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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 cert

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.
      - hurril 2y ago
        What does it mean for a thing to be hard to do in the context of different programming languages? Hard and easy here are extremely deep and complex subject matters. Is goto hard or easy, for example? The person is going to give up (or you are,) because you are not going to be able to just have this conversation for any meaningful length of time. This is a (bad) fantasy, and one that books sometimes attempt (that I hate) and some people fantasise this way. They are not going to Ask The Next Question because if they could do that, it would come from a position of already understanding in a sort of anachronistic way. (In that they already have your answer, yet still want it.) They lack intuition for all the new concepts, they have a bunch of false friends (to borrow from linguistics, in that they think they understand some of the concepts - but they are different concepts with the same or simliar names). If you are a good teacher, then I am sure you will be very successful in explaining, but it's just not happening quickly nor with just anyone.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    > what is fire Funny you ask, this was the most frustrating question in my childhood because no one could give a satisfactory answer of what exactly is the visible part of fire or whether it even exists as a body.
- treflop 2y ago
  It’s all about analogies. You can explain anything to anyone. Rust is safer than Python in the way same way as having a backup sensor in your car versus not. Sure, you won’t need most of the time but it may catch you that one time that you almost backed into a wall because you were still groggy after a night out. You got their attention and they understand your expert PoV. If they’re still curious and want to know more, you go deeper.
- noobermin 2y ago
  > 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 means that the asker is impatient, not the expert. An expert can explain everything from 0, and might even enjoy it.
  - kaba0 2y ago
    Let the expert be a native Indonesian person who speaks no English, and I don’t speak a word of his native tongue. Can he explain anything to me, given such a language boundary? Even though he knows stuff from 0, that doesn’t translate over to ability to explain.
- MrJohz 2y ago
  I think you're both right, but I think you're talking about different kinds of knowledge transfer. Imagine, as a simple model of expertise, three different levels of knowledge in a subject: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. In my experience, an expert can always explain their knowledge to the next level down: if you've got someone at the advanced level in a room of intermediates, then if the person at the advanced level should be able to explain what's going on to their intermediate peers. If they can't, I would be deeply sceptical that they know their stuff. But beyond that - someone at the advanced level in a room full of beginners, for example - communication gets harder, and the expert usually needs to be skilled in teaching in addition to their specialist subject in order to effectively explain what they're on about. So in your example, the expert is dealing with someone who only knows the basics, and so will need to do a lot of explaining to get them up to speed. But if instead the expert was asked something like "How does the use of ADTs in Rust change how you would model data in comparison to Python?", then the person they're dealing with probably knows enough that the expert only needs to explain the relevant specifics to them. So in summary: yes, teaching someone who knows relatively little compared to you requires a lot of specific teaching skills, even as an expert. But if you really are an expert, you should be able to explain your expertise to peers who just don't have the specific knowledge you have.
  - kaba0 2y ago
    This is a very wise point I haven’s seen written out this concretely, thanks! I really do feel this additional detail is necessary to the above claims. No matter how much of an expert someone is, there are topics that have so many dependencies themselves, that are alsk advanced knowledge, that explaining it in one go is just not possible. There are some topics where analogies can sidestep some of this difficulty in teaching by basically keeping the shape of the dependency graph, and replacing it with one that happens in ordinary life. But I don’t think that every expert topic can have such a homology, fundamentally so. Complexity is unending, while “problems common in ordinary life” has limited complexity. That math paper that 10 people understand on Earth will not be readily accessible to Aunt Mary not even by the smartest person on Earth.
  - philipswood 2y ago
    Your point reminds me of ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS by Scott Alexander [1] >“You’re talking about an infinite regress”, I said, when I had finished the glass. >“Not infinite. Architects. Teachers. Teachers of teachers, but the art of teaching teaching is much the same as the art of teaching. Three levels is enough. Though the levels have to mix. The teacher who trains the next architect must be a master both of teaching and of architecture. I will spare you the math, but one needs a series of teachers at different points on the teaching-skill/architecture-skill tradeoff-curve. One will be a master teacher who has devoted decades to learning the textbook-writing skill, and who can write a brilliant Introduction To Architecture textbook that makes the first ten years of architecture ability seem perfectly natural and easy to master. Another will be a mediocre teacher who knows enough advanced architecture to write a passable textbook on the subject. Still another will do nothing but study pure Teaching itself, in the hopes that he can one day pass on this knowledge to others who will use it to write architecture textbooks. In practice we are limited to a few strategic points on the tradeoff curve.” [1]:https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
- a_wild_dandan 2y ago
  "If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it." - Richard Feynman Experts deeply understand their subject, and tailor answers to meet the audience where they're at. If you express genuine interest in someone's passion, they'll be ecstatic. That's what the OP is talking about. It's not about how experts (or anyone) interacts with belligerent and dismissive interlocutors. And observing teaching moments is just one aspect of a larger smell test for detecting imposters. I think it's a good heuristic within that scope!
