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Douglas_Knight comments on Discussion: Yudkowsky's actual accomplishments besides divulgation - Less Wrong
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What is "divulgation"? (Yes, I googled it.) My best guess is that you are not a native speaker of English and this is a poor translation of the cognate you are thinking of.
Yes, "divulgation" (or cognates thereof) is the word used in Romance languages to mean what we call "popularization" in English.
I assumed it was a neologism for the skill or practice of "divulging things" (which turns out to be pretty close to the author's intent), similar to how we talk of "Bayescraft" or "empirimancy". In any case, it didn't trip up my "non-native speaker" detector ... but then, my threshold's pretty high to begin with.
The action of revealing stuff that wasn't previously known to the public.
Not exactly a poor translation, more like the word exists in English with this meaning, but is used much more scarcely than in my own language. I vote for the revitalization of Latin as a Lingua Franca: science would be much easier for the common folk if they knew how crude the metaphors the words it's made of are. Blastula: small seed. Blastoid: thing that resembles a seed. Zygote: egg. Ovule: egg. Etc.
Eeer... I mean, like, when you aren't writing for peers but for other people so they can access the fruit of your research without all the travelling though the inferential distances.
I think they call it "popular science" or something, but I never liked that term, it it kinda evokes the image of scientists selling records of their lectures and churning out "science videos"...
Actually that'd be kinda cool, now that I think of it.. #mind wanders offtopic to the tune of MC Hawking*
The word you want in English is popularization. (Which, you'll note, is also Latin-derived!)
Yes, populus and vulgus are basically synonims, with vulgus having the worst connotations ("folk" VS "the mob" basically), but semantic sliding and usage have made "popular" and its derivates get a base connotation. People don't as easily link "divulgation" and "vulgar".
It'd be nice to have a word that basically means "spreading elevated knowledge to the untrained" without making it sound like we're abasing it. Every time I hear the term "Popular Science" I think of Dr. Sheldon Cooper deriding and ridiculing any of his colleagues who are trying to do just that.
That sort of elitism just makes me sick*, and I've seen it in Real Life, even among scientists and from scientists towards engineers ("The Oompa Loompas of Science", another Sheldonism)..
If only for self-serving reasons, it is very counterproductive. The more people know about Science, the more likely they are to understand the importance of any given work... and fund it. Also, the more likely they are to show respect to science-folk and freaking listen to them. That means investing time and effort to make this stuff reach the masses, and it's perfectly understandable that a researcher spend their entire career on that: understanding scientific concepts proprely and then managing to grab untrained people's interest and eloquently explain advanced concepts to them so that they grasp even a pale reflection of them is not trivial.
It's been tried
Oh. It looks pretty nice actually. Still, inflection-latin might be more fun to learn, but I guess if you just want people to learn Latin vocabulary and use it for simple thing so they aren't baffled by the huge things, it might be a good idea to popularize it.