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

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181–190 of 237 posts

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

#181
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around: First was the concept, then the agreement which words we use to describe them. > If you skip out the part of the analogy where you actually return to the complex terminology you're simplifying, you haven't produced understanding Billions of people know what a telephone does and how to use one without understanding τῆλε ("tele-", distant) and φωνή ("phone", voice, talk, language). They all g…

> I can teach you to play chess without teaching a single chess-specific term. Yes, other players will laugh at you when you call the pawns "smurfs", but when you understand how to handle your smurf-army But that doesn't remove the terminology, it only changes it. You can understand chess equally well in English, French, or Lebanese, because the syntax isn't as important as the semantics. You can't teach me chess wit…

Where are you trying to go?

First it was that, to understand, we have to "actually return to the complex terminology you're simplifying". I disagree.

Now it is, that we need some common way of communicating. I agree.

But that are two different questions.

> [explaining EM radition in terms of phones does not help]

Nor does explaining EM radiation in terms of oranges. But I'd do neither. I'd first try to figure out whether you struggle with the concept of what a phone is or with the question how it works. Because step 1 in being understood is to understand what you are trying to say, to define the metric you can later use to evaluate your success in your attempt at being understood.

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

#182
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening to Feynman talk about magnetism fails to answer that question definitively one way or the other. But seriously, if you can't explain what a complex-valued "probability" is to a layman, apparently you don't understand quantum mechanics?

It might have been hubris at the time he got the prize, but later he felt different about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY

Another video which touches more on the same point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkv0KCR3Yiw

(Highly recommend the whole Feynman series, which is excerpted from an interview video called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which is also spectacular)

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

#184

This is generally true but I will add one wrinkle. And there are three kinds of explanation: 1. visual 2. mathematical 3. linguistic So sometimes, you understand something visually, or mathematically, but you are forced to put it into verbal terms (say, over a text only channel, or voice), and then you may seem not to be able to explain it even though you understand it.

I first learned about The Big Triangle from Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics". http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/triangle/index.html http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~mfram/Media/0505-UC-triangle... Filed under "I believe, but cannot prove": The three-way tension is a recurring pattern. When trying to understand new things, I often try to reframe things as a triangle. When pondering intractable problems, I favo…

(A name for the three-way tension you will find a lot: trilemma.)

If you have to budget something, it becomes a soft trilemma: I have 24 hours for work + leisure + sleep, so any given combination will be a point inside a triangle whose vertices are (0, work), (0,leisure), (0, sleep). This structure is called a (2-)simplex.

BTW: a regular dilemma (should I spend or save) is a 1-simplex, and is a simple linear combination asave + (1-a)spend.

Now, this is fun for two reasons:

- You can have (n)-lemmas (i.e. n-fold tradeoff structures) that are modeled as (n-1)-simplices. Actually useful: you can do statistical inference on simplices using the Dirichlet distribution.

- A simplicial complex (basically, a set of simplices) can be used to build topological spaces part by part. This kind of maths (algebraic topology) is a whole "south part of the mountain" climb towards abstract mathematics that bypasses a lot of Cantorian handwringing on the ultra-local structure of topology. Instead, you're computing stuff from the get go -- and indeed one of the emerging machine learning techniques goes precisely from building a simplicial-like complex from data and computing characteristics of its topology.

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

#185
post #29

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…

"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…

If something is too complex to be explained to a college freshman, it might be time for a paradigm shift to simplify (I.e. Ptolemaic astronomy vs heliocentric)

Algebra and calculus were one bleeding edge research that only the elite understood, now kids are learning it in middle school.

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

#186
post #106

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…

> "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'.

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

#187
post #38

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…

> If you rehash it in smaller words, just by information density alone, aren't you guaranteed to be losing some detail? Yes, but knowing which information you can lose is why it is said that you don't understand it until you can explain it. Explaining it in simple terms forces you to over-simplify, and then you have to pick which information is important and which isn't...and doing that requires a deep understanding…

You have a knack for explaining "explaining something in simple terms" in simple terms. Kudos.

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

#189
post #180
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…

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 t…

> 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.

At this point it's turtles all the way down.

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gene…

agree. it's when something doesn't work at the edges and you desperately need it to is when you're often ready to learn. motivation (desperation ;-) is a marvelous incentive.
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