The bigger the audience is, the more people there are who won’t know a specific idea/concept/word (xkcd’s comic #1053 “Ten Thousand” captures this quite succinctly), so you’ll simply have to shorten.
I took logarithm of sentence length and linearly fitted it against logarithm of world population (that shouldn’t really be precise since authors presumably mostly cared about their society, but that would be more time-expensive to check).
Relevant lines of Python REPL
>>> import math >>> wps = [49, 50, 42, 20, 21, 14, 18, 12] >>> pop = [600e6, 700e6, 1e9, 1.4e9, 1.5e9, 2.3e9, 3.5e9, 6e9] >>> [math.log(w) for w in wps] [3.8918202981106265, 3.912023005428146, 3.7376696182833684, 2.995732273553991, 3.044522437723423, 2.6390573296152584, 2.8903717578961645, 2.4849066497880004] >>> [math.log(p) for p in pop] [20.21244021318042, 20.36659089300768, 20.72326583694641, 21.059738073567623, 21.128730945054574, 21.556174959881517, 21.97602880544178, 22.515025306174465] >>> 22.51-20.21 2.3000000000000007 >>> 3.89-2.48 1.4100000000000001 >>> 2.3/1.41 1.6312056737588652 >>> [round(math.exp(26.41 - math.log(w)*1.63)/1e9, 3) for w,p in zip(wps,pop)] # predicted population, billion [0.518, 0.502, 0.667, 2.234, 2.063, 3.995, 2.652, 5.136] >>> [round(math.exp(26.41 - math.log(w)*1.63)/1e9 - p/1e9, 3) for w,p in zip(wps,pop)] # prediction off by, billion [-0.082, −0.198, −0.333, 0.834, 0.563, 1.695, −0.848, −0.864]
Wouldn’t people not knowing specific words or ideas be equally compatible with “you can’t refer to the concept with a single word so you have to explain it, leading to longer sentences”?
I suggest additional explanation.
The bigger the audience is, the more people there are who won’t know a specific idea/concept/word (xkcd’s comic #1053 “Ten Thousand” captures this quite succinctly), so you’ll simply have to shorten.
I took logarithm of sentence length and linearly fitted it against logarithm of world population (that shouldn’t really be precise since authors presumably mostly cared about their society, but that would be more time-expensive to check).
Relevant lines of Python REPL
>>> import math
>>> wps = [49, 50, 42, 20, 21, 14, 18, 12]
>>> pop = [600e6, 700e6, 1e9, 1.4e9, 1.5e9, 2.3e9, 3.5e9, 6e9]
>>> [math.log(w) for w in wps]
[3.8918202981106265, 3.912023005428146, 3.7376696182833684, 2.995732273553991, 3.044522437723423, 2.6390573296152584, 2.8903717578961645, 2.4849066497880004]
>>> [math.log(p) for p in pop]
[20.21244021318042, 20.36659089300768, 20.72326583694641, 21.059738073567623, 21.128730945054574, 21.556174959881517, 21.97602880544178, 22.515025306174465]
>>> 22.51-20.21
2.3000000000000007
>>> 3.89-2.48
1.4100000000000001
>>> 2.3/1.41
1.6312056737588652
>>> [round(math.exp(26.41 - math.log(w)*1.63)/1e9, 3) for w,p in zip(wps,pop)] # predicted population, billion
[0.518, 0.502, 0.667, 2.234, 2.063, 3.995, 2.652, 5.136]
>>> [round(math.exp(26.41 - math.log(w)*1.63)/1e9 - p/1e9, 3) for w,p in zip(wps,pop)] # prediction off by, billion
[-0.082, −0.198, −0.333, 0.834, 0.563, 1.695, −0.848, −0.864]
Wouldn’t people not knowing specific words or ideas be equally compatible with “you can’t refer to the concept with a single word so you have to explain it, leading to longer sentences”?