Re:Ask HN: How to Explain Tech to Parents?
by sircastor on Saturday December 30, 2023 @07:57PM
(#38820823)
>It’s very hard to explain something you know well.
I really like the concept of “it’s tremendously difficult to remember what it’s like to not know something.” I think it frames really well the challenge of explaining a concept to someone.
Your expectations of where the other persons baseline knowledge is will always be off and your assumptions of what is “common knowledge” will be wrong.
A lot of things are also just hard to explain. Many things we know have been learnt by experience - we may not actually know the underlying logic or reasons for doing something - we just know that it’s what you have to do.
Explaining these things to someone who has not gone through the experience is very difficult.