  - jwandborg 2y ago
    Experts deeply understand their subject. - Experts that tailor their answers to meet the audience are experts, but not only experts, they also have the luck of finding good analogues for parts of a system or topic, and a skill, or luck, of story telling and structuring teaching. - Individuals who use analogues and simplifications to describe a system or topic are not necessarily experts, they can also be lucky or skilled imitators, or just teachers. - Experts who are experts by the definition of having a deep understanding of the subject, but who are incapable or unwilling to simplify and/or structure the story well (in your subjective opinion), are still experts, but unless you also become an expert on the topic, it will be hard for you, or anyone else, to trust their expertise.
  - oefrha 2y ago
    That's oft cited but usually by people who know Feynman from the shuttle explosion. I've never heard a physicist cite it, and as a former physicist (high energy theorist) myself I have a few qualms with it. I would say even the Feynman Lectures for undergrads aren't simple, but that's arguable, so let's talk about Feynman diagrams, a supposedly intuitive invention of Feynman. Pretty little line drawings of particle interactions are indeed useful for surface level explanation, but physics is quantitative (that's how we verify anything) and staring at line drawings gets you nowhere in that regard. So the layperson might ask, "how do physicists calculate anything with Feynman diagrams?" at which point Feynman himself would probably be speechless. The path integral calculations for the simplest case in QED is like a page long, which is complete gobbledygook for the mathematically unprepared (>99.5% of the general population), and even for the mathematically prepared, the calculations mean nothing without tons of theory buildup. I have on the shelf right next to me the classic tomes on quantum field theory: >800pp Peskin & Schroeder, >800pp Schwartz, three volumes of Weinberg, all filled with dense mathematics. You need to study at least about a quarter of those to properly understand the aforementioned topic, no to mention all the prereqs: various formulations of classical mechanics, some classical electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, special relativity. There's no shortcut, anyone claiming to have an intuitive understanding of Feynman diagrams (the real deal, not just the line drawings) by reading some "simple" explanations is lying, regardless of whether they have genuine interests. (Btw, the ones with genuine interests are sometimes the worst: the "my theories are correct, I'm just bad at math!" alt scientists who love to email their papers to our entire department.) In conclusion, there are fields where there's really no way to explain things beyond the extreme surface level in simple terms, and ironically Feynman's own is one of those.
- bbqbbqbbq 2y ago
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- sqeaky 2y ago
  If I were presented such questions I would provide some basic context in a sentence or two and then ask why they care about the difference. Perhaps something like this: Sqeaky: rust and python are both good programming languages rust is good for high performance, safety oriented, systems development. While python is good for hooking two systems together or processing a little data right in front of me. Why do you ask what are your goals, maybe some context would help me understand? Q: I'm a new developer and I want to build a web page I wasn't sure what to use? Sqeaky: well let's get into what programming you know and let's discuss some Libraries Python and rust both have options! Q: ... And the conversation would carry on from there based on the context the asker provided, because contextualizing conversations, questions, and data around a topic is part of having expertise.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  "Python is like your kid's room - clean and dirty clothes mixed up in the wardrobe and in random piles and boxes on the floor. Every now and then you come, take the dirty laundry away, and put the rest in some order - in programmer terms, you're acting as 'garbage collector'." "Rust is like the room of Steve, you know, the one with OCD. Separate drawers for underwear, separate for socks, all subdivided by days of the week. And nothing, nothing is. ever. out. of. order. Sounds like a lot of work up front, but you know what Steve never is? Late. Or in dirty or mixed up outfit. Or unsure whether something is lost or who was it lent to." "Now, some programming is more like writing experimental music; other is more like double-entry bookkeeping for a company. The flexibility Python gives you is great for the former, but you'd likely prefer something more strict for the latter."
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  Reminds me of Feynman on magnets. He said something awhile back...basically said "ya'all are too dumb to understand magnets". That was my take-away anyway.
  - jwiz 2y ago
    My takeaway was more that it was along the lines of "you can't explain this in terms of other things because it is fundamental to the nature of reality."
