Interest in an "Explain like I have brain fog" thread?

Since we have such a lovely millieu of well-informed folks with a wide variety of background knowledge, I thought it might be useful to have a thread where people could ask conceptual questions and expect that the answers will be as easy to understand as possible.

I'm very passionate about making science more accessible (and chatting about science until people get annoyed with me) so I think it would be a lovely resource, but I wanted to get some feedback about whether others think it would actually be useful/how it could best be implemented.

I've tried to do a search but couldn't confirm if a similar resource already exists on here--please feel free to direct me to it if that's the case.

The name comes from the (somewhat condescendingly named) "Explain Like I'm 5" reddit phenomenon. I think it's really vital for people to feel like they have permission to ask seemingly "silly" questions, because in reality nothing is a silly question and there should be no shame in asking for an easier explanation!

I'm sure we all have a long list of "things we should probably learn about" (I know I do) but it can be incredibly difficult to get over the hurdle of starting to look into something when you're totally out of your depth.

It's even more difficult when you feel like it's something you should know by now, but have been embarrassed to ask for it to be broken down to the level you need.

Not to mention the fact that pwME have barriers to accessing high-level educational spaces, and that most resources on the internet may not be accessible when someone is dealing with brain fog and fatigue.

Ergo, "explain like I have brain fog." A shame-free thread to ask other smart people to explain things to your (smart) self in a simple way.

Here's an outline of what I envision:

General guidelines:

• Specific questions will generally be easier to answer. If you want to learn about a general topic (e.g. B cells), it might help to start with a specific question (e.g. "How are B cells related to antibodies?" or "What makes B cells different from T cells?") and go from there.
• [Edit: if you have trouble narrowing down a question, you could also ask something along the lines of "give me a simplified 2 sentence encyclopedia entry for B cells" to start the conversation]
• Like the title of the thread implies, try to keep explanations as simple (and concise) as possible. This might not always be possible if the question is complex, but responders are welcome to state that a simple explanation is not possible, and prompt for a more specific bite-size question.
  
• Links to other resources for continued learning are welcome, but should always be preceded by an attempt at a simple explanation. Just dropping a link to an article/video/etc. defeats the purpose of the thread.
• You don't have to be an expert to answer a question! Trying to explain a topic to others is also really useful for learning. If someone feels reasonably confident about the answer, they're welcome to chime in (perhaps just with appropriate heads up that they might not be 100% confident in the answer).

Happy to hear thoughts from others!

 

Yes please.

 

I'm all for it! I am basically 5 years old as far as understanding biology goes, brain fog or not!

Great idea, @jnmaciuch

 

I think this is a great idea @jnmaciuch. We do ask all sorts in threads but some of these fundamental questions sometimes do feel like they don’t easily fit. Or you may feel silly asking or don’t want to derail things too much.

I’ve found myself going off into other resources and going down rabbit holes with new questions from each explanation I’ve found. Which is a lot of fun! But an open area to ask here and make use of people’s knowledge could be really usefull. Asking the same question or approaching the same topic from different angles can be really helpful.

 

That’s a great idea @Trish, thanks for the feedback. I’d be happy to help with curation, though I will likely be prone to disappearing for periods of time when school gets more busy.

If there are others who might be able to help more consistently, that would be great.

 

I’m happy to give a bit of curation/library management a go. I have been looking for a way to contribute that isn’t load bearing and I can dip in and out of and this could work.

 

I like the idea. Instead of a thread could this be added to research posts with a ‘brainfog’ explanation/ research for dummies?

 

I think it would be nice to have concise and accessible summaries for research papers. My only concern is that making this a site-wide feature might put undue burden on people who don’t have the capacity to keep up with all papers.

Perhaps the solution might be to crowdsource it? I see people often posting AI summaries that they’ve generated on papers that they’re interested in. We could just encourage a similar kind of ad-hoc participation for simple summaries?

It could just become a little do-good task that members could provide if they’ve read the paper, have a decent understanding, and see that a summary hasn’t been posted in the thread yet.

Not every paper would end up with a summary, but anyone who wants some help understanding a specific paper would be free to post on the thread with an open request for an “explain like I’m brain-foggy” summary.

I think it might be useful to have this as a separate thing from a dedicated discussion thread + curated forum library, so the thread can serve as a space for discussion of general topics that might apply to tons of papers.

