A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:
When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time Iâd tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other wayâlots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).
But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.
So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors⊠Iâm not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)
So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that Iâd only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.
But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.
So I gave him that summary, and then askedâsince he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesisâwhat his research was on.
âOh,â he said, âyou wouldnât understand it.â
Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one gameâa game of âletâs talk about what weâre passionate about!ââ and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my researchâand he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, Iâm sorry, itâs hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldnât possibly understand his work.
Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate studentânormally undergrads and graduate students couldnât be roommates, but weâd been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically⊠in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)
(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)
Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, âHe made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.â
And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, âIf he canât explain his research to you, then heâs not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.â
Now I hesitated, because Iâd be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldnât dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, âLook, Iâve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?â
And I said, âGenetic algorithmsâthat is, self-optimizing algorithmsâfor prioritization, specifically for scheduling.â
âRight,â she said. âYou couldnât code them because youâre not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone canât explain it like that, it isnât a problem with you as a person. Itâs a problem with them. They either donât understand it as well as they think they doâor they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.â
If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away⊠here is what I have to say: maybe it isnât you who is the idiot.
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