This is a tricky thing. Demystification of the complex is ostensibly good. Curiosity and broad relative understandings of things are also healthy.

But shortcut understanding has inherent sacrifice. The slope here runs towards, "ONE WEIRD TRICK TO UNDERSTANDING THIS PIECE FROM THE JOURNAL SCIENCE". Big words are big on purpose.

There's this dangerous TED-talky redditification of intellectual tourists. We're at critical mass of Dreamworks-faced white guys in their 20s that really **get it** about nuanced, impossibly complex topics because they read a few wikis and an ELI5 and want to sound smart at parties. Don't be that guy.

Difficult stuff is difficult for a reason. If you want to play at certain levels, there is a requisite workload and expense of mental effort that's required to function at that level. Accreditation is important. Study is key.

There is no quick and easy way to true knowledge and deep understanding. It requires focus, passion, intellect, and hard work beyond, "I read an article". You may be able to see the peak of someone else's mountain, but there are no shortcuts to get there other than to climb down and start another trip up from the bottom of the valley.

Does an 8-second gif really make cellular automata "super-clear"? A New Kind of Science is like 1200 pages long and it doesn't make cellular automata "super-clear".

The dark side of that is something like the proliferation of the bullshit ten thousand hours piece of fake trivia.

A twisting of results from one psychology paper from 1993 becomes useless, vaguely affirmative pablum on the work of a popular writer. Colloquially it's known as a "rule" at this point, and one "touted" by this writer, while it's not even like, sort of supported by anything.

But you present pop-psychology to people that don't approach material like that with skepticism or rigor, stuff you learn when doing scientific study the proper way, you end up with a grossly misinformed public that just takes anything by rote.

Also, the most important science is often numb-boring.

Yeah that was a crappy phrasing. The point I was going for was that progress is slow and unglamorous and never dripping with ~~turns out~~ sparkle.

We're in agreement about scientific thinking being the thing that's really lacking in popsci journalism.

Accessible works teaching skepticism, curiosity, and the basic scientific method would have a very beneficial and lasting impact.

Did anyone here ever watch "Beakman's World"?
He slightly pre-dated Bill Nye the Science Guy, and my kids recently re-discovered him on Netflix. He is a comic not a scientist but he clearly got good science advisors in the writing process. His show also coined the term, "Mythbuster," as far as I can tell.