A Basic Guide for Curious Minds: Review of “Thing Explainer” | Hacker News Reader

A Basic Guide for Curious Minds: Review of “Thing Explainer”

gatesnotes.com

179 pointsmhb70 comments

Amused that the first sentence is "Terminology is an occupational hazard of philanthropy", I think he meant "hard words are often used by people who give money away"

also "hard words are used by NGOs when you're trying to give money away".

http://reliefweb.int/report/world/words-matter

Doesn't pass the test :)

http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/

An occupational hazard is a danger that engaging in a profession opens you up to. Like injuries in football, or getting sued for malpractice as a doctor.

I don't think he mean that. I think he meant "People who practice philanthropy often hear hard words in their line of work."

I think parent post was thing-explaining. :)

Let's try that again: "People who give money away to help people have to hear hard words at work."

I think it means people for varying reasons see it appropriate to use industry specific terminology when discussing things with non insiders, either out of custom (no code switching) or as a way to project "professionalism" when it's not necessary for communication to occur.

As others have mentioned, that's actually not what it means. Here's a version that's closer to the gist of it:

"When you are trying to give away money, the people asking for it can often use special or hard words and ideas that you may not know or that may be confusing."

Sadly "rare," "uncommon," "unclear," and a whole bunch of other words don't make the simplewriter cut (too bad the XKCD tool doesn't automatically try to pull up closet matches from a thesaurus filtered against the word-list).

> Amused that the first sentence is "Terminology is an occupational hazard of philanthropy", I think he meant "hard words are often used by people who give money away"

Or you could have read literally the next three sentences and learned what he actually meant.

Gates is spot on and Munro extraordinary. Too often managers feel obliged to use technical language where none is either needed nor natural.

People talking about budgets and fiscal planning making use of hi-tech specific, bio-tech, etc. Anything which passively indicates that they are up to date on cant and argot of totally unrelated fields but serve as signal of being at the edge or on the cusp of all things new and modern and professional.

Examples, using MM for millions, or K for thousands (is that metric K or computing K), or saying "spend" as a noun. Having to sound like one knows and is up to date with all the different industry terminologies must be taxing.

Best of all is when a person is actually familiar with the terminology and senses the forced nature of the out of context use. They can only smile at the stilted use.

Two great essays on language that is neither needed nor natural:

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...

" I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

    I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
"

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.h... : targeted at legal writing, but the suggestion to have a point and stick to it is universally applicable.

Can you format the quotations as quotations (leading "> ", I think) rather than indenting them? As it is, you have to scroll right to read the entire quotation.

Choosing flowery, poetic prose to translate into into modern techno-babble doesn't sway me to the point of view that the former was better than modern English. Neither is a good example of clear, concise communication IMHO. The former's reason for being lengthy is at least understandable. It serves the purpose of both slowing the reader, and supplying them with examples and metaphors to ponder over. The latter's reason for being obtuse is much less understandable, since it actually hampers communication for the sake of style (that is, the style provides little to no extra informational benefit).

Nature Climate Change recently published [1] a comparison of the language in the IPCC climate change executive summary versus the seminal scientific papers by Einstein and Hawking. Einstein and Hawking's writings are significantly easier to read. (Easy to read doesn't imply easy to understand, but it doesn't hurt either.) [1] http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...

Reminds me of this[0] talk by Guy Steele where he explicitly defines any word outside of a given set before he can use that term in his speech. Interesting language exercise, definitely worth a watch!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0&feature=youtu.be

Yeah, the book is real fun. Amazon seems to have sent it early and I am not complaining.

It's a lot of text in comparison to the original poster-comic and a lot of stuff seems very repetitive (it's bound to be, right?) since many principles of planes, submarines, rockets are the same (physics). Still a fun read if you don't plow through it in one sitting.

I'm curious to see how the book is received. I excitedly bought and enjoyed the What-If collection, but I'm not sure a book of diagrams with simple language is all that interesting. Thanks for posting what you thought of it.

Do you think it would be educational for children, or is it mostly an amusing curiosity for adults?

I'm now hoping for a book titled "How to build civilization from scratch".

This book comes close: The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World After An Apocalypse

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-Rebuild-World-After-Apocal...

