Re:If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t...
by rocqua on Thursday June 15, 2017 @06:08PM
(#14564865)
It's not so much life experiences, but prior knowledge and familiarity.
Taking mathematics as the operative example. A lot of deep theorems are trivial when you fully understand all relevant definitions. These proves cannot be stated 'in simple terms' because it took a stack of non-simple definitions to even formulate such a theorem.
Explaining the entirety of the stack gets hard when the stack gets deep. For example, a lot of math gets really hard to explain when the concept of the real numbers being 'uncountably infinite' whilst the rationals are 'countably infinite' isn't obvious.
Re:If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t...
by wnoise on Thursday June 15, 2017 @06:31PM
(#14565026)
> A lot of deep theorems are trivial when you fully understand all relevant definitions.
A lot of deep theorems comes down to properly choosing the definitions so that the theorems are true.
This is also true for literature, poetry, non-analytical philosophy etc. And there the challenges are not about the complexity of the subject, but about its subtlety, and how one needs historical context and/or certain life experiences (or even proclivities) to be able to grasp a particular piece of work.