• Apathy Tree
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    1 year ago

    It’s sad how right you are about this. People are terrible at explaining their passions in a way that gets other people excited about it!

    Not just nerds, everyone!

    I love knowing what makes people tick so I ask them about things they find interesting (regardless how they think I will feel about it). I basically ask them to info dump about the thing they care most about, because I want to know what makes them who they are.

    Most people are very timid about sharing, they don’t have the gusto, or if they do, they are so buried in the minutia that they don’t know what gets them excited for it on a grand scale, so they can’t share those aspects.

    It’s true of nerds, specialists in any field, really anyone who knows a lot about a thing. It’s why science communicators are kinda rare and those that are popular are… kinda arrogant… (I’m a science communicator myself so I’ve been exposed to a lot of the content out there and a lot of it comes off as extremely condescending)

    • Pelicanen
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      31 year ago

      As someone who probably sucks at getting people interested in his hobbies, in my defense it can be difficult for me to boil down what makes it interesting to someone who’s not into it because I’ve been into it for so long that I am fascinated by those details that others find boring.

      I could not for the life of me successfully convince someone to think that control systems are awesome, which they absolutely are, and the things I can find fascinating about new methods won’t matter and probably won’t even be understandable to someone without the fundamentals.

      • @Sanyanov
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        41 year ago

        As a food microbiologist, I feel like I could excite some child by saying “it GROWS!”, but I’ll have hard time explaining the joy and happiness of “IT grows!”, so to speak :D

        I’ll have to get into a lot of details on why this particular strain is so revolutionary, what was it worth to extract one, and how happy I am that it all works just as planned (which it often doesn’t, since we’re working on the barely explored territory).

        Those strains are about to change the way we make goddamn bread, and yet communicating the importance of it is surprisingly hard, because it operates characteristics people don’t pay close attention to, which they absolutely goddamn should.