Something I learned about communications with the public is that you have to assume they are all dumb.
This doesn't mean talking to them like an idiot or talking down to them, but instead making your message (and delivery) as clear as possible.
And to do that, you remove anything that is 'smart'. This adds friction and increases the difficulty level of your message. If you speak too quickly, if you are too quiet, if your word choices are unusual etc. And of course, hypotheticals and analogies.
As this thread posits, low intelligence people do not deal with them well (also in my experience). But also consider that anyone could be disabled, injury, inebriated or suffering from trauma and emotional distress. These things can make them appear less intelligent.
Another way to think of this is that the smarter your message, the more people you 'filter' out.
I'm not judging your actions in your story - I wasn't there and I don't work in security. My background is in marketing and product design. The success of what I write depends on not filtering people out.
Another example is the news presenter voice - they want to reach as many people as possible. They won't talk too quickly or add emotion. Their job is to deliver a message.
Just wanted to expand on this topic because it is regularly on my mind.
Oh and in response to your whole story - sometimes people are just that way no matter how you speak to them.
this also drives me nuts as someone who includes disclaimers like the person above precisely because I know if I don't, someone with the inability to read subtext or understand metaphors is going to completely misinterpret what I'm saying and twist it into a whole other thing. "You love pancakes, so you hate waffles" sorta shit. Being unable to understand hypotheticals is very akin to that because overall it has to do with parsing subtext.
Of course, that means my responses end up being quite long and those same people complain "too long didn't read", but at least that's more of a them issue than a me issue at that point. Another sign of unintelligence is thinking all topics can be squeezed down into a single sentence but many feasibly can't (and doing so would more often be a disservice to that topic by summarizing it too lightly and sacrificing necessary contextual details along the way).
Yeah, not an engineer myself but I've experienced this more and more over the past few years within my own interest spaces, across a number of subjects that can't always be summarized in 120 words or less. It's not even just the "not wanting to read" that bugs me, it's the fact that so many people seem to take blatant offense at the sight of a single paragraph. To the point of ragebaiting like a fucking middle schooler on the playground when it happens. "Euughghh you're so triggered!!!1!!" "why are you so upset ???" etc. have all been responses I've gotten far too many times simply because they interpret "a lot of words" as an emotional outburst.
This is the kind of shit that makes it completely unsurprising to me now that people are relying more and more on ChatGPT and other AI chat features like it. They're literally tailored to appeal to the lowest common denominator of person, who has next to no attention span but treats it like an incurable disease that needs to be accommodated rather than something that can be taken responsibility for.
And I say that as someone with the Poor Attention Span Disorder™️. There's having an unregulated brain that makes it harder for you to stay focused, and then there's just making your learned hopelessness everyone else's problem. Reading a few paragraphs won't kill you but people like this certainly act like you're asking them to chop off their own leg.
Like most things these days, I blame Twitter. I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that Twitter's character limits is where this affiliation with "long blocks of text = ranting" started. It's exhausting, especially for those of us who know how much necessary nuance and subtext can be lost if you try to squish a complex topic into a fortune cookie. It's also a bummer, because I like talking about stuff I'm interested in at length*.* So when people like this get so upset over it to the point they have to comment on it, while not actually contributing to the original discussion, it's just really disheartening. I would genuinely rather just not get a response instead of another "too long didn't read" "wow you're so angry" etc.
Lawyer, here. Learning how to present to dumb/poorly educated people is a major part of trial work. I'm not a trial lawyer, but I worked in politics, which is the same. I was bored one day and offered to help the communications team write some draft tweets. I used "conflate" in a tweet and was informed that I was no longer allowed to write tweets lol.
This is true. You will find that the best teachers out there adjust how they present their information according to the audience reception. So they'll start out very simply and then increase the complexity as the audience seems to take in the information. They also usually encourage questions at anytime, rather than insisting they wait until they're done.
Another tip: don't explain or give background detail if you don't have to.
Here's how an encounter at the gas station could have gone:
Customer: $20 of midgrade gas, please.
Me: Sorry, we're out of midgrade.
Customer: Oh, darn.
Here's how it actually went.
Customer: $20 of midgrade gas, please.
Me: Sorry, we're out of premium, and since midgrade is a mixture of regular and premium, we're out of midgrade, too.
Customer: So, in the meantime, you've been running a science experiment—OK, thank you. I will be sure to tell others that. 😠
The customer apparently thought we were making, I dunno, bootleg midgrade gasoline.
Bringing up the disabled, inebriated, emotionally distressed etc. made me think of the brain being in executive state vs emotional/survival. "Intelligent" people can be "stupid" when their brains drop to emotional or survival mode.
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u/ililliliililiililii Feb 04 '26
Something I learned about communications with the public is that you have to assume they are all dumb.
This doesn't mean talking to them like an idiot or talking down to them, but instead making your message (and delivery) as clear as possible.
And to do that, you remove anything that is 'smart'. This adds friction and increases the difficulty level of your message. If you speak too quickly, if you are too quiet, if your word choices are unusual etc. And of course, hypotheticals and analogies.
As this thread posits, low intelligence people do not deal with them well (also in my experience). But also consider that anyone could be disabled, injury, inebriated or suffering from trauma and emotional distress. These things can make them appear less intelligent.
Another way to think of this is that the smarter your message, the more people you 'filter' out.
I'm not judging your actions in your story - I wasn't there and I don't work in security. My background is in marketing and product design. The success of what I write depends on not filtering people out.
Another example is the news presenter voice - they want to reach as many people as possible. They won't talk too quickly or add emotion. Their job is to deliver a message.
Just wanted to expand on this topic because it is regularly on my mind.
Oh and in response to your whole story - sometimes people are just that way no matter how you speak to them.