When I talk to non-technical people at work or about my work, I am frantically translating all the technical words I usually use into words that fit into something that I hope they can understand. This is very difficult! And I have to do it on the fly. I mess up sometimes. This must happen to a lot of people, and it’s all very innocent—because communicating across large inferential distances is hard. I’ve gotten better at it but it is definitely a skill. I appreciate the edit to call out that there are various options about what’s going on besides the Smarter and Bluffing options described in the post, but I still want to stress that bluffing is a small minority of such cases. Certainly no one should be defaulting to thinking that a person is bluffing, just because they’re using difficult language or failing to explain well.
Anecdotally, from working with data analysts and data scientists, watching them present to people outside their level of technical expertise, and looking back at certain presentations I’ve made: I feel embarrassed for a technical person who is failing to bridge the inferential gap. Like another commenter said, failing to model the audience looks bad. If other technical people are listening and notice, they’ll think you’re just messing up. So even if we imagine that this Bluffing is common, those doing it would probably only want to do it when there are very few peoplearound to notice how bad their explanation is.
When I talk to non-technical people at work or about my work, I am frantically translating all the technical words I usually use into words that fit into something that I hope they can understand. This is very difficult! And I have to do it on the fly. I mess up sometimes. This must happen to a lot of people, and it’s all very innocent—because communicating across large inferential distances is hard. I’ve gotten better at it but it is definitely a skill. I appreciate the edit to call out that there are various options about what’s going on besides the Smarter and Bluffing options described in the post, but I still want to stress that bluffing is a small minority of such cases. Certainly no one should be defaulting to thinking that a person is bluffing, just because they’re using difficult language or failing to explain well.
Anecdotally, from working with data analysts and data scientists, watching them present to people outside their level of technical expertise, and looking back at certain presentations I’ve made: I feel embarrassed for a technical person who is failing to bridge the inferential gap. Like another commenter said, failing to model the audience looks bad. If other technical people are listening and notice, they’ll think you’re just messing up. So even if we imagine that this Bluffing is common, those doing it would probably only want to do it when there are very few people around to notice how bad their explanation is.