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Comment by noahl | Hacker News Reader

Making a concept intuitive and easy to understand is extremely difficult to do. A person who could do this would probably have to understand Paxos better than Lamport does.

I wouldn't assume that Leslie Lamport doesn't want his algorithm to be understood. It's just that explaining things is really, really, really hard.

(This is also why teaching is an incredibly difficult profession.)

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Making an explanation intuitive takes time and effort, but I don't think it requires the explainer to have a better understanding of the concept than another person. They probably must have a good understanding of the concept, but once there is a good enough understanding, I think it's more a matter of finding the right way to explain it.

Lamport's original Paxos paper (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf) is notoriously difficult to understand because he decided to write the whole paper as an archeological survey report. Writing an explanation more intuitive than that isn't difficult even with only a basic understanding of Paxos -- just avoid the whole island and Parliament thing. His later paper (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf) is much more clear.

reading the paxos-simple.pdf it seems it's very much like blockchain

Not necessarily. Sometimes it takes a person who’s involved with “laymen” to explain a solution in simple terms that resonates well with them. This is why being a good teacher is not at all the same trait as being a good researcher: they’re two very distinct skills.

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