Summary: Communicating with a diverse audience requires you to use the least level of abstraction (words, sentence structure, paragraphs) that will effectively deliver the idea. When this general idea is ignored you must accept an audience loss of 50% for each unnecessary layer of abtraction. [Adam Bosworth via Sean McGrath and others]

Every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience.

The cost of pushing abstraction [Seb's Open Research]

Sean McGrath: "It's time for the Semantic Web proponents to stop trying to teach us to think at their level of abstraction."

Sean McGrath

Somebody, I think it was Adam Bosworth of BEA, once said that every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience. Or words to that effect.

Let's do the math. You are presenting on the subject of a new business IT architecture to an audience of 100 people. You start with people and business processes at the bottom of your diagram. You add layers of abstraction on top so that everything fits neatly into some nice three letter acronym-emblazoned box at the top. Let's call the top level box XYZ for the sake of argument. The XYZ acronym becomes a strategy buzzword of the enterprise. All new systems have to be XYZ-enabled or XYZ compliant. Board members start to talk about XYZ as a vision. A group is established to care and feed XYZ and get the all important mouse mats printed.

Let's say there are five layers of abstraction in the architecture. If every layer costs you 50% of the initial audience of 100 people, by the time you reach the last one, only four people in the room have one iota of what you are talking about.

[via Mathemagenic]

To extend (and belabor?) the point; Proposition: the least abstraction necessary rule is applicable to any attempt to transmit any idea (i.e., any attempt to teach) to any audience.

Worry: (with audience >= 1) does lower abstraction than a given audience member can process, everything else being equal, diminish interest?