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If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

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Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#171

Post by ChuckMcM »

jgamman wrote: post #166
ChuckMcM wrote: post #154

"What I cannot create, I do not understand." This actually came up for me at the office. I was asking a bunch of questions about the Z transform and the Fast Fourier Transform. The person I was talking to said, "Hey, just call the function in MATLAB, it doesn't matter how it works, just that you understand what it is saying." All of my life I have rebelled at this notion. My earliest recollection of running into it w…

surely there's some tension between these two extremes. for someone learning how to _use_ FFT's, treating them as a black box for a while is useful so they can build some intuition etc and then, if it floats their boat, go back and dive deeper. as a chemist, I didn't give a rat's how the thing worked, I had spectra to analyse... Conversely, if you had to deep dive everything, you would not get _anything_ done since t…

I don't think I was clear in my comment, I personally find great joy in learning things (which makes me something of an autodidact) its just one of those things.

My desire to understand things though has never been a hindrance to using them. Long before I understood how compilers worked I was using them daily, long before I understood how PN junctions did what they did I was soldering diodes into boards.

It only generates tension when I want some tool to do something that it cannot do, and reasoning about whether the constraint is due to the tool or the implementation of the tool can only happen if I really understand what the tool is actually doing.

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#172

Post by jshelly »

dtashima wrote: post #127
jshelly wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Feynman's statement is a wee bit over the top, and I will say that being able to teach complex things to novices is definitely an art and certainly one which I do not possess

I think it's partly motivational. There is definitely a level of understanding where it feels like you understand a concept, and then when you try to teach it to someone else, you realize when they ask basic questions that you don't understand it as deeply as you thought you did. So, if you think you understand something, it's worth trying to explain it simply, so you can push your own understanding of the subject.

I like this idea

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#173

Post by Cyph0n »

tlb wrote: post #169
Cyph0n wrote: post #63

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).

Modern CPUs have phase-locked loops generating clocks for each region of the chip. These use separate pull-up and pull-down mosfets to control the frequency, so arguably ternary. Even more non-binary things happen inside DRAM and flash memory.

Ehh I don't believe PLLs have a ternary component at all. I'm not an expert though.

DRAM is analog-based due to the fact that the core memory unit is a capacitor, so it can't be ternary (not digital). I might agree with flash though.

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#174

Post by SilasX »

ivanbakel wrote: post #7

The problem I find with this outlook is that it takes technical terms being jargon at face value. If you can't fall back on progress in language which allows you to express more complex ideas, you're not going to reach the same depth of understanding in simpler words without it taking a lot longer anyways - with most of your time spent reestablishing what you just threw out the window. If you rehash it in smaller wor…

It's not a fail if you use jargon. It's a fail if you can't explain the jargon.

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#175

Post by lngnmn »

This is how to distinguish a cosplay of intelligence from true intelligence, among other things.

The Buddha and the Upanishadic seers were exceptionally good with explaining complex phenomena in simple terms.

Apparent sophistication is a sign of a confusion. Clarity is an evidence [of deep understanding].

Nature is vastly complex but not complicated (a few fundamental laws at work). Only simple things work.

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#176

Post by brownbat »

Jach wrote: post #106
squeaky-clean wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people seem to be conflating the idea of explaining something to a layman, and explaining something using simple terms.

A math formula is one of the objectively simplest ways of expressing something. But it's not easily understood unless you know the math well, thus violating Gruber's rule. Feynman was honest about this, because magnetism can be explained very simply, but not in any familiar way to things most people already know about. At least as good as math (and capturing the objective complexity better I think) is a working progr…

To your point, Feynman's famous magnets interview:

http://www.sciencealert.com/watch-richard-feynman-on-why-he-...

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#177

Post by olegkikin »

That's just not true, it's confusing explanation and oversimplification. Many complex things require years of study just to understand that thing even in the most simple terms. Try and explain string theory to someone who has no idea of particle physics, colliders, quantum theory. At best you can make up some abstraction which doesn't explain anything.

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#178

Post by sn9 »

mabbo wrote: post #165
s_ngularity wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be more clear, the lecture series you are talking about is called "The Character of Physical Law" and is not the same content that one would get from reading "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", which is a rigorous course in most of undergraduate physics. But I highly recommend the "Character" series. Just wanted to avoid having people think they're the same thing.

Yeah, I'm an idiot. Now I need to go find the actual lectures.

They've been available for free online by the publishers for a few years: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#179

Post by matthberg »

I think this is part of the beauty of simple.wikipedia.org. It is not only a way for laymen to understand complicated things, yet proof of the research being an actual understanding of the concept.

In the words of the xkcd on the subject, (check the title text):

"Actually, I think if all higher math professors had to write for the Simple English Wikipedia for a year, we'd be in much better shape academically." https://xkcd.com/547/

Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

#180

Post by xg15 »

Jach wrote: post #106
squeaky-clean wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people seem to be conflating the idea of explaining something to a layman, and explaining something using simple terms.

A math formula is one of the objectively simplest ways of expressing something. But it's not easily understood unless you know the math well, thus violating Gruber's rule. Feynman was honest about this, because magnetism can be explained very simply, but not in any familiar way to things most people already know about. At least as good as math (and capturing the objective complexity better I think) is a working progr…

But I think that's the deeper point of the "if you can't explain it, you don't understand it": Sure, you can write down the equations, but then what exactly have you done? You wrote down some string of characters and showed that it can be derived from some other strings of characters by applying a series of arbitrary-looking rules. By itself, that doesn't tell anything. It's only when you manage the connect formula to the part of reality that it tries to describe - and connect that part to the rest of reality - that it gains any sense.

Trying to explain a concept in "simple terms" forces you to view it in terms of its connection to other, well-known phenomena.

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