I'll paraphrase a famous piece of public speaking advice "avoid talking down to your audience, they will catch up".
Also, who knows how the lecturer presented the information. Perhaps it was well composed, and in fact could be understood by anybody.
When fields highly specialize they seem to attract a certain personality of people who revel in their 'insider knowledge' and make the learning of it for others more difficult in order to inflate their standing in the eyes of their students, "How did you learn this stuff!?"
The reality of these fields, like mathematics, music theory, computer science, and the like is that the ideas themselves are so ridiculously simple that they could be understood by most anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the 5 basic arithmetic operators if presented coherently.
After all, “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
I don't know if I agree with this. Advanced mathematics deals with layer upon layer of abstraction, and oftentimes there aren't significant shortcuts. A good friend of mine did her doctorate in algebraic geometry, and there were important open questions in her field that would take two years of study in order to be able to understand the problem statement.
Take the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In this case the problem is very easy to state (a^n + b^n = c^n has non-zero integer solutions only of n < 3). But the proof is very long (like over 100 pages at least?) and involves quite a lot of abstraction, well beyond integer arithmetic. Nobody's being pretentious here, it's just the nature of the field.
> When fields highly specialize they seem to attract a certain personality of people who revel in their 'insider knowledge' and make the learning of it for others more difficult in order to inflate their standing in the eyes of their students
This is one reason why Wikipedia is so very valuable. A well-done article gives you a foot in the door, even if by doing little more than decoding jargon.
Also, who knows how the lecturer presented the information. Perhaps it was well composed, and in fact could be understood by anybody.
When fields highly specialize they seem to attract a certain personality of people who revel in their 'insider knowledge' and make the learning of it for others more difficult in order to inflate their standing in the eyes of their students, "How did you learn this stuff!?"
The reality of these fields, like mathematics, music theory, computer science, and the like is that the ideas themselves are so ridiculously simple that they could be understood by most anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the 5 basic arithmetic operators if presented coherently.
After all, “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29442307