It is easy to find articles and guides designed for laypeople. If you know the right keyword, it is just as easy to find professional/expert level papers and articles. I have noticed that this is the case across fields. Is that what other folks experience? Where do you go for information when laypeople articles are too basic, but every expert level article is beyond you?
Textbooks! You can find textbooks on almost any topic that are aimed at undergraduate university students. It wasn’t until I got to college and browsed the extensive libraries for a few hours that I realized how much of the world’s knowledge is still in books.
I know this is a very specific answer and probably not what you are looking for, but anyways:
In the Netherlands there is a magazine called ars aequi which is a law magazine specialized for law students where both students and professors can write articles for. The articles are mostly written with in such a style that it analyzes complex law problems but in mind that it should be easily understood by every student; so also the students that have just begun with their study. I would say that even people who never studied law but are interested in it and are able to learn fast, could easily understand what the articles are trying to say. Too bad the magazine is only in Dutch, the concept is very good and contributes in my opinion to the enthusiasm people have for this field.
It sounds a bit like the journal “the conversation”
Those are both what I was thinking of. The law journal sounds like it would be great. I skimmed the conversation’s site and I think I’ll be going back when I have specific deeper answers to find.
Books from the local library. Most non-fiction is written to be digestible by the general public, whereas published papers will assume a lot of preexisting knowledge in the audience.
Many books are not written too differently from the articles for laypersons, but a book has your attention for 5-10 hours as opposed to 5-10 minutes with an article. All that extra time allows for elaboration on the nuance and context that matters for meaningful discussion about a topic.
Good point. I guess to the same end you could read straight through some subject specific blogs.
As a scientist, for me this gap was bridged by doing a Masters/PhD.
In my field, learning involves performing experiments using very expensive equipment and potentially very expensive failures. One also needs to spend a lot of time doing things that will build their own value (like reading papers and manuals and performing failed experiments) without necessarily producing a valuable output in the short term. It is difficult to do these things on your own without help and financial support from academia or industry. One would need to be in a very privileged position to be able to bridge the gap on their own.
I see where you’re coming from. There are a lot of shades of expert. In my estimation Masters/PhDs are already experts in their fields. They might not be the preeminent expert and have vast amounts to learn, but that knowlege base would likely put their knowledge at more than a step or two above a layperson’s. It would be a little silly to expect to gain that depth of knowledge without committing a whole lot of time and focus. Did I understand your point or did it go whizzing by me?
Put on the same scale - I was thinking more at first-year-in-a-major level information. Which would point straight at text books for anything that has an academic path and other subject matter books for things without standard classes like Jeffrey said in another reply. Do you have any other ideas?
