> a sure sign that someone is trying to

Nope. Explaining things well is a skill. One can be non-excellent at it. Its possible to have a moderately-good grasp of something that you can use while working with it, but not yet have come up with good ways to make your knowledge explicit in a well-organized fashion.

Moderately-good is not genius.

Part of being great at something includes an ability to abstract out common difficulties, which helps other people to understand (even when you are not that great at explaining).

I'm not aware that I've ever met a genius who was working on completely different principles to other people - everyone reaches the same difficulties and has to find a way to resolve those.

> Moderately-good is not genius.

Agreed.

But moderately-good is also not "a sure sign that someone is trying to appear smarter than they are".

> everyone reaches the same difficulties

That is definitely false. I've had difficulties with social skills, the writing process, and knowing how to direct my attention. Some of these are so alien to other people that when I ask questions, it is not uncommon to get responses like:

* Just do the obvious thing.

* This isn't hard.

* What do you think {repetition of my question}?

* You're overthinking things.

* What the fuck is wrong with you?

The folks I've heard get discouraged from maths or science tell similar stories. Part of being good at the skill of explanation is asking questions which help you understand the other person's perspective and what their difficulties are.

>> everyone reaches the same difficulties

> That is definitely false.

A bit strong, and I don't think your examples are necessarily contradicting this. Obviously everyone has their own experience.

Responses such as "You're overthinking things" most often mean: 'I overcame this problem with practice but it happened subconsciously, so I'm not able to express how I did this.'

No, not always. I have talked to a lot of people who are doing something I just fundamentally know nothing about, and I just cannot follow them. In my experience, people who are trying to appear smart are often intentionally unhelpful when you ask them for clarification or details (though there are of course smart people who just choose to be this way…)

As Feynman said: you don’t really understand a subject until you can explain it to your grandfather.

Just a note, Feynman was very bad at explaining things to uneducated people. He was famous for his insights and ability to explain things to other professionals, but his lectures were very badly received by the students. So I'd take that statement with a grain of salt, as Feynman obviously have way better understanding than an average lecturer.

And that's how I explained the cloud to my grandma: the company buys big daddy servers which make baby computers that the company sells for profit. She was so happy she finally understood what my job was at the time.

When I read this gestation/birth analogy, it makes it seem to me like a large piece of hardware assembles and ejects a small piece of hardware. I assume in-person there was more detail or different imagery?

How about: instead of keeping photos in a shoebox in your cupboard at home, you can keep them in a container at a company's storage place. But people want their own box, so the company divide their container box up into pigeon-holes and fit all the shoeboxes in to the spaces in it. If you want to look at the pictures you can go and view them, you only have access to your own shoebox though.

Shoebox is logical computer, cupboard is computer, container is a distant "big" computer (server), pigeon hole is a virtual server.

Now you might have a few boxes of photos at different companies -- the cloud is being able to see/use all those photos at the same time from anywhere in the World.

[Perhaps too close to storage model vs processing model of cloud?]