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

kottke.org

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

#211

Post by pimmen »

jknoepfler wrote: post #120
sh87 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever 'taught' anyone anything? When you do, you'll probably get what Feynman was trying to say. Complexity is intrinsic. Just that as a teacher/guide/explainer, you have to gently guide the novices around enough to invoke a sense of curiosity that will drive the pupil to explore on their own. The task at hand here is to make things less overwhelming, not removing or ignoring complexity. For every complex sys…

I have, and do. Physics 101, or in my case computer science 101 are not the world. Humans are gifted teachers (probably unique among animals in our instinct to simplify while teaching). I love distilling things down into teachable parts. It's hard, interesting work. But I also do research, and I absolutely do not expect deeply technical topics like advances in aerospace engineering or gene regulation or cosmology to…

> "But I also do research, and I absolutely do not expect deeply technical topics like advances in aerospace engineering or gene regulation or cosmology to have "simple explanations" that I can understand."

There's a difference between explaining the entire topic and just giving you a very broad strokes approach to get you started learning the subject on your own. Nobody's having any delusions about summarizing a complex subject to a few sentences to substitute learning it the hard way, but if you can't give a very gentle explanation that can ease people in to the subject so they can get started by themselves, I would say that you don't fully understand the subject.

Also, I would add that this explanation is not universal at all. You have to be able to gauge your audience and adapt to what's most suitable.

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

#212

Post by pimmen »

Sacho wrote: post #207
outworlder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not nonsense. You are forgetting a very important detail: "explaining". He was not talking about writing a research paper on the simplest possible terms. Rather, about "explaining" a subject. When we are explaining, we always have to deliberately omit details to get the basic idea across, so that the other person can form the initial mental image. Sometimes we also have to resort to metaphors and comparisons fro…

Er, they may be left with a warm and fuzzy feeling that they have some "understanding", but let get them to do some multidimensional analysis and see how they do. The meaning of "explaining" seems just as elusive as the "simple explanations" themselves - once you've heard such a "simple explanation" and have a feeling that you now understand more than you do, what is the objective difference between you-before and yo…

> "Er, they may be left with a warm and fuzzy feeling that they have some "understanding", but let get them to do some multidimensional analysis and see how they do."

Nobody's having any delusions that explaining is the same as teaching. You can explain multidimensional analysis simply if you understand the subject fully, however you can't teach something to someone else unless they work with you and try it out themselves.

But if you want to explain to your politicians that hospitals need special machines to do radiation therapy you don't enroll them into nuclear physics 101, they can probably do with a very broad explanation of how radiation works.

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

#213

Post by pimmen »

makecheck wrote: post #79

It's not realistic to expect this. If everything could be simplified to this degree, you would never need experts. 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, i…

Nobody's saying that "explaining" is the same as "teaching". Nobody's saying that "basic understanding" is the same as "mastery".

This is just to get people started, it's not a substitute for years of hard work and study. Feynman never claimed this and I think this is missing the point entirely. Unless you have a complete model of how the system works you can't come up with suitable analogies to gently ease in new people to get started.

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

#214

Post by NicoJuicy »

Simple trick, you don't have to explain everything and use similar things ( when possible) in layman context. Explaining only cause and affect without the method used can greatly simplify things when talking to non-programmers / non-technical people

Eg. IP = A address like your home address. So the internet knows where to search. We use zipcodes, the web uses numbers.

Then: I need to adjust a dns-record with our IP. Becomes, I will point the website to our address.

If it's not obvious, then all my previous clients are lying ( just mentioning it, cause it's possible)

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

#216

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

pharrington wrote: post #192
Retric wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QM for example has zero relationship with well known phenomena.

Now I want to invent a hominid that intuits probability.

Humans intuit probability. We just do it very badly.

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

#217

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

foobarchu wrote: post #186
Jach wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "What I can't program, I don't understand." This, of course, does not hold for the inverse of 'what I can program, I do understand'.

This depends on the output of "program" and also on the meaning of "program."

The most useful meaning is "Have a consistent and reliable model for."

The code implements a model. Of course you can implement a very bad model as easily as a consistent and reliable model.

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

#218

Post by onikolas »

Explaining something is compressing information and then transmitting it. As we know, there are limits to how much we can losslessly compress information.

So, no, you cannot explain everything in simple terms. But you can find sweet spots when trading brevity for accuracy.

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

#220

Post by bo1024 »

I'm in academia and get to listen to and interact with extremely smart people who are experts in their subject. This quote really hits home for me.

I'm not saying I'll take it as literally true in every situation. But what I love about the quote is that it sets the bar for "understanding" very high.

People sell themselves short on understanding - they reach a certain level and are satisfied that they understand something, when there is actually much deeper understanding to be had. For example, being able to write a proof of a theorem can be very far from understanding why it's true, but even mathematicians sometimes pretend it's the same.

So I like that this quote challenges us to understand things more deeply. And more often than not, I find it rings true.

(A basic example coming to mind is the determinant of a matrix. Can be explained in simple terms to children (at least the key idea), or in confusing terms to freshman linear algebra students....)

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