I actually blame Malcolm Gladwell and Matty Y. for a lot of this sort of rhetorical dogshit. This reeks of someone thinking to themselves “I know a ton about this really hard and complicated topic. I want to explain it, but these poor dumb peasants will never be able to follow my thinking. Let me write an “explainer” to help them understand the basics.”
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with trying to explain complex stuff in an accessible way, but this condescending “golly gee isn’t that somethin’!” way of doing that project is trash, and usually just hides the fact that the person writing it actually has nothing more than a surface level understanding of the topic. If all you understand are the basics, all you can write is a basic explanation.
I actually blame Malcolm Gladwell and Matty Y. for a lot of this sort of rhetorical dogshit. This reeks of someone thinking to themselves “I know a ton about this really hard and complicated topic. I want to explain it, but these poor dumb peasants will never be able to follow my thinking. Let me write an “explainer” to help them understand the basics.”
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with trying to explain complex stuff in an accessible way, but this condescending “golly gee isn’t that somethin’!” way of doing that project is trash, and usually just hides the fact that the person writing it actually has nothing more than a surface level understanding of the topic. If all you understand are the basics, all you can write is a basic explanation.