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It seems I know just enough to be dangerous. Thank you for your well-written explanation.

• vanderZwan 9y ago
  You're very welcome, and don't be hard on yourself! It is easy to underestimate how difficult it is to give good explanations to non-experts, regardless of the topic at hand. I mean, just look at how how much I wrote about the choice of one word. When writing for non-experts, an expert must imagine what it is like to not know the right answer. Our brains seem to be terrible at that: most people are unable to "not see" the cow in that famous gestalt picture once spotted[0], and I think the same thing applies to many kinds of thinking. The only way out for an expert seems to be a lot of exposure to "dumb questions" (there is no such thing, of course) from non-experts, to figure out what logic the latter's wrong conclusions are. It doesn't help that there are many more ways to come to perfectly logical but wrong conclusions based on wrong premises, than there are ways to come to the right conclusion with the right premises. And even once you are aware of these mismatches, you still have to explain yourself in such a way that there is a path from the incorrect interpretation to the more correct interpretation, without getting lost in trying to explain everything. So no wonder that even professional educators and science writers, who are supposed to be skilled at this, tend to do a poor job! [0] http://icog.group.shef.ac.uk/what-can-you-see-some-questions-about-the-content-of-visual-experience/ http://icog.group.shef.ac.uk/what-can-you-see-some-questions...