6 ms·

Imitators may get frustrated by the need to go deep with others because they can’t, but to say that experts don’t share that same frustration is nonsense. Ther

Imitators may get frustrated by the need to go deep with others because they can’t, but to say that experts don’t share that same frustration is nonsense. There are many audiences who want you to go deep, but are not capable of a necessary level of understanding. In fact, these audiences are the ones who become what the author claims are imitators; pretending to understand when they do not. Experts are experts not because they’re teachers; they’re experts because they’re experienced and are executionally excellent.

nickelpro 2y ago
In my career I've at times been a leading expert on, as is the way of these things, a couple niche technologies. I'm speaking from that perspective. While certainly there are those who struggle to connect with layman audiences, especially in academia, a complete inability to communicate the challenges and successes of a technology, technique, or theory to laymen is a huge demerit against a claim of expertise. There's a huge difference between walking through technical and theoretical mechanical specifics, and being able to communicate about a subject at different levels of abstraction. The greatest experts can often walk with a laymen right down to and rub against the jargon-filled specifics in a way that leaves no doubt they're able to step over that line without problem. This is important because we don't perform ideation, architecture, or structural problem solving in the terms of white papers and technical specifications. If an expert does not have an abstract internal narrative with which to navigate the mechanics of the subject, they are likely not an expert at all.
- mjburgess 2y ago
  This isn't really true for anything but the basics. If you're having a conversation with someone who asks more than surface-level questions, but hasnt more than surface-level knowledge, the answers can require many years of study -- or, at least, hours of conversation to get anywhere. This situation is incredibly frustrating if you're an expert, often because these question-askers aren't at all willing to listen to hours of you explaining many things to them. Consider a person who says, "I heard rust was better than python because its safe" -- where would one even begin? Suppose now you're dealing with a person who knows enough to make the claim, but isnt patient enough to have memory safety, garbage collection, interpreters, etc. explained This is often the situation experts are in. Indeed, it's a majority of hackernews threads.
  - Espressosaurus 2y ago
    It's easy. "Rust is better for safety than C because it makes it harder or impossible to make certain kinds of mistakes that are easy to make than C." "What kind of mistakes?" "There are times when you need to acquire some shared resource. Let's say memory. In Rust, it's easy to ensure you return that memory when you're done with it. In C, it's easy to forget to return that memory when you're done with it. This is called a memory leak, and you might find that eventually there's not enough memory for other programs to run." "What's memory?" "Think of a program as a recipe you're performing. Memory then is like working space. Like your counter space in your kitchen. If you run out of counter space, you don't have room to chop up more vegetables or temporarily store your cooked meat or what-have-you. Maybe you ran out of counter space because you left last night's dirty dishes on it. Rust automatically puts the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. In C, you have to remember to do that yourself, and sometimes you forget to." And so on. There's an easy explanation as long as you're not expecting them to perform detailed analysis. And I'm not. edit: eventually you'll get to your limit of simplicity, things like "what is fire?" and maybe you need to say "I don't know, let's find out together!" We all have limits to our expertise, after all.
    - hurril 2y ago
      This hinges on a thorough understanding of safety. It also does not even mention trading things off. Both of which are topics that will require further clarifications. And as it were: and so on.
      - Espressosaurus 2y ago
        "Why doesn't everyone use Rust then?" "Because it turns out that people aren't using the language too much yet, and it makes some things that are easy to do in C, hard to do in order to keep the language safe. It's all tradeoffs." At some point the person asking is satisfied and that tangent ends. This is how conversation works. You aren't trying to teach a layman how to write production-ready Rust code, and they aren't interested in learning how.
        2y ago
