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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

#81
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't glean the definition from context, anyone 10 years old or older should be able to use a dictionary.

Can a 10 year old do that? Wtf are we talking about.

We were talking about how explaining something to a 10-year-old sometimes means that you use words that a 10-year-old doesn't know. And that a 10-year-old should have the ability to use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words.

I was also implying that you, and I assumed that you were more than 10 years old, could also use a dictionary to look up words you weren't familiar with if you aren't able to glean their definition from context.

Can a 10-year-old use a dictionary? That's approximately fifth grade in the US. By 10 years old, they should be able to use a dictionary and encyclopedias to look up stuff. At the very least they should be able to go to merriam-webster.com or wherever and type in an unfamiliar word to get a definition.

Re: Explain it to me like I'm ten

#82

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?)

Also used in mathematics. A projection P is basically an idempotent mapping, that is P(P(x)) = P(x) for all x.
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