That way, folks can search and reference it themselves when they’re trying to understand any specific paper (and good samaritans can always post links to relevant entries from the forum library on other threads)

What do you think?

 

Would two threads on a paper create potential issues with splitting or duplicating the discussion?

 

I don’t think there would be a problem with duplication, since paper-specific explanations/summaries would still only be on the paper-specific thread.

The general thread would be more for things like “I’ve seen the term X come up in a lot of genomics studies but I could never figure out what it means, could someone explain?” or “What does it mean when people say the normality assumption is violated?”

Then once there’s a good definition (or consensus after some discussion), a curator can write up a final version of the question and answer in the library so it’s easy to search and reference in the future.

If a good general concept explanation comes up in a different thread and it’s not already covered in the library (or it’s just another good way of explaining that is worth keeping on hand), someone could always just link those posts in the informal “explain like I’m brainfoggy” discussion thread.

That would alert the curators who would be watching the “explain like I’m brainfoggy” thread, so they can go and pull the general explanation from the paper-specific thread into the library.

I figure that might be a better system than trying to tag curators across threads since you might not know who’s available.

And the discussion would still only be continuing on the paper-specific thread if it started there—if it ends up veering too off-topic, it could always be relocated to the “explain like I’m brainfoggy” thread by the mods (or allocated to a separate thread if the discussion is long enough, like already happens).

Tldr, the main discussion thread would be more like a “miscellaneous bucket” for simple explanations that aren’t paper-specific, which is periodically curated and cleaned up into forum library entries.

 

Yes, I very much saw my role as a librarian rather than an author here, I don’t have the knowledge for much else!

Cutting and pasting useful snippets and organising them in one place to be easily referred to. Some key terms, acronyms and definitions or concepts which can be built up over time. Maybe with links to other sources of info which can be useful for people, there are great resources out there. A reference or aid to learning rather than anything else.

There’s already some of this in the library and a thread discussing it
Science Library
Library discussion
(although the aims discussed here go much further than what I think we’re considering in this thread)

Explaining each research paper does seem like a lot of work. Different people have different levels of knowledge too so one size fits all is difficult. I’ve found some methods which work for me and touched in them in other threads but different people have different ways of thinking/learning and different needs or preferences.

 

Maybe I'm suffering a jet lag after travelling 16 time zones, but I'm having a hard time understanding what this thread is trying to accomplish. May be someone can start by explaining to me as if I have a brain fog?

5-year-olds are pretty smart believe or not. Their brain will churn to make sense of what they hear and sometimes come up with incredibly ingenuous picture of understanding. If you have brain fog, on the other hand, you are likely to struggle to parse even one sentence, let alone grasping the whole picture. Best thing to do would be to stop exerting to understand and wait for a better day. Which I will do right now.

 

It’s really just meant to be a space where people can ask questions about things they’ve been struggling to understand and get as simple an answer as possible.

I hope it would be helpful for people who want to understand topics from complex fields like immunology or statistics better, but all the available resources online are quite hard to parse as a beginner.

It would be especially difficult if you have limited energy and can rarely read through 12 articles until things start making sense.

“Explain like I’m 5” is just a Reddit colloquialism to ask for an explanation that does not assume any prior knowledge.

 

I'm interested in a Janet and John story about p-values and what they really mean.

Is 0.05 completely arbitrary? Where did the 0.05 come from.

Can any set of data have a p value or does it need to meet some statistics test such as how the data is distributed?

What is the common sense approach for interpreting p values in low sample numbers? Or does the p value calculation take this into account?

What happens when you compare data with a p=0.04 that has 10 samples with a p=0.06 that has 1000 samples. One is significant for the 0.05 test, and the other is not.

When do I need to be worried about multiple comparisons I keep hearing about here.

Most studies report p-values so I think a practical understanding would be helpful to many so I think a library to explain this kind of thing is useful.

 

On more severe ends we sometimes have brain fog that never goes away. So if you want some sort of ability to understand things you just got to try and do it despite the limitations. (I’m lucky in that I think my ME is much more severe physically — than cognitive, like I can do quite a bit cognitively for my severity, but that’s not the case for everyone, some have the opposite)

 

I’ve been in the same position since Christmas, although less severe than you. Before that both were equally terrible.

Although I don’t have access to multitasking or continuous concentration at all.