Explanations enhance equity

Tuesday July 23, 2024

In achieving understanding, a poor explanation can still be sufficient for people who are relatively advantaged. Better explanations make it possible for more people to achieve understanding more easily.

For a new idea, there was by definition no prior explanation. It is generally quite difficult to come up with new useful ideas, and often takes many years. Only very few people have any understanding of the new idea at first.

Someone, maybe the discoverer, tries to communicate the new idea. This may not be a great explanation. It may be cloaked in specialist language, heavy with background preconceptions, hidden from broader communities.

The trap of a poor explanation is that it can still be good enough for the most active, prepared, diligent seekers. Some will realize it isn't a good explanation, but understand anyway and move on. Others will fight through the poor explanation and conclude, with a kind of Stockholm syndrome, that the explanation is canonical. The poor explanation starts to be repeated to students.

This cycle can get harder to break as it becomes common knowledge that a subject is difficult, even if the difficulty is not innate but due to the poor explanation. It becomes hard to differentiate between removing unneeded complication and "dumbing down" the subject because people have become attached to the way they learned it. Maybe the subject is now a "filter class" that people take pride in having overcome.

An explanation should not be a filter but a fortifier, lifting up the listener from ignorance to understanding. Things should not be oversimplified, but should be made as simple as possible, so that as many people as possible can profit, as quickly as possible, from sharing in mastery—and contribute to the next ideas.