alt Hacker NewsA decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.
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This is sortof like how Only Connect switched from using Greek letters to Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm not sure if it was a joke or not but it was said that viewers complained that the Greek letters were "too pretentious" and obviously the hieroglyphs weren't.
I had a similar experience explaining logic, especially nested expressions, with cats and boxes. Also for showing syntactic versus semantic. We _can_ use cats if we wanted and retain the semantics. Also my proudest moment as a teacher was students producing a meme based on some of the discrete mathematics on graphs. They understood the point well enough to make a joke of it.
Most human brains just aren't very good at coping with abstract concepts. It reminds me of the Wason selection task[1]. You give participants a formal logic problem to solve, "how many cards do you have to turn over to show that the rules are being followed". If the rule is "a card with a vowel on one side _must_ have an even number on the other", people do very badly making illogical assumptions. If the rule is "one side has a bar order, and the other side has the age of the person making the order. The person must be above the legal age", it makes sense and people do well, because we understand bars, drinks and the laws thereof.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task