From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Mon May 14 2001 - 10:57:10 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> At 08:58 PM 5/13/01 -0700, Adrian wrote:
> >"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> >> Incidentally - this occurred to me afterwards - this is not me saying,
> >> "I'm a better explainer than you, nyah nyah." This is me saying "I get
> >> strongly annoyed when people say that things like this are hard to
> >> explain." It symbolizes a psychological disconnect. Our instinctive
> >> reactions, our automatic intuitions, carry all the necessary information.
> >> Trust your intuitions enough to verbalize them.
> >
> >Well said. I would add that it can be good to verbalize them not just
> >to others, but also to oneself. That way, one can know why one's
> >instincts lean a certain way, and know better when to trust them - and
> >when not to.
>
> But some things really are hard to explain! Isn't it true,
> for example, that some things are a lot harder to explain
> over the phone? Well, some things are hard to explain, period.
True. But if one practices explaining it to oneself as one would
explain it to a novice, or a child (if that metaphor is clearer), then
one can find ways to explain it to others easier...and, not
infrequently, come to understand it better oneself. At least, I have
used this technique myself when faced with confusing collections of
facts, and I feel that I understand those things better as a result,
though I am not certain how I could objectively test this. I have
found that for even the most difficult problems, repeating this
technique has allowed me to eventually boil anything I have tried it on
down to layman's terms. This happens most often through a combination
of finding commonly-used terms that adequately describe a concept, of
finding commonly known concepts with a small and clearly describable
set of differences from the concept being explained, and of determining
what large sections of complexity can be reduced to a few statements
while hiding the details from the basic explanation (with the
understanding that, if those details are desired, they can be requested
after the basics are digested).
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