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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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]
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.
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?
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