That well-known physicist from New York University, who was mentioned right at the beginning of the post above, explained a few months ago that it's terrible to tell the truth to politicians:
"On one of the last day of hearings, a congressman asked: “Will we find God with your machine? If so I will vote for it.” The poor physicist who had to answer that question didn’t know what to say. We should have said, this is a Genesis machine that will create the conditions of the greatest invention of all time...Unfortunately, we said Higgs boson. And people said, $10bn for another subatomic particle? And they cancelled the machine"
The bottom line is, Scientists should never tell the blunt truth to politicians for the simple reason that they are too dumb to understand it. So maybe it would not be a bad idea that those who want to make a career in research should attend a course where they would learn how to translate their research proposals into the rudimentary language that politicians can understand.
The ironic part is that simplicity is advantageous not only for talking to politicians (and thus obtaining funding) but also for receiving more citations, as a study based on more than 20,000 articles, published this year, showed that those who abused jargon in the title and abstract of the articles received fewer citations.
PS - Of course, it is also important not to forget the study carried out by researchers from Harvard, MIT, Aix-Marseille, and Northeastern Univ. which showed what are the more effective languages for worldwide influence https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2019/12/as-linguas-mais-eficazes-para.html
