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Explain it to me like I'm ten

timharford.com

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Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#61

Post by aristofun »

I have to admit that is the biggest challenge for me in working at modern IT companies - to understand the language.

I attribute that to me not being a native speaker. I always feel they all speak like Im 100, not ten.

Because of abundance of peculiar terminology, unusual ways of doing and describing things, extreme diversity of accents etc sometimes it feels like people intentionally make things more complicated than they are.

It’s sometimes harder for me to understand and make sense than most boring philosophical lectures on youtube.

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#62

Post by joshuahedlund »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #54
temporallobe wrote: post #26

My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As u…

Similarly I often read ticket or PR descriptions written by Claude that are so jargon-heavy that I just can't understand on first try. On one side it's a reality check because I always considered English to be close to a mother tongue for me, on the other side I never had to deal with words like "idempotent"... (Seriously, when did this become one of the go-to words to use?)

> jargon-heavy

Yes. It’s even worse than jargon tho I think it just invents its own metaphors. At first I thought this was clever and useful, helping me to internalize the code (“the normal path vs the escape hatch”) but I’m increasingly finding the metaphors to be so thick and esoteric that it’s actually a hurdle to understanding the actual code.

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#63

Post by WillAdams »

trashb wrote: post #55
temporallobe wrote: post #26

My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As u…

I find that this quote is not just applicable to writing of natural language like letters. It also applies to code, and is becoming more and more evident to me due to the use of AI. I believe the idea presented transcends writing actually. For example you could also apply it to painting or sculpting. I think this points to the character of creative thinking where one "chips" away at a subject until it is considered a…

The classic example of writing tight and efficient code is:

https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#64

Post by [deleted] »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #54
temporallobe wrote: post #26

My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As u…

Similarly I often read ticket or PR descriptions written by Claude that are so jargon-heavy that I just can't understand on first try. On one side it's a reality check because I always considered English to be close to a mother tongue for me, on the other side I never had to deal with words like "idempotent"... (Seriously, when did this become one of the go-to words to use?)

[deleted]

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#65

Post by jonathanlydall »

temporallobe wrote: post #26

My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As u…

Yes, but it can be worth it as I've generally found that the most effective professional writing has your high-level request appear within the very first sentence.

This is because it as quickly as possible puts the reader into the context of what you need from them making your rationalization of the request reinforce it, whereas if you try to rationalize before getting to your request a busy reader (think customer support, exec, manager) will be thinking "Okay, okay, okay, what are they getting to? Okay, okay, oh there we go finally I know, now let's consider their rationalization, maybe I should scroll up and re-read".

I started doing this after having done email customer service many years ago, when you're expected to spend as little time as possible per support case, you will speed read their writing until you find the part which says what their issue is, for some emails this was paragraphs. A particularly memorable WoW case for me was something like this, but more verbose:

"I finished the raid last night where we managed to down , after we celebrated, I logged off. Then I woke up and went to school as usual, after getting home I tried logging on it showed a message saying I was banned, I was heart-broken as I've put so much time into the game and it means so much to me, so to find out why I logged into my Gmail and an email from you said I was banned due to ."

As a support person, all of that was completely irrelevant except for the part saying "I was banned due to " (which was commonly due account being compromised by a gold seller looting it and then auto-banned due to stuff they were doing on it).

Something else which reinforced my view of "get to the point quickly" was an HN comment saying how they were once sent on a course on "how as an engineer to communicate effectively with execs" which apparently essentially stated "write your email as you normally would, then at the end take the last paragraph and put it at the top of the email". The rationale being that execs are typically only interested in reading a full email if it's actually relevant to them.

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#66

Post by bookofjoe »

temporallobe wrote: post #26

My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As u…

Classic Spanish proverb: "Vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa." Literally meaning "Dress me slowly, because I'm in a hurry."

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#67

Post by bookofjoe »

asdfasvea wrote: post #38
necovek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, that's my favourite quote from Blaise Pascal: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

My favorite quote for 10 years was from my 1993 college math professor: You will never go wrong attributing a pithy quote to Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain. And then the internet became popular.

When I was in college I read:

At a party, want to have people think you're really smart?

If someone asks "Where's that [quote] from?" quickly respond "The Bible or Shakespeare."

In English, you'll be right 50% of the time.

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#68

Post by philipallstar »

> a notch in the back of the helmet designed to accommodate hair buns allowed all soldiers, regardless of hair-do, to raise their heads while prone. “A new, more meticulous sizing process that benefitted women benefitted everyone,” Epstein writes.

This isn't a story of accommodating women magically accommodating everyone. It's spending lots of money allowing something for women because they're women, that of course benefits men as well. It's just you wouldn't normally spend that much money on something cosmetic for men; you'd just shave their hair off, so the money can go to something more useful (or not cost the taxpayer as much).

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#69

Post by jodacola »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #65
temporallobe wrote: post #26

My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As u…

Yes, but it can be worth it as I've generally found that the most effective professional writing has your high-level request appear within the very first sentence. This is because it as quickly as possible puts the reader into the context of what you need from them making your rationalization of the request reinforce it, whereas if you try to rationalize before getting to your request a busy reader (think customer su…

This sounds a lot like the BLUF technique [0]. This is one of my favorite techniques in professional settings.

I don't interpret this as contradictory to the OP's point and quote: in order to determine the most important first line, one must slow down to identify exactly what that is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#70

Post by KineticLensman »

ninalanyon wrote: post #57
KineticLensman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as slang for ‘perambulator’, which is basically ‘stroller’

Not really a stroller is a pushchair. A pram is a kind of mobile bed for babies.

Fair enough.

In my defence, I was coming at it etymologically, where (according to the OED), a perambulator is 'A person who walks or travels through or about a place' (hence 'walker') OR 'A carriage for a baby or young child, which may be pushed along by a person on foot. Now usually shortened to pram [...] a cradle mounted on four wheels'.

So 'mobile bed' is a perfect description

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