- Espressosaurus 2y ago
  Agreed. My experience with experts--both being one in my domain and working with others in their domain--is that if they can't explain how it works to a layman, chances are they don't know how it works. True experts can understand from the layman's perspective and tailor the response to that level of understanding.
  - 77pt77 2y ago
    > True experts can understand from the layman's perspective and tailor the response to that level of understanding. The Feynman paradox: > if you can't explain it to a six-year-old you don't understand it yourself but also > If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize The former probably apocryphal.
    - qrian 2y ago
      Interestingly I have recently watched a video of Feynmann essentially saying "I cannot explain it to you because you don't have relevant background knowledge" to a question of "What makes magnets repel or pull each other?". Which agrees with the latter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
      - 77pt77 2y ago
        Of both quotes the latter is definitely closer to the truth.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    Then there is the corollary: a topic is shallow, if an expert can explain it to a layman before the layman loses interest. I've been working with experts on highly technical topics most of my career. They can explain the big picture to a layman just fine, but if the layman asks something within the actual scope of their expertise, it takes a long time to get there.
- edgarvaldes 2y ago
  Not so sure. It implies that a bad communicator can't be an expert at anything.
  - g4zj 2y ago
    This is my take. As an autistic individual, I struggle a lot with communication in general, especially speaking in-person as opposed to typing slowly and carefully like I am doing now. No matter how well I understand something, my ability to relay that information effectively to another individual will always be another matter entirely. It's true that I can't explain something I don't understand, but it doesn't logically follow that I only truly understand something if I can explain it.
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      I think a little piece of that idiom is left out for the sake of making it a good sound bite. An expert can explain something to an eager listener. Would you be able to explain something you're an expert in to a patient lay person who actually listened and tried to ask the best questions they could? It is an entirely different skill to educate someone with your expertise when you don't get their feedback (tv, radio, youtube) or when they don't want to learn (classroom teacher, office politics around bean counters). Those are two kinds of education and they are important skills all on their own but are in no way tied to other kinds of technical expertise. If we were both working on a project that needed your and my expertise. If I understood that you had different sensibilities about social norms. If I respected those while asking questions about parts of your explanation I didn't understand. Would you be able to explain a detailed topic to me?
      - g4zj 2y ago
        Yes. I can answer questions far more easily than I can coherently give an impromptu explanation of a complex topic on which I am something of an expert. Even if the listener knows little to nothing about the subject, being eager to understand and asking questions while respecting my sensibilities, however realistic that expectation may be, makes all the difference for me.
- tetha 2y ago
  There is also a similar thing many experienced people complain about: Eventually, you'll have to be able to explain the cost and merit of a technical decision in business terms. Like, yeah I'm able to explain our postgres HA setup + DC-redundancy at fairly detailed technical level. But then a member of the board asks "Yeah but what does it cost and what benefit does it bring the customers and why?" Finding a satisfying and comprehensive answer to that question takes a whole new perspective and made me understand a few things more. And question a few more.