You will want to manipulate others to get confirmation of your acrobatics and always be on the lookout for disproof. This will lead to you limiting your life severely for fear of actually finding it.
-former smartness showoff who now acts betterer
Very sound advice.
Somewhat a tangent. I used to play a lot of poker. One angle that would work frequently to get information from people is exactly this.
Say something like "Ah you had AJ", even though you don't believe that. Then you might get a response "No I had __" or they might even show you their hand.
It's all tide to the need to prove how smart we are as humans.
It's a weird inversion, since the signals being defended are deeply illiberal: they exclude individualism, weirdness, inclusiveness, systems striving to be built on merit, etc etc.
I'm pretty familiar with this tendency because I come from a family who's pretty steeped in this kind of subculture. Growing up in CA and moving to the Bay as a teen, I absorbed the tech/Burning Man/CA memeplex of humanism and inherent equality and individualism way too deeply not to overwhelm my upbringing, but there are certain class markers I haven't shed, and un-self-conscious use of dense prose is one of them[1]. I actually did try to make my speech more casual when I became aware of these class markers during a period of teen rebellion, but changing how you communicate is a pretty complicated uphill battle, so I ended up with a weird hybrid of big words and idiomatic expressions (and lots of cursing, in verbal communication -_-)
[1] I want to emphasize again that this isn't quite an intelligence thing: my best friend is definitely smarter than me, and he speaks significantly more casually/colloquially than me because of his family's background.
I also think Emily Nussbaum is a wonderful TV critic and more or less deserves credit for elevating TV criticism to equal status with art & movie reviews.
Having said that, I quite take your point and I am always pleased when a researcher takes the time to write clearly. It's a skill that needs to be practiced and developed, but unfortunately, for most academics, investing in that skill isn't obviously a good career choice.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/how-prosperity...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/the-enduring-r...
Don't get me wrong, if it was the only thing available, I'd probably go crazy, too. But I believe there is a time and place in my "reading diet" for this kind of long-form journalism.
As your adjectives suggest, New Yorker articles are less bullets of breathlessly-repeated facts, and more illustrations of nuanced scenes and interactions. I think it's natural, because life is messy and meandering, too.
That being said, most of their articles have very well-defined and well-informed points. They don't make them by stating it up front, but by drawing a picture, observing some of its details, and asking you to form your own opinion. We can disagree, but to me it feels more intellectually-honest than other forms of journalism.
Yes, it takes longer to get there. Yes, some of the details (what clothes people are wearing, what the rooms smell like, whatever) could probably be removed without compromising the structural integrity. But the New Yorker is about structural integrity and style. It's like the "literary fiction" of news. I don't read each article in each magazine, but it's still pretty rare that I've regretted finishing one; maybe once every other month.
I'm talking more of the style used by Ben Taub [0] [1], or Sam Knight [2] [3]. More investigative than "think piece", although there are some big ideas in the presentation.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/iraqs-post-isi...
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma...
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/30/theresa-mays-i...
One one hand, it's great. More science/research is being done, but on the other hand it becomes less and less accessible due to the extreme specificity, very narrow scopes and due to simply being on the very edge of human knowledge accumulation.
And of course, theoretically whatever paper one is reading one can "simply" follow the references and look up the introduced technical terms. Occasionally there are great survey papers that take a look at a (sub-sub-sub-)field, and again from time to time there are amazing science communicators that allow laypeople to have some kind of real grasp on these questions and topics.
Yet, I think, it's clear that publishing terse PDFs is not the best way to communicate research and results.
And we know, we - as in DARPA, but anyway, as in civilization - did a trial, and it's very enlightening: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00672-7
And one of the big finding is that being stubbornly terse is bad.
And it's just a step, that this trial did not check, but maybe requiring researchers to spend a few days of their precious time to write a few pages about what they are actually doing, introduce the terms, techniques, methods, wouldn't be that bad, maybe even it would be helpful ... and this is basically pre-registration, and this is basically the grant proposal. And it'd be double-plus-good to link all of these in an open and really accessible manner in those fancy PDFs. (Or better yet, just use a HTML site. LaTeX is nice, but.)
Maybe we're not so different after all!
If you think The Government == The People, you're out of your mind. It's a nice ideal, but it's never been achieved in a modern nation state. Some nation states are less abusive than others, but that's as good as it gets.
The government is careless with spending and can't be trusted with people's money because they didn't earn the money they have. They took it out of people's paychecks, and if they run out, they can levy more taxes or just print more, there's no incentive to be thoughtful, careful, or diligent. At any rate, when the government is reckless with people's money, it's never the government that has to feel any pain.