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.

If only the LLM coding zealots were aware of this wisdom.

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

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.

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.

The classic example of writing tight and efficient code is:

https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

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

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

I think OPs comment is about education and not intelligence per se.

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.

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.

"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.

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!?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Harford

> But really it's a poetic pairing of punchy adjectives amplified by alliteration!

Silence! You bubble-headed boobie!

-- Dr. Smith

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."

Some Einstein quotes (uncited) on the topic of explaining things:

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."

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.

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.

Really enjoyed the read. Thank you OP.

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?

I must recommend "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy", 10-15 minutes audio episodes, very entertaining and educational.

> 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

I disagree but respect the reasoning

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