Re: On Writing: "The Curse of Knowledge"

Paul Brown <[email protected]> Fri, 18 Aug 2017 08:32:55 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.kde.events
Organization	KDE e.V.
Message-ID	<3167539.2Una3rMDBV__31969.0461423763$1503037988$gmane$org@linux-lpbb>
On Friday, 18 August 2017 06:32:10 CEST Valorie Zimmerman wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 2:44 AM, Paul Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Thursday, 17 August 2017 11:38:24 CEST Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> >> > On 17. Aug 2017, at 09:27, Paul Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> > 
> >> > Hi Promo People,
> >> > 
> >> > """
> >> > For Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls "the
> >> > Curse of Knowledge", which he defines as "a difficulty in imagining
> >> > what
> >> > it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The
> >> > curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good
> >> > people write bad prose." """
> >> > 
> >> > Interesting article on why many people's writing is hard to understand
> >> > by
> >> > people outside their immediate circle, despite their vast knowledge.
> >> 
> >> Hi Paul,
> >> This sounds like an interesting read!
> >> Can we have a link to the full article?
> >> Looks like you’ve presented an example of the curse of knowledge right
> >> here
> > 
> > Hah hah! Yeah. Sorry! Link:
> > 
> > https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/single-reason-why-some-people-cant-write-ac
> > cording-glenn-leibowitz
> > 
> > Paul
> 
> Great article! By coincidence, today I read Learning From the Feynman
> Technique:
> 
> https://medium.com/taking-note/learning-from-the-feynman-technique-5373014ad
> 230
> 
> which explains how the great Richard Feynman overcame the problems
> Pinker described.

Ah, yes! Classic. He went into business with his a friend of his son and a 
bunch of other engineers. They worked on computer simulations of particles (of 
course), and one of the things Feynman did was advise on how to explain things 
clearly:

"""
In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we 
were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started 
talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally 
Feynman told us to explain it like this,

"We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on 
the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of 
sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball 
bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of 
imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle 
is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six 
directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very 
similar to the flow of natural fluids."

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated 
the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention 
all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it 
delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real 
understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to 
critique the technical presentations that we made in our product 
introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine 
CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence 
critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' 
Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a 
bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him 
angrier than making something simple sound complicated.
"""

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/

Brilliant.

Paul
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