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temporallobe 20 hours ago [-]
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.
stillpointlab 25 minutes ago [-]
This brought to mind the often quoted assumption that intelligence and compression are intimately related.
A well edited letter may therefore be a sign of intelligence.
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.
necovek 9 hours ago [-]
I think your professor took that one from Franklin... or was it Mark Twain?
bookofjoe 4 hours ago [-]
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.
waynesonfire 11 hours ago [-]
If only the LLM coding zealots were aware of this wisdom.
jonathanlydall 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jodacola 3 hours ago [-]
This sounds a lot like the BLUF technique [0]. This is one of my favorite techniques in professional settings.
I don't interpret this as contradictory to the OP's point and quote: in order to determine the most important first line, one must slow down to identify exactly what that is.
Classic Spanish proverb: "Vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa." Literally meaning "Dress me slowly, because I'm in a hurry."
trashb 9 hours ago [-]
I find that this quote is not just applicable to writing of natural language like letters. It also applies to code, and is becoming more and more evident to me due to the use of AI.
I believe the idea presented transcends writing actually. For example you could also apply it to painting or sculpting. I think this points to the character of creative thinking where one "chips" away at a subject until it is considered as finished.
WillAdams 5 hours ago [-]
The classic example of writing tight and efficient code is:
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?)
Modified3019 7 hours ago [-]
Idempotent is definitely a word that’s strangely awkward and alien to actually use, but makes reasonable sense when the etymology is known.
The closest alternative I can think of is debouncing/debounced
joshuahedlund 6 hours ago [-]
> jargon-heavy
Yes. It’s even worse than jargon tho I think it just invents its own metaphors. At first I thought this was clever and useful, helping me to internalize the code (“the normal path vs the escape hatch”) but I’m increasingly finding the metaphors to be so thick and esoteric that it’s actually a hurdle to understanding the actual code.
interf4ce 7 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
17 hours ago [-]
mahdi7d1 17 hours ago [-]
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.
watercast 17 hours ago [-]
I used to work in higher ed. The reason you don't see this is that it's harder to produce (usably) than an eli5; there is little incentive as there aren't many advanced enough to want it who aren't also in walled off training; and there are often many tiers between layperson and professional such that connecting the right audience with the right material is its own problem. I agree it is terribly frustrating.
mjg59 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jamilton 17 hours ago [-]
I think at some point you just have to try to read the technical content then see what you don't understand and figure that out.
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
You're asking for "explain like you respect my intelligence"
baxtr 12 hours ago [-]
I think OPs comment is about education and not intelligence per se.
FinnLobsien 22 hours ago [-]
I think constraints essentially force you to reevaluate the thing from base principles because you add a condition that’s incompatible with the default way of doing things.
I think this is also why hackathons work: You can’t afford the bikeshedding we often do to avoid the hard work because you need to ship something by a deadline 1/500th of most of your normal deadlines, so all of your effort is concentrated into what moves the core work forward.
What gets proven in hackathons often become features, products, or companies later - even if they’re things that would be ruled out in any planning meeting because they seem too hard/laborious.
bariumbitmap 21 hours ago [-]
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.
gerdesj 18 hours ago [-]
"puzzling than pellucid"
Pellucid might be cromullant but it ain't pervasive. I have never heard that word and I've heard quite a few. If I had to guess: it might be American (US) in situ wankery only, for the use of.
Might be wrong.
pbhjpbhj 17 hours ago [-]
Harford, the author of the OC, is a learned man of at least middle-age (sorry!). He has been a journalist for decades.
I suspect he may have had an education including Latin (per-lucid => pellucid) making that word choice far more natural. But really it's a poetic pairing of punchy adjectives amplified by alliteration!
I'm a fan of his work generally. This piece landed well with me, I like to read less used vocabulary too. So often I can't express myself naturally because people don't share my word sense; it's liberating to release those bounds when writing for a more academic audience; as Hartford clearly was here.
