Wow, I don't know why but this explanation blows me away. So simple and yet so accurate.
Wow, I don't know why but this explanation blows me away. So simple and yet so accurate.
So, I second. Great anecdote!
Check out Feynman's very cool "Thinking Machines" t-shirt. He was working with Danny Hillis at the time.
One of their watershed products was the iPod. I had a several mp3 players before the iPod was created. But apple made them cool and thus mainstream.
Now his explanation says a lot about is inner thinking.
1. You need to specify an “origin” which is (0,0).
This is hard because there is more than one good choice (base or top of a brick?), the structure base may be more than a single brick wide, and you still need an orientation for the base bricks relative to the table, since if they’re at an angle, it isn’t the same.
2. This fails, or at least complicates, on structures that are not fully connected, like 2 towers next to each other. XYZ doesn’t have tools for two towers, rotated, at an angle not parallel to the table.
3. You’re fucked on units if there are any “small” half bricks in the structure, which are common in lego sets.
4. It’s not human optimized. If you forget the origin (easy in a big structure, you fail.
It’s not a bad idea, for some forms of the problem, but this underconsideration is why explaining things is hard.
I've had to explain to folks many times (and convince myself) that at some point, once you recognize there are multiple valid 'good' options, you need to move forward. There's often little long term benefit to identifying the 'better' or 'best' option for many projects - you just need an agreed consensus on the ground rules.
Also, what seems to be left off of these exercises sometimes is the concept of subroutines. At some point, rather than giving you explicit instructions for PB&J (like, extend hand, move towards knife, curl fingers around knife handle, move arm back to original position, etc), that can be coded as a named macro/subroutine, and we can just say "grab knife". (or... "grab knife by handle!")
I find this difficult to believe. An innate ability of humans is to teach others - evolution has selected for it, because humans need to be taught, as their living skills are not innate.
I've also seen a documentary that claimed humans have a unique ability to respond to pointing. Pointing is a big part of teaching. No animal has as lengthy a childhood as humans, and that is to teach them how to survive.
It just doesn't make any sense that people are inherently bad at teaching.
Whether it makes sense or not, what is your personal experience with others who try to teach you? Did you have nothing but highly effective teachers in school?
If you did, you are in the rare minority.
"Most people are actually pretty bad at explaining things in a clear, concise, helpful way, very often especially people well-versed in the field they are trying to explain. Communicating complex concepts to non-experts is indeed a fairly rare skill."
is not:
"nothing but highly effective teachers".
Here is the actual logic: if people are not inherently bad at teaching, that means they are mostly effective at it, right? Were most of the teachers you've had in your life effective at teaching? Mine certainly were not.
Perhaps you were having problems with the use of my word "nothing" instead of "mostly," which is just a colloquialism. Idioms of language rarely respond to logic in the way numbers do.
I'll admit to being surprised at such a reaction over the choice of either of these words over the other. My meaning was clear in either case.
Your point has been lost in all the nonsense, but I agree with it.
Given that so few people can explain something, yes. The problem is that explaining requires a very deep understanding which so few people attain. This Feynman story sums it up perfectly[1]:
Once, I [David Goodstein] said to him, "Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics." Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But he came back a few days later to say, "I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it."
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...