Translation Is Mastery
The signal that never left the room
The outside claims this piece leans on, and where they come from. Each note says what the source looked at, so you can judge how far it stretches.
'If you cannot explain something simply, you do not understand it well enough' is attributed, probably apocryphally, to Einstein
A popular quotation with no traceable Einstein source. Nearest documented remark: Clark (1972).
A well-made diagram carries cognitive work that prose does slowly and incompletely; the eye reads structure and relationship in ways text cannot
Theoretical and computational comparison of informationally equivalent diagrams and text on physics and geometry problems (1987).
Cognitive Load Theory (John Sweller and colleagues, since the late 1980s) says communication fails when it ignores working-memory limits; one of the most heavily evidenced ideas in how people learn
Instructional-design theory from experiments on students solving maths and science problems, from 1988 onward.
Hannah Fry is a serious mathematician whose broadcasting rests on real, rigorous work
University announcement of an academic appointment, 2024.
Kahneman: two modes of thought, fast and slow; the fast one is usually in charge and the slow one is effortful and 'lazy', engaging only when handed over
Popular synthesis of decades of judgement and decision research. System 1 / System 2 are Kahneman's labels (borrowed from Stanovich & West, 2000), not brain structures.
Marty Jopson communicates the science inside ordinary things
Biographical description; popular-science book on everyday objects (2015).
Matt Parker is a science communicator on mathematics
Parker's own Stand-up Maths channel and books (e.g. Humble Pi, 2019) (n/a)
Biographical description of a UK-based maths communicator.
Oppenheimer (2006) found needlessly complex writing makes its author seem less intelligent, regardless of the quality of the argument underneath
Five experiments with US undergraduates rating writing samples (admissions essays, dissertation abstracts, Descartes translations) of varying complexity (2006).
Readers interpret clarity: a clear document is read as competence and trustworthiness, an unclear one as confused or evasive thinking
Lab studies showing easier-to-process statements are judged more true (1999) and simpler writing makes authors seem more intelligent (2006).
Sinek's Start With Why (TED talk, then book): most communication begins with what and seldom gets to why; the best reverses that order
A conference talk and business book (2009) setting out the 'Golden Circle' model of why/how/what. Opinion and case examples, not empirical research.
The brain processes visual and verbal information through different, complementary channels
Theory from multimedia-learning research: separate but interacting auditory/verbal and pictorial/visual channels, tested mostly on students learning from instructional materials.
The curse of expertise afflicts the highly skilled most: experts forget what it feels like not to know
Two lab studies of experts, intermediates and novices predicting how long novices take on a complex task (1999).
The curse of knowledge was identified by the economists Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber in 1989, and the research is blunt about how involuntary it is
Lab market experiments in which better-informed subjects predicted less-informed subjects' judgements (1989).
Thirty years of social media, short-form content and context-switching have done something to the baseline of human attention; size debated, direction hard to argue with
Field studies of information workers' time on one screen before switching, 2004 to about 2020. Measures screen switching, not attention capacity.