People make assumptions in what they ask of you. When someone wants a simple answer, they genuinely expect that there is one. There must always be one. Mankind has been seeking one for all of its sentient existence. Whether you are religious or not, the simple answer seems to be either “There is a God”, or “There is no God”. There’s a lot of in-betweenness missing from those two poles of opinion. The reality is that there is no simple answer. & yet, given that we’ve been contemplating this particular question for so long & still don’t have a clue, how is it that anyone can expect you to come up with a simple answer to a brand new question like “Want do you want to drink?” or “Why did the project fail?”
Yes, there is a large gap in the importance of the answer to those questions, but fundamentally, you probably don’t have an answer ready when the question is asked. I know that some people have a response that they regurgitate every time the question is asked, but that doesn’t mean it’s an answer to the question, nor does it mean it is well thought out. “Beer” & “lack of planning” deflect the questioner wonderfully, but they negate the possibility that just once you’d like to try a fluffy duck or review your unwieldy business processes.
If there is no simple answer to a given question, & someone expects a simple answer, then there is no effective way to answer them. A Zen Buddhist might answer with “mu”, in that the answer exceeds the parameters that the questioner provides.
If you give them a “dumbed down” version of the truth, then they will accept this simplification as the truth, rather than it being a representation of it. When someone says “There is no God” they generally don’t mean “It is physically impossible for a supreme being to have created what I perceive to be reality”, they actually mean “I don’t adhere to the existence of the god that you revere in your belief system” - & they’ve even taken the short-cut of assuming that they know what context you have - what you mean by “God”.
The whole idea of dumbing something down is, in itself, silly. It makes the person asking the question sound as though they can’t handle the truth or large concepts, & it makes the person answering switch contexts to try to match their own idea of what a simple answer might be, rather than explain what they know (no matter how complex).
Good communication is about putting your ideas to an audience. An audience that demands that you speak Greek is not receptive to your ideas in Italian; & yet, interpretive dance crosses language barriers wonderfully in conveying a meaning. That is, there is always a way to communicate effectively, but it doesn’t have to be through the mechanism that the audience demands or expects.
If the audience demands to be talked down to, or treated like an idiot, then it limits the communication that can occur. If an audience is open to doing some interpretation & having an interactive dialogue, then meaning can be transferred.
Good communicators find how to get their message to their audience. If the audience doesn’t understand, then it’s the communicator’s job to find the common ground & elaborate, or else find another mechanism to impart the message. Stopping the communicator from doing their job shows a disrespect for their ability as much as it does a disinterest in their message.
When an audience “requires” the message to be in a particular manner (a given language, or dumbing down), then they limit the nuances that they can understand. They detract from the content, the meaning, the ideas that need to be conveyed. If the audience takes that dumbed down message as the actual message, rather than a representation, then the new version of the message becomes truth.
This is much worse than someone interpreting communication from their own perspective. Not only have they twisted what they’ve heard, but they’ve twisted what was said!
Whether we’re talking about religion, a status report, or a conversation in a bar, dumbing down a message is … dumb.
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