You make a valid point, but I found it ironic that a complaint about scientific language should come from a lawyer, since most of us non-lawyers feel the same about legalese.

It might be interesting to explore why specialists in almost every field, not just science and the law, tend to use language that makes their writing incomprehensible to outsiders. Whatever the original goal of such “technical language,” I think that now it often just represents laziness. To many young people have no experience in writing clearly, even in ordinary English, so then when they start writing in technical jargon the obtuseness of the their writing seems to be magnified.

My podcasts are my own small effort to translate some science into ordinary English. I would love to be part of a larger effort in this regard.

I am pesonally appalled by the anti-science attitude that seems to have taken root in this country. This show more than any other made me think about why people would care more the motives of the people presenting information than the information (facts) themselves. And I think part of the answer is simple: the facts are inaccessible to most of the population. Undoubtedly there are important reasons that the scientific studies are written up the way they are. But the language used and way the data is presented is almost incomprensible to non-scientists.

I am an environmental lawyer and so routinely deal with complicated technical issues. I was recently compelled to do research into some issues in veterinary medicine and found, to my dismay, that the papers on the findings of the reseach were almost impossible to read. I diligently looked up words I had never seen, only to find that they generally referred to ordinary concepts embodied in common English. The outsider gets the sense that the intent of these papers is to obfuscate as much as to illuminate.

In the absence of an ability to understand the research and findings, it is not surprising that a person looking for answers uses the motives of the people funding the research as proxy for the facts.

Not everyone would be able to read or would want to read scientific reports, even if they were written in plain English. However, I think it would help persuade people if the data was available to them in a format they could grasp, rather than forcing them to rely on the assurances of an outside authority, so many of which have been discredited recently.