No offense RightWhale, but I would submit that MUCH of scientific and technological offerings can be easily understood by the average layman. The fly in the ointment is the language of the discipline being discussed. Sciencespeak, technospeak or whatever label you would like to apply to it is what separates the masses from the sciences. Now I'm sure this makes for lofty exchanges within the community™ where they are able to impress each other with their knowledge of the "language", which is probably not a bad thing under the circumstances.
Like so many other things it seems, science has become something that happens behind closed doors. Is it necessary, or even advisable? Laymen could care less about the language; give us the red meat.
I would really like to press on here, but gotta run for now.
For when you return: it is not at all the quality of the offerings but the volume of undistilled thought, half-baked or even raw ideas with zero possibility that keeps us from spending any moments of our short lives reading the stuff. Institutional publications have at least sorted out the somewhat coherent developments from the general muck.
Understood, yes, sometimes.
But there are two problems.
One is the laypeople don't know all the background, so they might end up wasting time, space, and energy posting specious objections which all the *real* practitioners have discarded a long time ago. Over and over again as n00bs join in. (See any crevo thread on FR for examples).
The other is that laypeople often confuse the issue by not knowing the nomenclature -- it is not an "affectation" in the sciences, as it is in postmodern deconstructive liberal arts; rather the language is used in a specific, quite specialized fashion, unique to the discipline. And people from outside that field often mistake the meaning.
Cheers!