"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan." - Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
The argument that "I understand this and you don't, so you don't get a vote" seems like a lazy way to suppress democratic process. A better alternative is, "This might seem complicated, but really it's not; here's a simple but complete explanation to help you make an informed decision."
When all you have to do is explain to a child (or indeed a layman adult) you can use things like analogies that aren't perfectly accurate, and you only need go a little way beyond the person's existing knowledge - it's a waste of time to deliver more information than they can absorb in the time you've got to explain.
If you're a high energy experimental physicist you can say you work on a particle accelerator. That's a machine that makes particles hit into each other really fast, a bit like a super-high-speed game of conkers! When the particles hit together and break apart for a really short time you can see the parts that make them up, and you can learn things about them!
You've now explained what you're doing to an 8 year old! But if you ask the 8 year old whether they think it's a good idea to use Fox-Wolfram moments to partition phase space and suppress the continuum background, like B-factories do, or whether you'll have difficulty determining the centre-of-mass frame due to missing energy? Probably the 8 year old won't have an informed opinion either way.
Right, it's completely ridiculous that I had to study for months to understand the transport properties of a nabotube with magnetic contacts, after having studied for years to obtain the base knowledge to start that project. The prof should have been able to explain that to me when I was 8 years old. Obviously he doesn't understand his stuff and neither do I.
Or could it maybe, just maybe, be that it is entirely reasonable that it takes years to have sufficient background understanding before an expert can convey the knowledge you need to study for another few months to actually understand something and also have an expert opinion on it?
Do you see anything redeeming about the quote? It seems problematic if something like this can be so political but be impervious to the logical debate an 8yo can engage in, no?
You imply that a logical debate is somehow 'better' than a political debate. That's a category mistake: those two are incomparable. They necessarily coexist, because they are about different things.
Politics is about ethics. In this case: the ethical consequences of certain technical choices (under which I include a consideration like 'I will make less money'). (Expert) knowledge of the technical choice itself is mostly irrelevant for those parts of the debate. We can discuss the military merits of e.g. nuclear weapons until kingdom come, but if I'm opposed to them on humanitarian grounds, no amount of technical merits will convince me.
As for the quote, it depends on context. In a context where expert knowledge is necessary to make useful contributions to the debate, there is nothing redeeming in the quote. It merely encourages people to be disrupt it. In the more general context where you ask a researcher to be able to explain his work: of course he should be able to dumb it down. But not for the purposes of subsequently engaging in fruitful discussion with him.
Politics is about ethics? Yes, well, do you think an eight year old can look words up in the dictionary? Yes, of course you do. Well I argue that's all it takes, essentially, beyond that an eight year old needs some time, to answer some questions of their own, to be lectured at about the implications. But, an 8yo is perfectly capable of making the right choice, given context/access to information.
And, I'll additionally argue that technical merits can convince someone opposed on humanitarian grounds, the two are not incomparable, we do these sorts of comparisons just fine in the real world.
You are attempting to modularise the argument in a way I find unpalatable is all, our differences are likely surface deep.
In theory, I agree. In practice, it took me months of people explaining crypto & blockchain to me before I could claim I even partially understood how bitcoin transactions worked.
The argument that "I understand this and you don't, so you don't get a vote" seems like a lazy way to suppress democratic process. A better alternative is, "This might seem complicated, but really it's not; here's a simple but complete explanation to help you make an informed decision."