4 points
Academia is usually about minutiae, not concepts. Sometimes they get so hyperfocus in small areas that they are completely unable to give a general summary of what they are doing in the bigger picture. To do so would require them to understand things outside of their very narrow field of study.
1 point
And that’s not all. It’s easy to tell someone the high level area that you’re working on, but to explain the exact problem you’re trying to solve and why it’s interesting? That’s a whole journey into many topics that are very unintuitive for human brains to grasp and sometimes require heavy mathematical abstractions to even see that there’s a problem to begin with.