Most of the trouble building a world after Apocalypse, is all those working hard against you - the raiders and thieves and generally chaotic elements. Otherwise, it'd be no harder than setting up a new town somewhere.

In the book he does distinguish between two types of apocalypse - the first is where lots of people die, such as in a global plague or nuclear war. The second type is where the number of people is the same, but infrastructure is wiped out such as a massive solar flare.

In the latter you'll have massive famine and also likely fighting against other survivors.

In any breakdown of society, you'll have broken desperate people who turn to raiding instead of rebuilding. I don't think the two will be very much different?

The latter has 30 days of canned goods food supply on the supermarket shelves; the former perhaps 3000 depending on how awful the plague is.

In the former case, you have a few people and (relatively) a lot of resources. In the latter, you have a lot of people and nowhere near enough resources. That's going to lead to more desperate violence, by many orders of magnitude.

Note that "massive famine and likely fighting against other survivors" will turn an apocalypse of the second sort into an apocalypse of the first sort.

I also think apocalypses that start out as the first sort are also likely to produce famines and fighting against other survivors; survivors will be desperate, and even though the population has declined, the infrastructure to support it (particularly, the social infrastructure, even if the physical infrastructure is untouched) will likely have declined even more than the population.

Depending on how much you mean by "civilization" and "scratch", this isn't the kind of thing that's doable in a lifetime. If it were, international development would be a lot easier.

That has more to do with political corruption in NATO than the difficulties of building a functioning agroeconomy.

There is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch" by Lewis Dartnell.

Not a book, but here's a T-shirt that runs down the basics: https://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code...

(There's a ZOOM link in the description on the right)

Love the idea. But maybe he should expand his vocabulary a little bit beyond 1000 words. Saying "food holder" instead of "dish", obscures instead of clarifies, which defeats the purpose. Same for "up goer" instead of "rocket". And "funny voice air" instead of "helium". I'm intrigued enough to pick up the book, but I know stuff like that will just be annoying.

I don't think it's necessarily meant to clarify. I think it's an exercise in constrained writing.

Maybe you're right. But to me, the purpose of using plain words instead of technical jargon, is to clarify meaning. On the other hand, maybe he's just trying to be funny.

When did "goer" become one of the 1000 most common words in English? Is this really within the self-defined limits?

I think adding suffixes (-s/-es/-er/-ing) is permitted.

To me the whole joke is just how much you can explain using such a ludicrously limited vocabulary. Clarity is a side effect.

I would just like to take this opportunity to do my annual joke that Bill Gates should try and monetise his blog with affiliate links or he'll never make any money.

What rule allowed him to use the word "goer"?

I guess nounification of verbs is allowed.

Maybe he can mentor us on how to do that. /rimshot

> (I usually count all forms of a word, like “kick” and “kicked,” together as one word, although there are a few special cases where I don’t.)

http://blog.xkcd.com/2015/09/22/a-thing-explainer-word-check...

So on a whim, I put some system documentation that I wrote into the simple word writer linked on that page (xkcd.com/simplewriter). So many red words... perhaps that's a challenge suited for another day.

Here's the thing– the "rules" of grammar only really exist to facilitate effective communication.

Every so often, a skilled communicator chooses to bend a rule in order to make a point. If the point is well made, it sticks, and people start imitating it.

Next thing you know, the newly-coined word becomes an "actual" word with real currency. (I put "actual" in quotes, because if you think about it, all words are made up. All "rules" are really just general guidelines.)

All the rules are made up too! Like fashion, language is one of those things where popularity rules.

I would guess he concerned himself more with stems than surface form.

Except "fill" is allowed, but "filler" is not. I think he cheated.

Depending on context, filler is a much more complicated concept. You could be referring to stuff they put in food that is not food, or stuff they put in cracks to fill them in, or a nozzle at a gas station.

By contrast, go is such a foundational word to English that it appears in English reading primers for toddlers, and a goer goes.

grow, grower.

The point is, he's not simply stemming. He cheats.

If he uses regular rules for allowable modifiers (e.g., "-er" can be added to a verb that is in the base list, to form a noun that is refers to the agent of the action described by the verb, then "filler" would be allowed if "fill" but not "filler" was on the list, but only to refer to the actor who causes something to be filled, rather than thing with which something is filled.)

