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I understood very early in life that if I cried I would be hit. I couldn't talk, write, or communicate my understanding in any way, but I understood clearly.
Or to quote PG's Write Like You Talk [0]: And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way. Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas. [0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
I think PG has confused the informality people have when they have a common understanding with something else. Do you really think that a pair of experienced mechanics in an auto shop discussing a basic repair are going to be using more formal language? Turn one of the mechanics into an apprentice and consider the same discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Education is a series of small lies." Spoken by my intro to computer engineering professor, upon telling us that most real processors actually have some ternary logic. The notion here is that educating beginners about a subject is different from communication between experts. Yes, experts use jargon because it is more efficient. But, the notion here is that if you truly understand something, you should be able to fi…
> most real processors actually have some ternary logic Was he referring to the Z state? If so, it's not really ternary logic but rather a "no result" state for cases where there is a control signal involved (e.g., in a tri-state buffer).
"But if you can ONLY explain something in simple terms, you still don't understand it"
It doesn't work for biology, which is complicated at the bottom. Evolution doesn't have the parsimony of physics. Nor does it have to be understandable by humans.
Whether it works for software is a design issue. It's certainly possible to create software which cannot be explained simply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most real processors actually have some ternary logic Was he referring to the Z state? If so, it's not really ternary logic but rather a "no result" state for cases where there is a control signal involved (e.g., in a tri-state buffer).
So it was a small lie?
Explaining something in simple terms does not mean you _fully_ explain it. You explain the essence (or what you see as the essence) of the thing. Google search is: you type a question into a box and Google shows you the best answer. Google search is a lot more than that, of course, but if you can't "boil it down" you don't understand it.
This is the top line of a git commit v.s. the comments you leave in the source code. You can spend months working on thousands of lines of code, bur if you can't describe it in a single sentence (while leaving a lot out!) it's a bad sign.
This is Feynman from the introduction to his Feynman Lectures on Physics: The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own point of view — which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students — is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I…
He would be proving something in class, someone would stop to ask a question, and from their question he would know not to try to answer it as asked, but rather he knew they were asking the wrong question, because the question was predicated on a misunderstanding of something three or four steps back.
Now these were proofs that a working mathematician could probably do in their sleep, but they were a level up in terms of abstraction for most of the students and to be able to drag us along with him was a rare talent.
It is also dangerous to assume this, because that is exactly how we reached the "my uninformed opinion is as valid as your years of experience" aspect of the current political climate. NO, things are NOT as simple as you think they are just because you saw it in the space of a tweet!
On the other hand, it is important to recognize expertise over bullshit. The easiest defense is having several experts, since at a certain point they would need to do an awful lot of collusion to just make things up between them (i.e. if enough of them agree then what they say is apparently correct).
Feynman also said: "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." [1] Showing a limitation of the maxim or Feynman's hubris? [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman