Barking Up the Ratchet Tree – MLS Is Neither Royal nor Nude

Summary

One of the first rules you learn about technical writing is, “Know your audience.” But often, this sort of advice is given without sufficient weight or practical examples. Instead, you’re ushered quickly onto the actual tactile aspects of writing–with the hope that some seed was planted that will sprout later in your education. Science communication is famously a hard problem. The formal scientific literature is often written with an intended audience of other scientists. In the past few decades, an industry of popular science publications sought to bridge the gap between the cool things scientists were doing and us mere mortals who completely lack the intuition necessary to wrap our heads around the intricacies and nuances of what the eggheads figured out in their pursuit of higher-quality ignorance. The few science communicators who excelled in not only informing, but also exciting, a young audience would be celebrated for decades to come. We all remember Mythbusters, right? VIDEO One of the things that exacerbates the difficulty of effective science communication is when you cannot know, let alone choose, who your audience is. Deprived of the ability to work backwards from what the intended recipient already knows and believes, you have to make tough choices about how to articulate your ideas. When the Internet Engineering Task Force publishes an RFC, their bar is community rough consensus. RFCs are, inherently, the result of a design-by-committee writing process; usually intended for engineers to read. Especially with cryptography, they err on the side of technical specification rather than introductory blog post. When someone misinterprets an IETF RFC, it can have devastating security implications. So, in recent years, RFC authors have demonstrated a tendency to err on the side of overcommunicating security risks. However, this is a delicate balance to strike: If you go too far, you risk confusing or scaring the reader. This is especially risky since RFCs are o...