Comment by juancn
5 days ago
It's really hard to achieve. It takes an awful lot of work and being able to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know everything you know.
5 days ago
It's really hard to achieve. It takes an awful lot of work and being able to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know everything you know.
A lot of writing suffers from the problem of "this explanation only makes sense if you already understand it", and I think it's the default - if the author is essentially explaining the problem to themselves, of course it makes sense to someone who already understands it.
The problem can be perpetuated when e.g. a lecturer sets recommended reading to students. From the lecturer's perspective the selected reading material has clear explanations (because the lecturer understands the subject well), but the students do not feel the same way.
As you say, this takes effort to overcome, both on the author's side and from anyone trying to curate resources - including what we choose to upvote on HN!
Sadly many Universities have lots of professors who just copy books in the blackboard. Those books that asume you already know.
Partially because Universities insist on making professors both teach and perform research (for the most part a few do have a real distinction between teaching and research but most still require at least a token class from most of their researchers) which isn't what most people go into a PhD program to do.
4 replies →
What helps is explaining it to many people, and carefully listening the questions asked by them. It of course help also to have a deeper understanding of the subject matter.