You can't tell people anything

> I’m totally convinced that a new idea or a new plan or a new technique is never really understood when you just explain it. > People will often think they understand, and they’ll say they understand, but then their actions show that it just ain’t so. Isn't this the very reason that homework assignments exist? When I was in college, it took me two years to realize that I could have easily gotten As and Bs (instead of Bs…

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains know when it's…

> I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement. I believe this is true for almost every ambitious (maker/engineer). It’s really hard to convince Management about something new because they don’t experience the pain…

I firmly believe this is almost exclusively a didactic issue, ie. the person explaining does not or cannot reflect what is common knowledge and what needs to be explained in addition to the new ideas. This comment resonated with me so much "I’ve been on the receiving side of this before. What typically happens is the Dunning-Krueger Effect. This is typically understood as incompetent people are too incompetent to determine that they are incompetent, but its lesser-known corollary is that…