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    Being able to contextualize such data and such facts into actionable knowledge or wisdom is definitely a facet of expertise. It takes a different sort of expertise, some kind of communication expertise, to interject the need for actual study or research in the space. In my career I have many times been asked to understand a system and to evaluate it and come back with an explanation to the non-technical. The first few times I made no accommodations for cost or support planning. And when asked how much such a thing would cost I inevitably gave wrong answers based on sticker prices or cost of hardware or something similarly trivial. Today I'm always evaluating systems I work in in terms of technician and expert hours in addition to the cost of the things we purchased for them to work on. If somehow I were surprised today and asked to give a price of standing up such a system, I would know enough to say I need to do some review and formal planning. I would staunchly, but politely, refuse to give up any numbers and say that I can come back with a detailed plan with itemized costs after I actually write down all my notes because even after having worked and software for 20 or more years there are just too many little details that can add a million dollars to a project. After having bought such time I would write down all my thoughts and gather all my notes and look around for things I missed. Then provide such costs and benefits to the bean counters in the only language they all speak dollars, and I would be sure not to put a single number for any field they would all be ranges possible minimums and maximums. And I've been asked why they are ranges in the past, and those help to articulate uncertainty. That is another whole discussion but people who don't work with the technology often don't understand the uncertainty that come from these very certain, digital, and predictable machines.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  > a complete inability to communicate the challenges and successes of a technology, technique, or theory to laymen is a huge demerit against a claim of expertise. Hard disagree. A person can be an internationally recognized expert working on e.g. a novel mathematical theory useful for cryptography, without being able to explain any of it to anyone without a university-level math education. I posit you're combining two orthogonal properties, expert knowledge and being a good communicator, into one axis because that's a useful combo, or the make-up of an expert that you'd like to know and/or hire.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  The problem isn’t always whether an “expert” can, it’s whether they want to. I’ve worked with plenty of experts who are also impatient, short and condescending with anyone who doesn’t grasp things straight away. That doesn’t mean they’re an imitator, it just means they’re an arsehole. People aren’t binary. An expert isn’t automatically a good teacher. And, in fact, some imitators are actually better teachers. It’s almost as if teaching and “doing” are different skills ;)
- nazka 2y ago
  > The greatest experts can often walk with a laymen right down to and rub against the jargon-filled specifics in a way that leaves no doubt they're able to step over that line without problem. Unfortunately I think it’s naive. I saw people ready to say BS things with a touch of acronyms getting more traction and at higher levels compared to some experts. It’s true experts can walk a layman into deeper subjects but so people used to half BS and know how to convince people… I remember getting a technical interview with the CTO of a startup. He knew all the vocabulary of DDD, Event Sourcing and the like and was talking length about it but he couldn’t explain even what he was saying like what is an aggregate, etc… I’m sure he was convincing to other officers and the tech team but not to me. Because of that I feel like almost only experts can detect non experts. The world is full of people like that. Consultants are sometimes literally all they do.
zh3 2y ago
Indeed, this article could easily - and possibly should have - equate imitators to current AI (which tend to fail on deep knowledge, and - unlike experts - show inflexibility when challenged). Which is not to say that shallow knowledge (whether AI or human) is a bad thing. I'm very happy to be helped out by ChatGPT in places where I'd be in the shallow knowledge ('imitator') camp. Still, the limitations of current AI seem quite similar to the 'imitators' described here (noting that plenty of humans aren't above making stuff up either).
Justsignedup 2y ago
What I found as an interesting point is the concept that an imitator can't really tell it a different way, because to explain something from a different angle requires you to see it as a 3d object, and not as a flat painting just seeing the result, not everything that goes behind it. Thinking up how to use that.. How to use the concept of explain something to me, and me not understanding to see how deeply they get it.
qp11 2y ago
Worth also pointing out as Rate of Change around the Expert increases they become executionally non excellent, while still being called Experts. So that kind of confuses everyone including the experts. Network growth, trade growth, capital growth, info growth all are happening faster than expert growth.

