文 | 文双春（湖南大学教授）
Not long ago, I met an undergraduate student who asked: We all want to listen to more academic reports, but some of the reports are not understood at all, so many people stop listening to them. Shall we go to the report that we don't understand?
This question is not new. There are many answers to this kind of question online.
My advice is: listen to it.
There are two reasons for this. First, a report that you don't understand is more worthy of listening than a report that you can understand. The truth is that reading only books that are easy to read is equivalent to not reading books. The key is how to listen. I won't go into details.
Second, the purpose of listening to a report is not just to understand. It's like when you go to the cinema to watch a movie, the purpose may not only be to understand the movie, or even to watch the movie at all.
Nobel Laureate in Physics Feynman is recognized for his first-class lectures and lectures. He asked his students, "If you don't understand what I'm going to tell you, why are you sitting here listening from beginning to end?" he said, "and it's clear to all the listeners who go to a science lecture that they don't intend to understand what the lecture is about." However, the lecturer may have a beautiful colorful tie to look at. ”
The charm of academic reports is not only in the report, but also in the speaker. So Feynman also said, "My task is to ask you to believe, and not to walk away because you don't understand." ”
In reality, we see a lot of academic celebrities going to universities to give lectures, and they are very popular. Are you sure that the people who attend the lecture go with the intention of understanding?
Confucius said: "I don't try, so art." "If your study (listening to academic reports is also a kind of learning) is not for exams, not for use, and ultimately not for utilitarian purposes, then you may learn the realm of "art" like Feynman and Confucius.
Here is the focus on why you can't understand the academic report. As far as I can observe, there are three main points.
For one, you may not be the target audience set by the reporter.
Robert P. Crease, a philosopher of science, said, "Explaining science to outsiders is like talking about a city to a non-city dweller—you have to decide what to talk about based on how the audience reacts." If they want to be city dwellers, your conversation will have to focus on rules, regulations, and laws, and it will take time for the audience to grasp them. If your audience is here to travel and doesn't want to be a city resident, then you have to focus on public tourist attractions, don't go into too much detail, a lot can be omitted altogether. ”
Many presenters will first understand who the audience is before making a report, as Crease said, and then determine the content and method of the report according to the audience's interests, needs, expertise, background, etc.
Undergraduate students are the "tourists" of the vast majority of academic presentations, and if they happen to come across professional presentations aimed at "city residents" (academic peers), it is inevitable that they will not understand them.
Second, the reporter did not understand what he was saying.
If you're part of the target audience set by the reporter and you still don't understand, what's the problem?
Kun Huang is one of the founders of continental solid-state physics and semiconductor physics. According to his student, Professor Ge Weikun, Mr. Huang Kun often said: "If the people below can't understand a lecture or a report, it is never the problem of the person who listens, but the problem of the person who speaks." ”
The famous orator Nadu Quembin had a similar opinion: "If you are standing in front of a real expert, you will understand everything he says." If you can't understand what he says, he's not really an expert. ”
Thinking Like a Physicist is a highly readable popular science book on "New Physics" (Quantum Theory and Relativity). It's hard to imagine that its author, Gary Zukaeff, has no background in physics.
The title page of the book quotes three physicists:
Albert Einstein: "The basic ideas of science are mostly simple in nature and can usually be expressed in a language that everyone knows. ”
Heisenberg: "Explaining things in ordinary language is an indicator of the level of comprehension even for physicists." ”
Schrödinger: "In the long run, if you don't have a way to make people understand what you're doing, then what you're doing is worthless." ”
Zukae's confidence in writing this popular science book stemmed from the shared belief of leading scientists: that even the most esoteric science can be expressed in simple language, and that it can be understood by people without any professional background.
Conversely, if the reporter does not make people understand his report, it means that he does not understand what he is saying. In this regard, Einstein also provides us with a more precise ruler: "If you can't explain a concept to a six-year-old, you don't fully understand it." ”
Third, the reporter is playing tricks.
Even if the rapporteur has the ability to make the report understandable, he may not necessarily do so.
On the one hand, it takes effort to make the report easy to understand, but anyone can open their mouth to make it clear or make people hear it in a fog.
As Albert Einstein said, "Any clever fool can make things bigger and more complicated, and it takes talent and great courage to go in the opposite direction." ”
Michael Kosterlitz, a Nobel laureate in physics, said that explaining something to someone who had absolutely no background in the logical steps was an almost impossible task, so he tried to explain his work to his wife 99 percent less.
On the other hand, the speaker sometimes weighs the benefits of making the report easy to understand or being subtle.
Research has shown that researchers have sufficient motivation to deliberately "make things bigger and more complicated" when expressing their research results or ideas.
A series of studies published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes shows that researchers often prove themselves to be experts or in the industry by speaking jargon — language used by a particular group of people instead of words and phrases that are easier to understand.
德国汉堡大学Lennart Ante通过分析135502篇与12种技术有关的学术论文摘要的可读性，考察了科学语篇的可读性与其科学影响（用引用数表示）之间的关系(The relationship between readability and scientific impact: Evidence from emerging technology discourses)。
The results show that in almost all research areas considered, the more complex the abstract, the lower the likelihood that a paper will not be cited, while in some more mature or larger fields, the more complex the abstract, the higher the chance that a paper will be in the top 10% or even 1% of citations. This implies that scientists have an incentive (artificially) to reduce the readability of their abstracts (artificially) in order to convey a signal of quality and competence to readers, thereby attracting attention and attracting more citations, the authors not.
In addition, according to a paper published in the Journal of Informetrics, Peter van den Besselaar and Charlie Mom from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the effect of writing style on success in grant applications), researchers can help to successfully obtain support for their scientific research projects by making their own scientific discourse complex. Based on linguistic analysis of abstracts, project descriptions, and applicants' biographies from a European Research Council (ECC) funding scheme for early-career researchers (covering all disciplines), the authors found that, overall, complex writing with longer sentences, more jargon, and a rich narrative structure was positively correlated with review scores and funding decisions.
To sum up, not being able to understand an academic report cannot be a reason not to listen to a report. Because whether you can understand or not is basically decided not by the person who listens, but by the person who speaks. Listening to more reports, you may not understand much, but there may be a lot of things you see, learn, and gain a lot, and these are often more important than what you understand.