People who understand a topic will simplify it for you. Even if it’s a complicated topic, they’ll be able to have a clear conceptual breakdown of its parts and

People who understand a topic will simplify it for you. Even if it’s a complicated topic, they’ll be able to have a clear conceptual breakdown of its parts and their interactions. Whenever someone tries to sell themselves as an expert through the usage of obscurity, their explanations are complicated, whenever you poke at it with questions they’ll answer with a new part of an ad-hoc conceptual framework, as opposed to explaining it in terms of concepts which are derived from a generalization of more fundamental, simpler concepts. Also sometimes you think someone falls into the second category but eventually they’ll just tell you “I don’t know “ or “I don’t understand” as you explore a domain. At that moment I personally put them in the first category, because IMO people being aware of their partial lack of knowledge is a good signal of better quality in the part of knowledge that they do claim to have.