely meaningless. But, of course, in news on topics that are new to me, I mostly play the role of a literary editor - a person who simply makes the text readable, and leaves the composition of the microhalo to the conscience of the news authors.

Making text readable is a task of its own, it takes a lot of time and is very rewarding. My authors are wonderful, smart and educated people, and therefore they write in the first paragraph of the news: “The method is one of the most effective for the production of photonic crystals based on ferroelectrics with high coercivity,” without taking into account the fact that the unfortunate reader does not know who they are photonic crystals, who are ferroelectrics and why do they need coercivity.

Empathy for the reader is the most important thing I learned from my television experience. Immediately after university, it seemed to me that a person who does not know basic things (well, for example, that chromosomes consist of DNA tightly packed with histones) does not deserve leniency. But thanks to the fact that I saw my own correspondents every day, who did not know basic things (but were certainly smart and beautiful), and the fact that I explained even more primitive things in cartoons every day (and drawing a cartoon takes time and money, and for really no one would have given me the obvious thing to draw), I gradually realized that popularization - at any level - is needed so that the reader feels like a smart person becoming even smarter. But if, as a result of reading the article, a person gets the impression “I don’t understand anything,” then this is not his problem, but a sign of the author’s professional incompetence.

But I generally believe that the carrot works better than the stick in all cases. Training based on the “interesting” motivation works better than the “will get kicked out of the institute” motivation. A subordinate who is told “you do an important thing well” will regularly perform feats of labor, and a subordinate who is told “you should actually be grateful that we tolerate you” may be grateful, but he will definitely not work. A relative who is praised for a washed cup will also wash the pan, and a relative who is scolded for a dirty pan will stop even washing the cups. And the reader who will think “well, why are they explaining primitive things” will scroll below to see that they have discovered something new about an obvious thing - unlike the reader who will close this tab because he will think “this I still do not understand".

I recently tried to buy myself a physics textbook. I discovered an amazing thing: university textbooks turned out to be simpler than school textbooks. School ones come down to definitions and formulas that you just need to memorize in order to get your grade; in higher education, the author tries to explain where certain things came from, because someone might find it interesting. This happens because people are expected to go to college voluntarily. When I think about this, I find myself sympathetic to school education projects that propose to give the child the opportunity to choose teachers, subjects and the scope of their study. Yes, humanity on average would become significantly less educated, but the percentage of people who are interested in learning a lot would increase three times. And popularizers in this system are becoming more in demand: they continue to explain obvious things, but they do it simply in the context of “here’s another interesting thing,” and do not try, as now, to compensate for the reader’s childhood trauma: “look, the world is not so complicated and boring, as they explained to you at school.”