a snip of a response to Peter B.....
'You make some good points. What I often find offensive is the way the "experts" talk down to the low, ignorant masses who read and sometimes comment. This has evolved into a forum whereby the genuine keepers of the keys of knowledge are breaking their arms trying to pat themselves on the back.'

my take...
What you do here imho Peter is not science but the previewing of science literature which has some relevance to bee and/or beekeeping. I greatly appreciate your time and effort in this regards since I have neither the time nor the computer connectivity to do the same.  Hopefully you filter out some of the garbage and toss us simple beekeepers a jewel from time to time. This task (which I have greatly simplified for brevity purpose) is pretty much 'telling us what we now know on a subject' which imho is often where new research or thinking begins. The process of science goes on from there.

I suspect I know exactly what the writer was referencing which is the tendency of some educated people to wish to appear to have expertise way beyond their educational background.  This does not mean anyone (or at least anyone with an adequate education) could not become somewhat familiar with almost any topic but it does quite often mean their understanding is a mm shallow and a mile wide.  Often time thinking from one school of thought does not even translate to another but some educated (or somewhat educated)folks seem to think it does. I guess some of us are quite comfortable in knowing what we know and what we do not know???

Of course the difficult task 'the writer' points is tuning a presentation to the audience in front of you and as the student at the TAMU lab have found out this can be a daunting task and subject to much discomfort both for the audience and the presenter till they learn to do 'that dance'.  Most of my own friends here are very much blue collar types who seem to think I am a bit overeducated and I do know that when I converse with those friends I have to be very careful to simplify my language or it makes them feel very uneasy.

Everything of course has changed since I was in school, but every course I encountered in technical writing would give one or two 'not to do' pointers to exactly the error folks are making (and your letter writer Peter B. is pointing toward) when they use technical words, jargon or large or unusual words when a simple word or phase would do. 

Gene in Central Texas....

    

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