I did spot an error:
>soldier a rifle
They mean shoulder, of course. Surprised if a newspaper editor or personal spellchecker missed that; perhaps it was left in as bait for social media comments!?
> But really it's a poetic pairing of punchy adjectives amplified by alliteration!
Silence! You bubble-headed boobie!
-- Dr. Smith
ahazred8ta 2 hours ago [-]
Jonathan Harris gave an interview where he described the suit-wearing stuntman Bob May as "A very strange individual, even by the standards of the 1960s. Whenever I said 'you bubble-headed booby', I wasn't talking to the robot."
aristofun 6 hours ago [-]
I have to admit that is the biggest challenge for me in working at modern IT companies - to understand the language.
I attribute that to me not being a native speaker. I always feel they all speak like Im 100, not ten.
Because of abundance of peculiar terminology, unusual ways of doing and describing things, extreme diversity of accents etc sometimes it feels like people intentionally make things more complicated than they are.
It’s sometimes harder for me to understand and make sense than most boring philosophical lectures on youtube.
8bitsrule 13 hours ago [-]
Some Einstein quotes (uncited) on the topic of explaining things:
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."
matherial 18 hours ago [-]
I agree, but not everyone can. I've worked with several people who were top experts in their field and absolutely sucked at accessible explanations. The author alludes to it here: "the very expertise that makes the expert worth consulting also makes it hard for the expert to imagine what it was like to know nothing about the topic" - but that also carries over to ELI5 or ELI10. Another problem is that, to be frank, experts sometimes don't know how to explain certain concepts. For example, you can be adept in calculus without knowing where the rules come from. All you can do is relay the rulebook to someone else.
Another problem, I think, is that we're actually overindexing on ELI5 / ELI10, a problem compounded by YouTube educators and LLMs. Many skills are hard to learn and require some trial, error, and hands-on practice. It's easy to come up with an endless supply of childlike metaphors. It's a lot harder to actually teach someone that way.
philipallstar 4 hours ago [-]
> 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).
karim79 17 hours ago [-]
Really enjoyed the read. Thank you OP.
hsuduebc2 8 hours ago [-]
I must recommend "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy", 10-15 minutes audio episodes, very entertaining and educational.
viralreferapp 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
effnorwood 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hny6epwg93 22 hours ago [-]
I disagree but respect the reasoning
01284a7e 23 hours ago [-]
"fusillades of acronyms"...
Fusillades? No ten year old knows that word.
rpdillon 23 hours ago [-]
The blog post isn't directed at 10-year-olds. In fact, you're pulling a phrase from a paragraph that's describing exactly how you should not speak when talking to a 10-year-old.
> The simplest constraint for anyone trying to explain a complex topic is to accept the request to “explain it to me like I’m 10 years old”. What’s packed into that request is, vividly exaggerated, the reminder that what seems obvious to an expert is often incomprehensible to the listener. Technical jargon and fusillades of acronyms are often used to convey an explanation that has been denuded of all the foundations and context that might allow it to make sense.
01284a7e 23 hours ago [-]
My point stands. The author can't explain explaining it like I'm ten like I'm ten.
nemosaltat 22 hours ago [-]
It might be helpful to note that this article was written for the FT (as he mentions at the very bottom.) While it aphoristically may make a “pre out of you and me,” I presume neither the author, nor the subscribership of FT _are_ indeed (or wish to be) constrained to the language of a typical 10-year-old. Presumably the same would apply to the readership of HN.
We don’t know if the author _can_ explain it like we’re ten, but I think we can be reasonably certain they understandably chose not to.
kelnos 21 hours ago [-]
The author can do that, but didn't for literary effect. And he can do that because his audience is FT readers, not 10-year-olds.
AnimalMuppet 23 hours ago [-]
Ten-year-olds don't need advice on how to explain something like the listener is ten.
cwmoore 20 hours ago [-]
“Explain it like I am an adult.” - 10yo
atoav 22 hours ago [-]
Good thing they never claimed to be writing in that style then. Not sure what you're working yourself up over here. Authors are allowed to write about a method of writing without having to apply it themselves.
