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That Sounds Smart (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

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How do you tell if what someone is saying is smart? Most people’s first instinct is to think that things they can’t understand must be smart. After all, to say such things they must have learned them and aren’t people who have learned more about something generally smarter than people who haven’t? Thus the common phenomena of people trusting jargon-laden statements. One problem with this method is simply that jargon can be faked. It’s not too hard to make up a bunch of longish words that sound complicated. And if you don’t understand them, you’ll have a hard time telling whether they’re real or made up. But the more serious problem is that this method is exactly backwards. Smart people actually say things that are very simple and easy to understand. And the smarter they are, the more clear what they say is. It’s stupid people who say things that are hard to understand. Part of this is because stupid people say things that aren’t true, things that aren’t true don’t make sense, and thing

That Sounds Smart (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) Raw Thought by Aaron Swartz That Sounds Smart How do you tell if what someone is saying is smart? Most people’s first instinct is to think that things they can’t understand must be smart. After all, to say such things they must have learned them and aren’t people who have learned more about something generally smarter than people who haven’t? Thus the common phenomena of people trusting jargon-laden statements. One problem with this method is simply that jargon can be faked. It’s not too hard to make up a bunch of lon

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