Can you explain a complex idea using only the 1000 most common words?

Just for kicks, here’s the winemaking process.

This is how you make a drink for grown ups. It is hard to make this stuff, but many people like to drink it and will pay lots of money for it.

First you have to grow some very nice green things. These green things make their own food at the end of the year.

You can take this food from the very nice green things and turn it into the drink for grown ups. First, press the food until water comes out. Sometimes this water will be red, and sometimes it will be white. Put this very nice water in a big cup and let it sit for a few days. Soon, tiny animals from the air will turn the very nice water into the drink for grown ups. If you want, you can put this drink in big wood cups for a long time.

There are many different kinds of grown up drink. Some of them are red, and some are white. The very nice green things grow all over the world, but the ones people like best come from only a few tiny places.

Tried it. It doesn’t seem possible to even say how horrid a statement of Darwin’s theory their example is. So the up-goer five answer is:

“Up goer five is stupid.”

@ETpro Oh, I don’t know. They really did capture its essence.

Those of us in the science biz are accustomed to having to tailor our elevator talk (i.e. summing up your research in the amount of time typically spent in an elevator) for different types of audiences. Usually, these include your supervisor (who gets the whole story using the appropriate jargon), your committee (who get the whole story using the appropriate jargon, minus the expletives), and your mom (in words only slightly longer than those in the up-goer vocabulary). Because if you can explain it to your mom, you really understand it yourself.

Computers all over the world need to talk to each other.

When one computer wants to talk to another it can talk through a big group of computers and boxes that each pass the words and pictures along by making them simple, then back into their right form at the other end.

It’s like amazing but cooler.

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No.

I have a friend whom I consider a genius because she can explain to me, in plain English, how she can create a two-headed worm from a single egg.

I haven’t tried doing something like that yet, but I think I’m doing a similar thing very often: when my classmates and I do research for a presentation, my job is to simplify what are explained in complex documents we found (rewrite them using the most common English words possible) so that everyone can read when we show it on the powerpoint since not many people in my class have a good knowledge of English.

I do something similar when tutoring – I don’t see why children struggling with a certain subject should have to struggle with difficult, long words at the same time. However, I think the up goer five editor is overdoing it. About the winemaking process, for example. It doesn’t make sense for the reader to guess which “nice green things” he will have to grow. Here, instead of making information more easily available, the information is simply left out.

what? who? when? where? why? wtf? All above me!!!!

“and being able to avoid dying for as long as possible.”

Inaccurate. being able to avoid dying until having babies. Natural Selection doesn’t give a shit about you after you’re done breeding.

Anyway, I have to deal with morons with limited vocabularies on a daily basis, and having to dumb everything down to single syllables is a burden I choose not to take on.

If you want an example of what a society that limits their language and by extension their capacity for thought looks like, you’ll find it in an Orwellian novel. In my opinion, that’s just doubleplus ungood.

Isn’t this how government is “explained” to us every two years? (Of course, most people only “listen” on four-year cycles.) Apparently politicians can’t explain – or understand – government in that way.

^ Yeah, they can break down their party line in monosyllabic sound bytes, but write out amendments in Ecumenical Latin legalese.

I think therefore I yam, what I yam, what I yam, what I yam…gagagagaga!

@Seek_Kolinahr “being able to avoid dying until having babies”

Not necessarily. It’s about differential reproduction, so having more babies is the key, not whether one has any babies at all.

In humans, living longer does not necessarily equal producing more babies, but in the natural world (whatever that means), it usually does. The blurb already stipulated that the individuals must be reproducing.

Not always, @glacial

It’s about having babies that survive to have babies. In some species that means having lots and lots of babies, and in others it means having one that lives, because resources are scarce and breeding too quickly would make life difficult.

For example, the Kakapo had no natural predators during its evolution. Kakapo ancestors who bred too quickly ran out of food and died out. The ones who bred slowly and lived solitary adulthoods save for breeding were able to fend for themselves and survive—until humans brought cats and rats and dogs to their island.

There is no evolutionary advantage to living beyond your breeding time or the time it takes to raise one’s young, and no way for genes for that extended lifespan to be directly selected. A long life beyond reproductive age may be indirectly selected as a result of those genes being attached to other desirable genes, like physical strength or good health, but it doesn’t come into play directly.

I like this so much that from now I will only use the 1,000 most used words to answer questions on this question asking and answering area thing done through my computer.

@Seek_Kolinahr You are now talking about the differences between semelparity and iteoparity… while this is interesting, it doesn’t have any bearing on the point that I responded to.

My interpretation of what you said here:

“Inaccurate. being able to avoid dying until having babies.”

was that an organism must survive until it reproduces, and that its life beyond that first reproductive event is not important. Whereas what I was talking about was living long enough to produce more cohorts than other, less well-adapted individuals. The length of time that one survives matters as long as one continues to produce offspring. It’s not a race to survive to the threshold of reproductive age.

But on re-reading your comment, I assume that this following comment:

“Natural Selection doesn’t give a shit about you after you’re done breeding.”

implies to me that you are talking about the entire breeding window. I wasn’t talking about a long life after reproduction stops, although you’ve made a good case for it affecting the survival of offspring.

Anyway, my point was that the Up-goer version of the theory of natural selection is pretty much a direct translation of the original theory. I’m not going to dispute the tenets of the theory. A lot of corollaries have been added since Darwin’s time.

The internal combustion engine:

“Suck, Squish, Bang, Blow.”

Oh, same for jet engines, silly me.