Chris2048 22 hours ago [-]
Is "explaining it like I'm ten" a complex topic?
rzzzt 23 hours ago [-]
It's when multiple soldiers are ordered to fire their guns very quickly, either everyone at once or one after another.
vova_hn2 22 hours ago [-]
I think that the author is doing it deliberately, to put the reader in the shoes of someone who has a hard time understanding some of the words, and reinforce his point.
As a non-native English speaker there are 4 words in this article that I had to look up, which is significantly higher than a typical article from HN frontpage (usually it's 0, occasionally 1).
If anyone curious, the words are: pellucid, fusillades, pram (idk, why I never heard it. I knew the word "stroller", of course, but I never thought about different kinds of strollers), octogenarian (this one I could have guessed from Latin roots and context, was lazy).
ErrantX 19 hours ago [-]
As a native English speaker; pellucid was new to me.
Fusillades specifically was unfamiliar but I inferred if from context and knowing fusilier.
sltkr 18 hours ago [-]
There's also “lexiphanic” and “denuded” (uncommon but clear from context in this case).
hn_go_brrrrr 22 hours ago [-]
Pram is common in British English. I'm guessing you learned US English, which doesn't use it.
KineticLensman 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, as slang for ‘perambulator’, which is basically ‘stroller’
ninalanyon 8 hours ago [-]
Not really a stroller is a pushchair.
A pram is a kind of mobile bed for babies.
KineticLensman 3 hours ago [-]
Fair enough.
In my defence, I was coming at it etymologically, where (according to the OED), a perambulator is 'A person who walks or travels through or about a place' (hence 'walker') OR 'A carriage for a baby or young child, which may be pushed along by a person on foot. Now usually shortened to pram [...] a cradle mounted on four wheels'.
So 'mobile bed' is a perfect description
pm215 21 hours ago [-]
Though even in the UK I think it has a slightly old fashioned feel -- I feel like parents are more likely to have a pushchair than a pram.
pbhjpbhj 18 hours ago [-]
My understanding was that a pram is used for a younger child, they are laid flat. A pushchair/buggy for an older child, they sit. Language is often used incorrectly however.
The word pram doesn't exist in American English, true, but you'll learn it anyway if you ever read Peter Pan.
ranger_danger 23 hours ago [-]
I don't think the article itself was intended to be written for a 10-year-old to understand it.
nemosaltat 23 hours ago [-]
Neither did the author
> If you are reading this column you definitely aren’t a typical 10-year-old, but the image of the bewildered 10-year-old gives the expert an anchor to help them slow down and simplify [0]
[0] TFA
jimmygrapes 18 hours ago [-]
Pirate books use it a lot!
Smaug123 12 hours ago [-]
I just checked on Gutenberg and was surprised to find that Hornblower doesn't use the word! But the second sentence of the first Sherlock Holmes book (A Study in Scarlet) introduces Watson as having been a member of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers.
thaumasiotes 21 hours ago [-]
> No ten year old knows that word.
Why would you think that?
esikich 21 hours ago [-]
Because they pretty much just learned to read?
singpolyma3 19 hours ago [-]
... 5 years prior
esikich 18 hours ago [-]
Well I've got 38 years of reading experience and have never seen that word.
18 hours ago [-]
basscomm 16 hours ago [-]
If you can't glean the definition from context, anyone 10 years old or older should be able to use a dictionary.
thaumasiotes 11 hours ago [-]
You know how you'll see people talking about the difference between having five years of experience, or having one year of experience five times in a row?
A well edited letter may therefore be a sign of intelligence.
You will never go wrong attributing a pithy quote to Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain.
And then the internet became popular.
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.
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.
I don't interpret this as contradictory to the OP's point and quote: in order to determine the most important first line, one must slow down to identify exactly what that is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
I believe the idea presented transcends writing actually. For example you could also apply it to painting or sculpting. I think this points to the character of creative thinking where one "chips" away at a subject until it is considered as finished.
https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
The closest alternative I can think of is debouncing/debounced
Yes. It’s even worse than jargon tho I think it just invents its own metaphors. At first I thought this was clever and useful, helping me to internalize the code (“the normal path vs the escape hatch”) but I’m increasingly finding the metaphors to be so thick and esoteric that it’s actually a hurdle to understanding the actual code.
