Explain it to me like I'm ten | Hacker News Reader

Explain it to me like I'm ten

timharford.com

200 pointsbookofjoe74 comments

My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As usual, it very much depends on the target audience.

Incidentally, that's my favourite quote from Blaise Pascal: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

My favorite quote for 10 years was from my 1993 college math professor:

You will never go wrong attributing a pithy quote to Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain.

And then the internet became popular.

I think your professor took that one from Franklin... or was it Mark Twain?

Franklin couldn't predict the future. It was Twain, saying you'd never go wrong attributing a quote to Franklin.

Respecting a timeline only matters in some universes, and in the Universe of Quotes, it certainly does not!

When I was in college I read:

At a party, want to have people think you're really smart?

If someone asks "Where's that [quote] from?" quickly respond "The Bible or Shakespeare."

In English, you'll be right 50% of the time.

Similarly I often read ticket or PR descriptions written by Claude that are so jargon-heavy that I just can't understand on first try. On one side it's a reality check because I always considered English to be close to a mother tongue for me, on the other side I never had to deal with words like "idempotent"... (Seriously, when did this become one of the go-to words to use?)

Idempotency is a crucial trait in the world of web APIs (and any other system where commands that modify state might need to be retried due to communication failures). It's not a new word or concept, but it's certainly a niche one.

Also used in mathematics. A projection P is basically an idempotent mapping, that is P(P(x)) = P(x) for all x.

Yes, but it can be worth it as I've generally found that the most effective professional writing has your high-level request appear within the very first sentence.

This is because it as quickly as possible puts the reader into the context of what you need from them making your rationalization of the request reinforce it, whereas if you try to rationalize before getting to your request a busy reader (think customer support, exec, manager) will be thinking "Okay, okay, okay, what are they getting to? Okay, okay, oh there we go finally I know, now let's consider their rationalization, maybe I should scroll up and re-read".

I started doing this after having done email customer service many years ago, when you're expected to spend as little time as possible per support case, you will speed read their writing until you find the part which says what their issue is, for some emails this was paragraphs. A particularly memorable WoW case for me was something like this, but more verbose:

"I finished the raid last night where we managed to down <boss name>, after we celebrated, I logged off. Then I woke up and went to school as usual, after getting home I tried logging on it showed a message saying I was banned, I was heart-broken as I've put so much time into the game and it means so much to me, so to find out why I logged into my Gmail and an email from you said I was banned due to <reason>."

As a support person, all of that was completely irrelevant except for the part saying "I was banned due to <reason>" (which was commonly due account being compromised by a gold seller looting it and then auto-banned due to stuff they were doing on it).

Something else which reinforced my view of "get to the point quickly" was an HN comment saying how they were once sent on a course on "how as an engineer to communicate effectively with execs" which apparently essentially stated "write your email as you normally would, then at the end take the last paragraph and put it at the top of the email". The rationale being that execs are typically only interested in reading a full email if it's actually relevant to them.

It works in all cases except the important ones, where you expect that your request will be denied upfront and you have to present all the compelling arguments for your request along with the risks of not honoring your request, before you go to formulating what you need as the lesser evil of all the unpleasant alternatives.

Classic Spanish proverb: "Vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa." Literally meaning "Dress me slowly, because I'm in a hurry."

With both ELI5 and this title, the hidden assumption which is generally correct is that "I don't remember much from my education specifically middle and highschool".

Well I do remember my highschool subjects and I feel like there is a chasm between highly detailed technical content created for other profesionals and watered down versions for 5 year olds.

I don't see that many "explain to me like I've finished highschool" content.

You're asking for "explain like you respect my intelligence"

I teach OS security for a masters course. I don't know where my students are for any given semester - it's a mixture between experts who need a certification (I have taught someone who literally wrote the book on a major OS's security model) and people who have ended up on security entirely by accident. It is extremely hard to write something that lands for that entire range. "Finished highschool" is really not a precise determinator in the way "I am literally 5" is.

I'd say a lot of the value in "explain it to me like I'm ten" is just expending more time and effort in explaining something. People of all ages respond to engaging writing and clever analogies, and that tends to accompany the style of writing for a younger or broader audience.

The whole ELIx implies that an advanced narrator has to simplify things for another adult. Why not just call it a simplified ELI-at-my-age?

> a notch in the back of the helmet designed to accommodate hair buns allowed all soldiers, regardless of hair-do, to raise their heads while prone. “A new, more meticulous sizing process that benefitted women benefitted everyone,” Epstein writes.

This isn't a story of accommodating women magically accommodating everyone. It's spending lots of money allowing something for women because they're women, that of course benefits men as well. It's just you wouldn't normally spend that much money on something cosmetic for men; you'd just shave their hair off, so the money can go to something more useful (or not cost the taxpayer as much).

I use “ELI 58” with my coding agent all The time. It’s perfect lol

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