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.

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.
    - hurril 2y ago
      What does it mean for a thing to be hard to do in the context of different programming languages? Hard and easy here are extremely deep and complex subject matters. Is goto hard or easy, for example? The person is going to give up (or you are,) because you are not going to be able to just have this conversation for any meaningful length of time. This is a (bad) fantasy, and one that books sometimes attempt (that I hate) and some people fantasise this way. They are not going to Ask The Next Question because if they could do that, it would come from a position of already understanding in a sort of anachronistic way. (In that they already have your answer, yet still want it.) They lack intuition for all the new concepts, they have a bunch of false friends (to borrow from linguistics, in that they think they understand some of the concepts - but they are different concepts with the same or simliar names). If you are a good teacher, then I am sure you will be very successful in explaining, but it's just not happening quickly nor with just anyone.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  > what is fire Funny you ask, this was the most frustrating question in my childhood because no one could give a satisfactory answer of what exactly is the visible part of fire or whether it even exists as a body.
treflop 2y ago
It’s all about analogies. You can explain anything to anyone. Rust is safer than Python in the way same way as having a backup sensor in your car versus not. Sure, you won’t need most of the time but it may catch you that one time that you almost backed into a wall because you were still groggy after a night out. You got their attention and they understand your expert PoV. If they’re still curious and want to know more, you go deeper.
noobermin 2y ago
> 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 means that the asker is impatient, not the expert. An expert can explain everything from 0, and might even enjoy it.
- kaba0 2y ago
  Let the expert be a native Indonesian person who speaks no English, and I don’t speak a word of his native tongue. Can he explain anything to me, given such a language boundary? Even though he knows stuff from 0, that doesn’t translate over to ability to explain.
MrJohz 2y ago
I think you're both right, but I think you're talking about different kinds of knowledge transfer. Imagine, as a simple model of expertise, three different levels of knowledge in a subject: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. In my experience, an expert can always explain their knowledge to the next level down: if you've got someone at the advanced level in a room of intermediates, then if the person at the advanced level should be able to explain what's going on to their intermediate peers. If they can't, I would be deeply sceptical that they know their stuff. But beyond that - someone at the advanced level in a room full of beginners, for example - communication gets harder, and the expert usually needs to be skilled in teaching in addition to their specialist subject in order to effectively explain what they're on about. So in your example, the expert is dealing with someone who only knows the basics, and so will need to do a lot of explaining to get them up to speed. But if instead the expert was asked something like "How does the use of ADTs in Rust change how you would model data in comparison to Python?", then the person they're dealing with probably knows enough that the expert only needs to explain the relevant specifics to them. So in summary: yes, teaching someone who knows relatively little compared to you requires a lot of specific teaching skills, even as an expert. But if you really are an expert, you should be able to explain your expertise to peers who just don't have the specific knowledge you have.
- kaba0 2y ago
  This is a very wise point I haven’s seen written out this concretely, thanks! I really do feel this additional detail is necessary to the above claims. No matter how much of an expert someone is, there are topics that have so many dependencies themselves, that are alsk advanced knowledge, that explaining it in one go is just not possible. There are some topics where analogies can sidestep some of this difficulty in teaching by basically keeping the shape of the dependency graph, and replacing it with one that happens in ordinary life. But I don’t think that every expert topic can have such a homology, fundamentally so. Complexity is unending, while “problems common in ordinary life” has limited complexity. That math paper that 10 people understand on Earth will not be readily accessible to Aunt Mary not even by the smartest person on Earth.
- philipswood 2y ago
  Your point reminds me of ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS by Scott Alexander [1] >“You’re talking about an infinite regress”, I said, when I had finished the glass. >“Not infinite. Architects. Teachers. Teachers of teachers, but the art of teaching teaching is much the same as the art of teaching. Three levels is enough. Though the levels have to mix. The teacher who trains the next architect must be a master both of teaching and of architecture. I will spare you the math, but one needs a series of teachers at different points on the teaching-skill/architecture-skill tradeoff-curve. One will be a master teacher who has devoted decades to learning the textbook-writing skill, and who can write a brilliant Introduction To Architecture textbook that makes the first ten years of architecture ability seem perfectly natural and easy to master. Another will be a mediocre teacher who knows enough advanced architecture to write a passable textbook on the subject. Still another will do nothing but study pure Teaching itself, in the hopes that he can one day pass on this knowledge to others who will use it to write architecture textbooks. In practice we are limited to a few strategic points on the tradeoff curve.” [1]:https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
a_wild_dandan 2y ago
"If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it." - Richard Feynman Experts deeply understand their subject, and tailor answers to meet the audience where they're at. If you express genuine interest in someone's passion, they'll be ecstatic. That's what the OP is talking about. It's not about how experts (or anyone) interacts with belligerent and dismissive interlocutors. And observing teaching moments is just one aspect of a larger smell test for detecting imposters. I think it's a good heuristic within that scope!
