I owe you an explanation, but not a quick one

During the 2026 Indian protests, if your Internet consumption was curated a certain way, you'd have gotten to see some pretty interesting leftist infighting (using that term itself could be considered polemical, though). This was more common on ideologically puritanical (another polemical term) pages, long leftist text walls type people. There could be a separate tangent about how "ideological puritans" are in fact the only people you could consider ideologues, or an equivalent argument, that everyone is an ideologue. But that's not what this is about. Besides the infighting and puritanism criticisms of these people by other leftists/liberals, you'd also see a lot of criticism for using big words and inaccessible arguments.

I loathe reading that particular complaint, and not because I consider leftist pedantism to be particularly good politics. I despise the notion that understanding should be granted, and not earned. Now of course, people feeling that they ought to be able to understand something without putting in the requisite effort, that is a logical consequence of the mass movement politics. I imagine some communist wrote about it, but I don't really care about that.

I've been in IIT Jammu for some work lately, and I overheard a conversation in the mess where the conversation started off about humanities departments in universities, to about how studying history is worthless. I did try to think of a concise argument regarding why that's such a retarded take (mainly regarding that you need empiricism to make a model, and history is that experiment, there's also another metatext), but that isn't the point. What I'm getting at is that the notion that one ought to be able to explain a philosophical, political or sociological perspective with the same length and complexity as a Twitter post arises from a complete lack of respect for the humanities.

No one feels the same way about mathematics and the natural sciences, partially because you cannot misjudge your understanding of these sciences. You cannot reasonably consider yourself entitled to an explanation of control theory in the duration of a YouTube short, certainly not an explanation that is worth much perhaps a simple visualisation or some intuition before entering the subject. It is quite difficult to even misunderstand it in that duration. And thus no one judges an explanation of control theory as being unegalitarian. Of course, there are good instructors and bad instructors. There are obstacles to obtaining the requisite education to understand control theory. Let the access to knowledge be egalitarian.

But one's choice to use precise terms for precisely what they mean, to require prerequisite knowledge from the student, and to take their time to explain concepts in a natural science cannot meaningfully be criticised for being unegalitarian. This grace is no longer lent to the subtler arts. It is fortunate that mathematics requires notation that differs from vernacular writing, although I imagine AI has the potential to denigrate the natural sciences the same way vernacularisation did to the humanities.