I never studied mathematics. I did take courses, though. When I was inscribed in physics, there was analysis, and algebra and quite a lot more. I did not get too much ahead before I switched to biology, but I got enough to understand. Not to create math, but to figure out (with plenty of work on my side) what was said. Or so I thought, till I got into my own research. I needed to formulate my own systems, so I needed to learn what I didn’t learn in my undergraduates years. So I got the books, and get on with it. It wasn’t easy. I remember an afternoon trying to figure out a result in dynamical systems theory, and bouncing against the proof again and again. Eventually I gave up and did knock the door of my advisor. With not an unrelevant amount of shame, I must say. A graduate student pretending to write meaningful equations should know the basis, I thought. He was gracious. Looked up whatever I was reading and advised me to try another proof of the same result. There are two kinds of mathematicians, he said. The ones that make it easy and the ones that make it complex. Don’t be the second one, he said. Later on I read his recommendation and the other proof of the same result was simple, and certainly easy to understand. Keep it easy, indeed.
You are surely familiar with the person speaking to you using a bunch of complex words and expressions. The ones that are trying to confuse you, the ones that actually prevent you to discover that what they have to say is, after all, very simple? Of course you do. We all have been there. So we distrust complex formulations, we reject pompous language, we have this... almost fetish? for people that can explain things in a simple way.
And yet...
Is that the only use of complex language? what if complex language is like manners? What if communicational complexity is a way to cover the true purpose of the communication, a true purpose that we all know, but we don’t like? Have we not been, also, in the situation that we all know what are we really talking about, but can’t bear the thought of speaking it out in simple terms? I believe that manners are our own mechanism of defense against the harshness of human relations. We stay polite so that we need not to explicit our own true feelings, that anyway our interlocutor already know. If we would say what we really think to an adversary, we would have to fight him. But if we stay polite, we can skip the violence... even if we know how much we actually hate each other. Perhaps the elaborate complexity of the rules of being polite are that, a defense mechanism, a well devised cloak against the rawness of our true intentions.
So then a last result of linguistic research. Just published. The researchers indeed corroborated the idea that people is more attracted to simple language, that people put more time reading things that are simple. You want to keep your readers engaged? keep it simple indeed. So far so good, right? Right. But that is not all. Our researchers also went to check the cases in which people did not allocate more time, but more money; when the goal was not to keep the attention of the reader, but to get money out of the reader. And guess what? in those cases, the language that was more capable to get money, was complex language.
I think that we always know when money is expected from us. And I guess that we don’t like it, even when we know that in the end, we shall yield. So perhaps complexity is just needed to cover ourselves from our already taken decision. Perhaps we need a lot of noise to distract us from the painful fact that we are going to give some money to somebody else.
Quite an interesting result, I think. If I understood the paper, that is.
The predictive utility of word familiarity for online engagements and fundingMarkowitz and Shulman in PNAS, 2021. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/18/e2026045118.abstract?etoc
Great topic Inti!! Thanks a lot!!!