I can understand that one should not write for academics, but it MUST BE under some constraint of rigor that only professionals can detect.
Pinker is expert at writing books on subjects he knows nothing about s.a. statistical properties of wars, probabilistic rationality, etc.
Academics write for each other, not for people.
Steven Pinker has spent over four decades doing the opposite, and thinks current academic writing is "enormous wasted effort."
"There's an awful lot of brilliant work, really smart people in academia. Why are they doing it? Just to entertain each other? Taxpayers pay for it. It should be accessible. Why should I have to read a paragraph five or six times?
It gets under my skin when academics devote so much brainpower into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done."