nickelpro 2y ago

In my career I've at times been a leading expert on, as is the way of these things, a couple niche technologies. I'm speaking from that perspective. While certainly there are those who struggle to connect with layman audiences, especially in academia, a complete inability to communicate the challenges and successes of a technology, technique, or theory to laymen is a huge demerit against a claim of expertise. There's a huge difference between walking through technical and theoretical mechanical specifics, and being able to communicate about a subject at different levels of abstraction. The greatest experts can often walk with a laymen right down to and rub against the jargon-filled specifics in a way that leaves no doubt they're able to step over that line without problem. This is important because we don't perform ideation, architecture, or structural problem solving in the terms of white papers and technical specifications. If an expert does not have an abstract internal narrative with which to navigate the mechanics of the subject, they are likely not an expert at all.

mjburgess 2y ago
This isn't really true for anything but the basics. If you're having a conversation with someone who asks more than surface-level questions, but hasnt more than surface-level knowledge, the answers can require many years of study -- or, at least, hours of conversation to get anywhere. This situation is incredibly frustrating if you're an expert, often because these question-askers aren't at all willing to listen to hours of you explaining many things to them. Consider a person who says, "I heard rust was better than python because its safe" -- where would one even begin? Suppose now you're dealing with a person who knows enough to make the claim, but isnt patient enough to have memory safety, garbage collection, interpreters, etc. explained This is often the situation experts are in. Indeed, it's a majority of hackernews threads.
- Espressosaurus 2y ago
  It's easy. "Rust is better for safety than C because it makes it harder or impossible to make certain kinds of mistakes that are easy to make than C." "What kind of mistakes?" "There are times when you need to acquire some shared resource. Let's say memory. In Rust, it's easy to ensure you return that memory when you're done with it. In C, it's easy to forget to return that memory when you're done with it. This is called a memory leak, and you might find that eventually there's not enough memory for other programs to run." "What's memory?" "Think of a program as a recipe you're performing. Memory then is like working space. Like your counter space in your kitchen. If you run out of counter space, you don't have room to chop up more vegetables or temporarily store your cooked meat or what-have-you. Maybe you ran out of counter space because you left last night's dirty dishes on it. Rust automatically puts the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. In C, you have to remember to do that yourself, and sometimes you forget to." And so on. There's an easy explanation as long as you're not expecting them to perform detailed analysis. And I'm not. edit: eventually you'll get to your limit of simplicity, things like "what is fire?" and maybe you need to say "I don't know, let's find out together!" We all have limits to our expertise, after all.
  - hurril 2y ago
    This hinges on a thorough understanding of safety. It also does not even mention trading things off. Both of which are topics that will require further clarifications. And as it were: and so on.
    - Espressosaurus 2y ago
      "Why doesn't everyone use Rust then?" "Because it turns out that people aren't using the language too much yet, and it makes some things that are easy to do in C, hard to do in order to keep the language safe. It's all tradeoffs." At some point the person asking is satisfied and that tangent ends. This is how conversation works. You aren't trying to teach a layman how to write production-ready Rust code, and they aren't interested in learning how.
      - 2y ago
Espressosaurus 2y ago
Agreed. My experience with experts--both being one in my domain and working with others in their domain--is that if they can't explain how it works to a layman, chances are they don't know how it works. True experts can understand from the layman's perspective and tailor the response to that level of understanding.
- 77pt77 2y ago
  > True experts can understand from the layman's perspective and tailor the response to that level of understanding. The Feynman paradox: > if you can't explain it to a six-year-old you don't understand it yourself but also > If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize The former probably apocryphal.
  - qrian 2y ago
    Interestingly I have recently watched a video of Feynmann essentially saying "I cannot explain it to you because you don't have relevant background knowledge" to a question of "What makes magnets repel or pull each other?". Which agrees with the latter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
    - 77pt77 2y ago
      Of both quotes the latter is definitely closer to the truth.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  Then there is the corollary: a topic is shallow, if an expert can explain it to a layman before the layman loses interest. I've been working with experts on highly technical topics most of my career. They can explain the big picture to a layman just fine, but if the layman asks something within the actual scope of their expertise, it takes a long time to get there.
edgarvaldes 2y ago
Not so sure. It implies that a bad communicator can't be an expert at anything.
- g4zj 2y ago
  This is my take. As an autistic individual, I struggle a lot with communication in general, especially speaking in-person as opposed to typing slowly and carefully like I am doing now. No matter how well I understand something, my ability to relay that information effectively to another individual will always be another matter entirely. It's true that I can't explain something I don't understand, but it doesn't logically follow that I only truly understand something if I can explain it.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    I think a little piece of that idiom is left out for the sake of making it a good sound bite. An expert can explain something to an eager listener. Would you be able to explain something you're an expert in to a patient lay person who actually listened and tried to ask the best questions they could? It is an entirely different skill to educate someone with your expertise when you don't get their feedback (tv, radio, youtube) or when they don't want to learn (classroom teacher, office politics around bean counters). Those are two kinds of education and they are important skills all on their own but are in no way tied to other kinds of technical expertise. If we were both working on a project that needed your and my expertise. If I understood that you had different sensibilities about social norms. If I respected those while asking questions about parts of your explanation I didn't understand. Would you be able to explain a detailed topic to me?