I certainly think its clear (and even implicit in his own descriptions) that the exact methodology is not disclosed, but I don't think its far to say simply "he cheated".

I'm not sure, but I think we can all agree "US Space Team" is an infinitely better name than NASA!

But I'm pretty sure "US" is only allowed because it matches the common word "us", rather than as an acronym for a nation.

Presumably proper names are exempt from the count.

Of course now that you've raised the point, I'll probably have to waste some time today working out a simple word name for myself.

It would seem that he did not allow himself proper nouns:

> I found myself wishing that Munroe had allowed himself a few more terms—“Mars” instead of “red world,” or “helium” instead of “funny voice air.”

Beyond what the other comments said, that was the title of the very first diagram he made like this, and he was probably just trying to pick a punchy title.

Doers gonna do.

The rule that adding an -er to a word you get the agent.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er#Etymology_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_noun

This would make a great Wikipedia! Score for brevity and using words with high frequency.

There is the Simple English wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Although I enjoy the Saturn 5 "Up goer five" description, I doubt that "goer" is in the top 1,000 most common words...

Edit: He's taken the common word list and added different forms as he needed them. Go -> goer and goers, because he wanted to use them. Grow is allowed, but grower and growers are not, because he didn't need them.

They probably classify them by top thousand base words. Otherwise every noun and its plural count, every verb and its conjugations, etc. Though it is kinda cheating to call goer a top word.

I think he's allowing conjugations, e.g. "run", "runs", "running", "ran" count as one word. And he's stretching it to include "goer" as a conjugation of "go".

Looking at the simplewriter's JS [1] that lists the legal words [2], it appears to have 3634 entries in it. I assume that under the "rules" alternate forms of the top 1000 words are permitted. I'm not sure the "rules" have been explained elsewhere. (Perhaps in the book but that's not out yet.)

"goer" is a legal form of go. I mention this because I actually thought for a moment myself it might not be, but of course Googling it revealed it is extensively used in compound words like "movie-goer". Not sure I've ever seen it in the wild standing on its own, but I'll concede the point. One must grant a certain amount of flexibility here...

(And from the "surprisingly klunky translation" department, what player of Final Fantasy X could forget the Blitzball team name the Luca Goers? [3])

[1]: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/

[2]: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/words.js

[3]: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Luca_Goers

There's a whole thread of speculation about the rules on the xkcd forum [1]. It looks like the conclusion is that derived words are allowed, and the base word list comes from here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Co.... "go" is #37.

[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=98621

I wonder at what point does using fewer words become detrimental to understanding.

I think it depends entirely on the audience. If a word is appropriate, and your audience is comfortable with it, then not using it is detrimental.

What if some of your audience knows the word? Then it's a judgement call.

I wonder why this book doesn't explain the fractional reserve banking system. Oh wait, never mind, I know why.

Some of your money that is left in the bank is given to other people so long as they promise to give back even more money. Even though the bank doesn't have all the money that it has taken, so long as most people do not ask for their money at the same time the bank will always have enough for people that want their money back. The bank gives you some extra money for letting them do this. When a lot of people believe the bank can't give their money back, it may cause everyone to try and take their money out. This is called a bank run and can be very bad.

It checks out: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/

That's the description of banking we were taught in school and though it's not wrong, in practice, banks don't really work that way.

Banks deposits are a tiny source of the money banks loan. In practice, they loan out a portion of the collateral that they get when issuing a loan.

Example: They give Bob a house loan for $100K and in return they get the deed to a house worth $110K and an IOU from Bob for $100K (plus some interest). The bank can now treat the house as a $100-110K asset on their own balance sheet and loan part of that asset ($90K) out to another borrower.

Or something like that. ;-)

Its weirder than you think. No banks have owned loans for a very long time. They're resold to various quasi government-ish organizations (think, like the IRS or the federal reserve, although not the IRS) in exchange for cash raised by selling mortgage backed security bonds. All kinds of random individual and orgs own those bonds. They pay off pretty well almost a sure thing when the first derivative of interest rates is negative, not so well at zero to positive.

Banks and mortgage brokers act as commissioned sales forces for the MBS bond market, basically.

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