The goal is to communicate, so I'm going to use the words that mean what I want to say rather than trying to dumb it down. It's the same reason why most if not all professions have jargon; the goal is not to gatekeep, but to efficiently communicate well understood concepts within the profession.

All of which isn't to say that people shouldn't occasionally step back and question whether they could convey the same thing without the jargon and fancy words, but frequently the answer is no, or at least not anything like as succinctly and clearly.

50% of Americans can't read a book written at an 8th grade reading level[0]. It's one of the reasons politicians don't use jargon and fancy words. I think they'd probably laugh if you told them they should be talking above their constituents' understanding.

0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...

Seems to me the solution to that problem is to fix the problems with American schools that produce such illiterate citizens, rather than continue dumbing everything down.

When I was in school, the kids that had the best grades and were in all the good programs always ended up reading. aloud. like. this.

I don't know what that means.

No one said an author shouldn’t choose what words to write. They are astonished people want browsers to choose. If politicians want a to use simple words, good for them.

This is a reason to use more (appropriate/useful) words, not fewer. Politics is one of the few contexts where you are explicitly addressing the largest and most horizontally sampled set of people possible. Politicians speak that way out of necessity.

>Is your goal to (try to) teach people new words, or to communicate your points?

Fancy words exist for a reason, and it's that their semantics are different from other words. Sometimes using a fancy word is the correct choice, and sometimes a more common word will do.

Synonyms don't actually mean the same thing as each other.

If I'm reading a text in French and I come across a word I don't know, I look it up. It's my second language after all. I certainly don't expect French authors to dumb anything down for me.

Many words have similar meaning, yet of subtle shades of meaning, or nuances that are lost when “dumbed down”

So you’re literally communicating less effectively when using a smaller vocabulary.

The best answer is to have the reader learn the difficult word, but that isn’t always possible.

A difficult needle to thread for sure.

Yes, sometimes language is complex without adding anything, but usually there's a reason. I like the example of "apparently" vs "ostensibly". Non-native speakers often either don't know the latter, or think it's a straight synonym, but, without getting into it too deeply, "ostensibly" is usually used to mean "apparently" with added doubt.