- jwandborg 2y ago
  Experts deeply understand their subject. - Experts that tailor their answers to meet the audience are experts, but not only experts, they also have the luck of finding good analogues for parts of a system or topic, and a skill, or luck, of story telling and structuring teaching. - Individuals who use analogues and simplifications to describe a system or topic are not necessarily experts, they can also be lucky or skilled imitators, or just teachers. - Experts who are experts by the definition of having a deep understanding of the subject, but who are incapable or unwilling to simplify and/or structure the story well (in your subjective opinion), are still experts, but unless you also become an expert on the topic, it will be hard for you, or anyone else, to trust their expertise.
- oefrha 2y ago
  That's oft cited but usually by people who know Feynman from the shuttle explosion. I've never heard a physicist cite it, and as a former physicist (high energy theorist) myself I have a few qualms with it. I would say even the Feynman Lectures for undergrads aren't simple, but that's arguable, so let's talk about Feynman diagrams, a supposedly intuitive invention of Feynman. Pretty little line drawings of particle interactions are indeed useful for surface level explanation, but physics is quantitative (that's how we verify anything) and staring at line drawings gets you nowhere in that regard. So the layperson might ask, "how do physicists calculate anything with Feynman diagrams?" at which point Feynman himself would probably be speechless. The path integral calculations for the simplest case in QED is like a page long, which is complete gobbledygook for the mathematically unprepared (>99.5% of the general population), and even for the mathematically prepared, the calculations mean nothing without tons of theory buildup. I have on the shelf right next to me the classic tomes on quantum field theory: >800pp Peskin & Schroeder, >800pp Schwartz, three volumes of Weinberg, all filled with dense mathematics. You need to study at least about a quarter of those to properly understand the aforementioned topic, no to mention all the prereqs: various formulations of classical mechanics, some classical electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, special relativity. There's no shortcut, anyone claiming to have an intuitive understanding of Feynman diagrams (the real deal, not just the line drawings) by reading some "simple" explanations is lying, regardless of whether they have genuine interests. (Btw, the ones with genuine interests are sometimes the worst: the "my theories are correct, I'm just bad at math!" alt scientists who love to email their papers to our entire department.) In conclusion, there are fields where there's really no way to explain things beyond the extreme surface level in simple terms, and ironically Feynman's own is one of those.
bbqbbqbbq 2y ago
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sqeaky 2y ago
If I were presented such questions I would provide some basic context in a sentence or two and then ask why they care about the difference. Perhaps something like this: Sqeaky: rust and python are both good programming languages rust is good for high performance, safety oriented, systems development. While python is good for hooking two systems together or processing a little data right in front of me. Why do you ask what are your goals, maybe some context would help me understand? Q: I'm a new developer and I want to build a web page I wasn't sure what to use? Sqeaky: well let's get into what programming you know and let's discuss some Libraries Python and rust both have options! Q: ... And the conversation would carry on from there based on the context the asker provided, because contextualizing conversations, questions, and data around a topic is part of having expertise.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
"Python is like your kid's room - clean and dirty clothes mixed up in the wardrobe and in random piles and boxes on the floor. Every now and then you come, take the dirty laundry away, and put the rest in some order - in programmer terms, you're acting as 'garbage collector'." "Rust is like the room of Steve, you know, the one with OCD. Separate drawers for underwear, separate for socks, all subdivided by days of the week. And nothing, nothing is. ever. out. of. order. Sounds like a lot of work up front, but you know what Steve never is? Late. Or in dirty or mixed up outfit. Or unsure whether something is lost or who was it lent to." "Now, some programming is more like writing experimental music; other is more like double-entry bookkeeping for a company. The flexibility Python gives you is great for the former, but you'd likely prefer something more strict for the latter."
8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
Reminds me of Feynman on magnets. He said something awhile back...basically said "ya'all are too dumb to understand magnets". That was my take-away anyway.
- jwiz 2y ago
  My takeaway was more that it was along the lines of "you can't explain this in terms of other things because it is fundamental to the nature of reality."

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.