Chapter 98 Question 088

Why do humanities professors, who are supposed to be better writers than most, often write incomprehensible stuff? Members of most groups vary widely in their ability to communicate.Even politicians whose personal success depends heavily on this ability are no exception.Some people, like Bill.Clinton is a model who is good at expressing; while others, such as Bush Jr., often make people unable to understand what he means.Members of other groups, however, should not differ much in their verbal abilities.For example, it is very difficult to become a professor of the humanities without being gifted with both written and spoken language.However, in the professional writings of humanities professors, there are few passages that can be easily read.For example, the philosopher Maria.Maria Lugones once wrote an article called "Street Hooker Tactics", which contains the following passage:

I intend to adopt the successful strategy of abandoning the dichotomy, a strategy that is as crucial as resistance/liberation epistemology.And to do so, it is necessary to understand the collective breakdown that accompanies social rupture and to theorize prospective groping about its dangers without being fascinated by its logic. Perhaps most humanities professors have no trouble reading this passage, but according to informal surveys of others, most say they don't.Why should the writings of humanities professors deviate from the comprehension of ordinary readers? One of the hypotheses is that humanities papers are shaped in a similar way to economics papers.Just as economists want to appear more precise than other job candidates, humanities professors want to appear knowledgeable: Suppose that most humanities professors start out speaking and writing in plain language. understand English sentences, so that a certain professor can gain an advantage by inserting individual unusual words or expressions into his writings.After all, doing so can give the impression that the professor speaks with authority because he clearly knows something his readers don't.

Of course, initially the professors will not insert too many uncommon words and expressions, because then readers will complain that the work is difficult to understand.But as parentheses of personal erudition proliferate, professional readers end up understanding many words and expressions that were previously unfamiliar.At this point, in order to impress readers with erudition, individual authors have to add some serious medicine.Because more and more people do this, professional readers' standards for understanding have changed.When the dust settles (if ever), it should come as no surprise that the professional writings of humanities professors will be quite different from everyday written language.

There is a saying: There are two kinds of buyers in the market, one is people who don’t know what they are doing, and the other is people who don’t know what they are doing.The first type of buyer can sometimes limit his losses by taking into account his own lack of knowledge of what the visible relationship between price and quality implies.Both of the following examples relate to asymmetric information.The seller knows more about the quality of the product than the potential buyer.The buyer's task is to infer whether the product quality is good or not based on the seller's visible behavior.