–“I genuinely believe that if you can’t explain a concept simply, you don’t understand it.”–
I can explain almost everything simply but can you understand the application and consequences of that simplicity?
So like mathematics the correct statement is that if you can’t reduce it to first principles in parsimonious unambiguous language then you don’t understand it. That doesn’t mean the general audience will.
So, your argument true if and only if the concepts are available to the audience such that they can grasp the connection between set A and Set B. In my experience this often requires quite a bit of training.
And I suspect the most important application of that principle is if the question is ethical (interpersonal) or moral (social, economic, or political) when most of us CAN understand that subject matter even if it takes some effort and examples to make any given point.
Conversely, if I tell you that the universe at every scale follows only one principle and that’s the release of pressure by spatial expansion or concentration by evolutionary computation of persistence of stable relations by discovery of opportunities for organization. Great. If I explain the thirty or so laws that emerge as complexity increases, and then the relation between language and those rules and complexities, and that langauge follows the same rules for the same reason – and so do our thoughts, without a lot of examples that’s very difficult to comprehend and apply.
So yes we can explain complex things in simple terms (calculus being my favorite example) but it doesn’t inform the audience at all ,and while it may stick as awareness of something, it doesn’t stick with them as undersetanding of something.
Furthermore, to make it far worse, when we simplify any statement we and opportuity for ambiguity. Grammar means ‘rules of continuous recursive disambiguation for the purpose of elminating ambiguity upon which we can agree or disagree’ then simplification that adds ambiguity is effectively ‘disinforming’ people which is effectively lying – and givng them opportunit to deduce and induce falsehoods while claiming they’re dependent upon your argument.
It is true for example that we can explain all known laws of the physical universe in an equation that’s about four lines long. But no one can understand it without the work to undersetand it which is — vast to say the least.
It’s true that we can convert the parsimony of those symbols to ordinary language. But again, does that convey the meaning.
What we observe is that without doing the math yourself you don’t really understand the meaning.
So I end up with this problem all the time. If I write something simple (like this reply) and I write something dense in operational language (the equivalent of the math of supply and demand across incommensurable references) and I do not write it unambiguously (the reason for mathematical symbolism) then is the meaning present in what I write? No.
This means we have to teach people to understand what they don’t when the distance between their existing frames and the new frame is greater than they have the intuitions to bridge.
I understand relativity just fine but I also understand mathematics much more deply than all but a few mathematicians (and physicists). And so it is clear to me why Einstein’s equations do not mirror reality at small and large sale – because he did not understand either the constitution and limits of mathematics or the consequences of claiming mathematical measurements were entities (space and time).
If the average person still does not comprehend darwin despitethe simplicity of darwin then what does that mean?
If the most sophisticated philosophers cannot undrestand the grammatical error that is the liar’s paradox – nor can they define truth nor the scientiic method – both of which some of us can define unambiguously, what does that say about the problem of simplicity even of our most complex ideas today?
Anyway. Food for your thought and others.
BTW: I found this post by the new Twitter-X feature of “See Similar Posts” without which I might never have come across your other fine posts.
Affections
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation
Reply addressees: @EdLatimore