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.
I think this is also why hackathons work: You can’t afford the bikeshedding we often do to avoid the hard work because you need to ship something by a deadline 1/500th of most of your normal deadlines, so all of your effort is concentrated into what moves the core work forward.
What gets proven in hackathons often become features, products, or companies later - even if they’re things that would be ruled out in any planning meeting because they seem too hard/laborious.
Pellucid might be cromullant but it ain't pervasive. I have never heard that word and I've heard quite a few. If I had to guess: it might be American (US) in situ wankery only, for the use of.
Might be wrong.
I suspect he may have had an education including Latin (per-lucid => pellucid) making that word choice far more natural. But really it's a poetic pairing of punchy adjectives amplified by alliteration!
I'm a fan of his work generally. This piece landed well with me, I like to read less used vocabulary too. So often I can't express myself naturally because people don't share my word sense; it's liberating to release those bounds when writing for a more academic audience; as Hartford clearly was here.
I did spot an error:
>soldier a rifle
They mean shoulder, of course. Surprised if a newspaper editor or personal spellchecker missed that; perhaps it was left in as bait for social media comments!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Harford
Silence! You bubble-headed boobie!
-- Dr. Smith
I attribute that to me not being a native speaker. I always feel they all speak like Im 100, not ten.
Because of abundance of peculiar terminology, unusual ways of doing and describing things, extreme diversity of accents etc sometimes it feels like people intentionally make things more complicated than they are.
It’s sometimes harder for me to understand and make sense than most boring philosophical lectures on youtube.
https://www.azquotes.com/author/4399-Albert_Einstein/tag/und...
including (something like) the most usual one:
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."
Another problem, I think, is that we're actually overindexing on ELI5 / ELI10, a problem compounded by YouTube educators and LLMs. Many skills are hard to learn and require some trial, error, and hands-on practice. It's easy to come up with an endless supply of childlike metaphors. It's a lot harder to actually teach someone that way.
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).
Fusillades? No ten year old knows that word.
> The simplest constraint for anyone trying to explain a complex topic is to accept the request to “explain it to me like I’m 10 years old”. What’s packed into that request is, vividly exaggerated, the reminder that what seems obvious to an expert is often incomprehensible to the listener. Technical jargon and fusillades of acronyms are often used to convey an explanation that has been denuded of all the foundations and context that might allow it to make sense.
We don’t know if the author _can_ explain it like we’re ten, but I think we can be reasonably certain they understandably chose not to.
As a non-native English speaker there are 4 words in this article that I had to look up, which is significantly higher than a typical article from HN frontpage (usually it's 0, occasionally 1).
If anyone curious, the words are: pellucid, fusillades, pram (idk, why I never heard it. I knew the word "stroller", of course, but I never thought about different kinds of strollers), octogenarian (this one I could have guessed from Latin roots and context, was lazy).
Fusillades specifically was unfamiliar but I inferred if from context and knowing fusilier.
A pram is a kind of mobile bed for babies.
In my defence, I was coming at it etymologically, where (according to the OED), a perambulator is 'A person who walks or travels through or about a place' (hence 'walker') OR 'A carriage for a baby or young child, which may be pushed along by a person on foot. Now usually shortened to pram [...] a cradle mounted on four wheels'.
So 'mobile bed' is a perfect description
A ring-sling suited us better.
I think the modern style is a multi-hundred pound (£) infant travel system. https://www.argos.co.uk/browse/baby-and-nursery/travel/trave... - up to £1500 in this relatively down-market UK shop.
> If you are reading this column you definitely aren’t a typical 10-year-old, but the image of the bewildered 10-year-old gives the expert an anchor to help them slow down and simplify [0]
[0] TFA
Why would you think that?