    - g4zj 2y ago
      Yes. I can answer questions far more easily than I can coherently give an impromptu explanation of a complex topic on which I am something of an expert. Even if the listener knows little to nothing about the subject, being eager to understand and asking questions while respecting my sensibilities, however realistic that expectation may be, makes all the difference for me.
tetha 2y ago
There is also a similar thing many experienced people complain about: Eventually, you'll have to be able to explain the cost and merit of a technical decision in business terms. Like, yeah I'm able to explain our postgres HA setup + DC-redundancy at fairly detailed technical level. But then a member of the board asks "Yeah but what does it cost and what benefit does it bring the customers and why?" Finding a satisfying and comprehensive answer to that question takes a whole new perspective and made me understand a few things more. And question a few more.
- sqeaky 2y ago
  Being able to contextualize such data and such facts into actionable knowledge or wisdom is definitely a facet of expertise. It takes a different sort of expertise, some kind of communication expertise, to interject the need for actual study or research in the space. In my career I have many times been asked to understand a system and to evaluate it and come back with an explanation to the non-technical. The first few times I made no accommodations for cost or support planning. And when asked how much such a thing would cost I inevitably gave wrong answers based on sticker prices or cost of hardware or something similarly trivial. Today I'm always evaluating systems I work in in terms of technician and expert hours in addition to the cost of the things we purchased for them to work on. If somehow I were surprised today and asked to give a price of standing up such a system, I would know enough to say I need to do some review and formal planning. I would staunchly, but politely, refuse to give up any numbers and say that I can come back with a detailed plan with itemized costs after I actually write down all my notes because even after having worked and software for 20 or more years there are just too many little details that can add a million dollars to a project. After having bought such time I would write down all my thoughts and gather all my notes and look around for things I missed. Then provide such costs and benefits to the bean counters in the only language they all speak dollars, and I would be sure not to put a single number for any field they would all be ranges possible minimums and maximums. And I've been asked why they are ranges in the past, and those help to articulate uncertainty. That is another whole discussion but people who don't work with the technology often don't understand the uncertainty that come from these very certain, digital, and predictable machines.
yencabulator 2y ago
> a complete inability to communicate the challenges and successes of a technology, technique, or theory to laymen is a huge demerit against a claim of expertise. Hard disagree. A person can be an internationally recognized expert working on e.g. a novel mathematical theory useful for cryptography, without being able to explain any of it to anyone without a university-level math education. I posit you're combining two orthogonal properties, expert knowledge and being a good communicator, into one axis because that's a useful combo, or the make-up of an expert that you'd like to know and/or hire.
hnlmorg 2y ago
The problem isn’t always whether an “expert” can, it’s whether they want to. I’ve worked with plenty of experts who are also impatient, short and condescending with anyone who doesn’t grasp things straight away. That doesn’t mean they’re an imitator, it just means they’re an arsehole. People aren’t binary. An expert isn’t automatically a good teacher. And, in fact, some imitators are actually better teachers. It’s almost as if teaching and “doing” are different skills ;)
nazka 2y ago
> The greatest experts can often walk with a laymen right down to and rub against the jargon-filled specifics in a way that leaves no doubt they're able to step over that line without problem. Unfortunately I think it’s naive. I saw people ready to say BS things with a touch of acronyms getting more traction and at higher levels compared to some experts. It’s true experts can walk a layman into deeper subjects but so people used to half BS and know how to convince people… I remember getting a technical interview with the CTO of a startup. He knew all the vocabulary of DDD, Event Sourcing and the like and was talking length about it but he couldn’t explain even what he was saying like what is an aggregate, etc… I’m sure he was convincing to other officers and the tech team but not to me. Because of that I feel like almost only experts can detect non experts. The world is full of people like that. Consultants are sometimes literally all they do.

zh3 2y ago

Indeed, this article could easily - and possibly should have - equate imitators to current AI (which tend to fail on deep knowledge, and - unlike experts - show inflexibility when challenged). Which is not to say that shallow knowledge (whether AI or human) is a bad thing. I'm very happy to be helped out by ChatGPT in places where I'd be in the shallow knowledge ('imitator') camp. Still, the limitations of current AI seem quite similar to the 'imitators' described here (noting that plenty of humans aren't above making stuff up either).

Justsignedup 2y ago

What I found as an interesting point is the concept that an imitator can't really tell it a different way, because to explain something from a different angle requires you to see it as a 3d object, and not as a flat painting just seeing the result, not everything that goes behind it. Thinking up how to use that.. How to use the concept of explain something to me, and me not understanding to see how deeply they get it.

qp11 2y ago

Worth also pointing out as Rate of Change around the Expert increases they become executionally non excellent, while still being called Experts. So that kind of confuses everyone including the experts. Network growth, trade growth, capital growth, info growth all are happening faster than expert growth.