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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

#91

Post by sh87 »

api wrote: post #84
jknoepfler wrote: post #68

This strikes me as raw arrogance. Complexity is intrinsic to many systems that are subject of expert study. To tell someone who has devoted their career to understanding a complex topic that they don't understand their subject because they can't express it in layman's terms without doing terrible violence to the underlying phenomenon is ludicrous. This is the sort of thing you'd believe if you were an arrogant 20-som…

I strongly disagree. Complexity is real, but understanding means being able to conceptualize a system at such a high level that it becomes possible to convey the most important key ideas simply. This may involve some amount of over-simplification (which should be indicated if present) and will undoubtedly leave out a tremendous amount of detail, but the conceptual essence should be there. The inability to do this is…

For me the "derivative is a rate of change" moment was when I was told that a limited integral is the area under the graph. It just never made sense till then.

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

#93

Post by itsdevlin »

jknoepfler wrote: post #68

This strikes me as raw arrogance. Complexity is intrinsic to many systems that are subject of expert study. To tell someone who has devoted their career to understanding a complex topic that they don't understand their subject because they can't express it in layman's terms without doing terrible violence to the underlying phenomenon is ludicrous. This is the sort of thing you'd believe if you were an arrogant 20-som…

Being able to convey information in simple terms and pass along the depths of your understanding are two independent topics.

As an example, when we teach people how to fly a wingsuit, we essentially teach wingsuiting (which is a massively complex pursuit) as a set of nested arrays of increasing complexity.

For example, for a first jump course, the goals are as follows: - Exit safely - Demonstrate ability to navigate in-flight - Deploy

These are the most foundational aspects of flying a nylon dress out of an airplane.

After a few jumps, we'll add complexity to each of those, so to shift one point, it starts looking like:

- Exit in an unstable manner and gain stability in less than three seconds

In order to do that, you'll need to understand what causes a wingsuit to be stable, why it gets unstable, what happens when it gets unstable, and how to correct it. Additionally, you'll understand why I want you to do it in less than three seconds. However, at first, you just need to get out of the fucking plane. If I try to tell you all this extra shit you won't remember the foundational thing I need you to remember. You'll probably get unstable, you'll probably figure it out kinda, and you'll probably at some point deploy a parachute.

Teaching's hard.

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

#96

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

jknoepfler wrote: post #68

This strikes me as raw arrogance. Complexity is intrinsic to many systems that are subject of expert study. To tell someone who has devoted their career to understanding a complex topic that they don't understand their subject because they can't express it in layman's terms without doing terrible violence to the underlying phenomenon is ludicrous. This is the sort of thing you'd believe if you were an arrogant 20-som…

Since you bring up James Joyce, I'd like to add that poets don't explain things in layman's terms.

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

#98

Post by erickhill »

jknoepfler wrote: post #68

This strikes me as raw arrogance. Complexity is intrinsic to many systems that are subject of expert study. To tell someone who has devoted their career to understanding a complex topic that they don't understand their subject because they can't express it in layman's terms without doing terrible violence to the underlying phenomenon is ludicrous. This is the sort of thing you'd believe if you were an arrogant 20-som…

I think it's meant at a higher level. This is one of the basic tenets of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas:

"The limits of one's language are the limits of one's world." It's controversial, but the concept being if you can't speak about it, you really can't know it fully. This gets very fuzzy when experiencing art or emotions, but there is a cold logic to it that I appreciate, too.

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

#99

Post by tshadley »

SiVal wrote: post #85

Understanding something is having a good working model stored the way brains store models, which is quite a complex network. Explaining it requires finding a way to serialize it that makes it as easy as possible for a listener to reconstruct the model in his own mind. I think the effort involved in trying to come up with a serialization causes us to more carefully examine our models, which usually improves them. But…

You serialized that very well.

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

#100

Post by yiyus »

sh87 wrote: post #51
tgb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"implies" and "because" are not equivalent. For example, "x is positive implies x^2 is positive" is true but "x is positive because x^2 is positive" is false.

exactly what I was trying to point out. It came out wrong I guess. A statement like "if not a, then not b" is not applicable unless a "implies" b and a "is because of" b. Correct me if I got it all wrong somehow.

I understand the point of your comment. Just the last sentence ("Not being able to...") would have been enough. But your monkey example is confusing, because "=>" usually means "implies", not "because", and with that meaning there is nothing weird about the last statement.
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