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Do you think you could tell about something hard to many people using only the 1,000 most often used words? A ten hundred words sounds like a lot, but is it? This would not allow for the use of hard words, which is the point. You should be able to explain hard ideas in easy words, and talk about other things that are like your things, to make your things easier to learn.

This is something I do often, and not just on my computer place and other places. As a doctor I have to tell sometimes hard things to people and their families. To make things harder, people who come to me as a doctor are different from each other, from being other doctors, people who work with doctors, people who deal with hard ideas, to people who do not have high school or even not speaking very well.

Telling hard ideas to people in a way that works means using the right kind of words for the right kind of people. A person who does that well should be interesting to people who know many words while being possible to listen to by people who don’t. Another hard thing is to make hard ideas simple without being too simple.

As a way to try this out for people who explain hard ideas, Theo Sanderson made a computer place called Up-Goer Five – the idea and name comes from a drawing by XKCD in which he explains a hard drawing using only the 1000 most often used words. The Up-Goer Five computer place has a window in which you can place words, and it will show every word that is not one of the 1000 most often used ones.
Of course I had to try it out, so I took a part of something I wrote on a hard idea about how people think. It is under here, with each bad word in red.
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I would argue that the “sweet spot” for communicating science is slightly above the average literacy level for that topic of the intended audience. Not so much jargon that the message is degraded for the average reader, but enough to challenge them.

On the Babel fish, while perhaps not an accurate idea of how thoughts work, at least it gives us the most humorously concise refutation of God yet!

I think compartmentalization can allow for a middle ground. There do seem to be people who can protect certain ideas from scrutiny (e.g. accept things on faith), but, outside of these ideas, function in a totally different manner. I see a spectrum here, although I do think there is some clustering. There is an analogy to secular ideologies, in which skeptics are suceptible to. Although not necessarily about faith, there are emotional or intellectual commitments which can misform the “holes” in your analogy.

“The reference to the babel fish points to a common error that people make about mental concepts, that any brain can hold any mental concept the way that any blank piece of paper can hold any written text.”

I admit that this point initially escaped me. So, no babel fish, or at least not a universal one. But maybe a customizable model – adaptable to a particular set of mental concepts? Or a ‘mental concept esperanto’ babel fish – drawing only upon the ‘common ground’ in the mental-concept space? Or even a well-marketed BabelFish 2.0 – “Beyond Language”? Well, just amusing thoughts, really. I am actually not quite so fond of the whole ‘babel fish’ idea. After all, it is little but a narrative vehicle to justify vastly different beings from vastly different parts of the Galaxy conveniently being able to converse.

As for myself, I much prefer to learn as many different (I dislike the word foreign) languages as I possibly can and thereby expand and enrich my neural network(s). If I had not eagerly done this since childhood, we would not be communicating in English right now, without any need for a babel fish.

As for the notion that people who tend to accept things on faith must necessarily do so regarding any and all phenomena, this does not appear to always be so in reality. People can have multiple processing modes (or modules) and use them alternately. Voltaire made this point when he commented how amazing it is that people who solve complex practical problems in their lives every day, using highly objective reasoning, can still believe their local priest when he insists that Moon phases occur when God puts a part or whole of the Moon in His sleeve.

Skeptics can tolerate being wrong, they just abandon those errors and move on, and know that now they are closer to what is real. What does someone with a faith-shaped hole do? Abandon faith? Which particular fath-derived idea? What do they trust instead? Their lying eyes? Then their whole faith-based edifice collapses.

It seems like it should be harder for someone who doesn’t accept things “on faith” to understand what doing so is like (the flip-side of your statement). On the other hand a person who does accept things “on faith” most likely does not accept everything in this manner, so why can’t that skepticism be applied more broadly?

I guess the ‘faith shaped hole’ you are talking about is really a broad type of ‘false idea shaped hole,’ and just like any committment to a false idea, it can be protected from scrutiny. Sorry, just talking out loud with my fingers and keyboard

This is simply not the case. In order to instantiate a mental concept, a brain has to have a structure that is capable of instantiating that mental concept. Your brain has to have the “idea shaped hole” (analogous to the apocryphal “soul-mate shaped hole”, or the “God shaped hole”, or the “baby shaped hole”) so that the idea can “map” onto that structure so you are able to think about that idea.

The brain has to self-modify its structure so that it can do the pattern recognition to recognize the mental concept that you are trying to think about. This is why it can take a long time to learn things, the brain has to remodel itself so the new concepts map onto them.

Most of this neuronal remodeling occurs spontaneously, but it can also be consciously directed (to some extent). Usually this occurs when people refuse to allow their brains to remodel to allow the new concepts to map onto them. This is how denialists are able to persist in their denial of reality for so long. They are actively suppressing the normal brain remodeling that goes on in neurotypical individuals. People can also delude themselves and purposefully create a delusional world view. They deliberately generate a “false idea shaped hole”, so that they don’t have the capacity to perceive reality as it is. This is what YECs and AGW denialists do.

When you accept something “on faith”, what you are in effect doing is making a “faith shaped hole” in your brain that can only be filled by whatever thing it is that you are accepting based on “faith”. Skeptics don’t do this, and people who do accept things “on faith” are simply unable to understand what not doing that is like.

This reminded me of the use of the word “anomaly” in climate science.

Also there is the infamous “hide the decline” and “using a trick” jargon, that was misinterpreted. Both “decline” and “trick” were not allowed at the Up-Goer-Five website. I did manage to substitute “fall” for decline, but I could not find anything to replace “trick.”

Looking at the list, I find that it was just brute force without any editing of what 1000 words appear most often. This should explain why the are several contractions instead of just “do not”, “have not, etc.

Some on the list are “can’t”, “don’t”, “he’d”, “he’s”, etc. (just find all apostrophes, and there are plenty).

So maybe “knowledge”, “ability” and “science” SHOULD be in the top 1000 words.