On the other end, when writing, I feel that recursively expanding upon your ideas to explain them and back them up is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced.
When I come up with an idea, I suspect that I do so with whatever abstractions and ideas my brain has on hand, but those are probably not the same as those of the target audience. When I start writing, I’ll end up writing a ~1-2 sentence summary that I feel captures what I’m trying to get across. Then I need to make a conscious effort to unpack each of those component ideas and back them up with reasoning/examples to support my claims, this get’s harder as I further unpack statements, because I’m more inclined to take those claims for granted. I suspect that this gets easier with practice, and that I’ll be able to write progressively more detailed posts as time goes on.
Does anyone else feel that this is a bottleneck on their ability to explain things?
A slight variation on this which I find a challenge is that when I start working on something the inferential distance between me and the target audience might not be that large. After I’ve spent a few hours/days/weeks thinking about something and researching it I might be a few inferential steps from where I started.
Going back and recreating those steps can be difficult unless I remember to note them down as I go.
I definitely struggle with how much to explain. For me, it’s like I can’t always track what ideas are novel vs. familiar to the reader, or what people will think is an argument for my conclusion vs. just pointless exposition vs. crucial background.
Weirdly, I don’t have this problem when teaching physics to people. So this skill seems surprisingly domain-specific.
On the other end, when writing, I feel that recursively expanding upon your ideas to explain them and back them up is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced.
When I come up with an idea, I suspect that I do so with whatever abstractions and ideas my brain has on hand, but those are probably not the same as those of the target audience. When I start writing, I’ll end up writing a ~1-2 sentence summary that I feel captures what I’m trying to get across. Then I need to make a conscious effort to unpack each of those component ideas and back them up with reasoning/examples to support my claims, this get’s harder as I further unpack statements, because I’m more inclined to take those claims for granted. I suspect that this gets easier with practice, and that I’ll be able to write progressively more detailed posts as time goes on.
Does anyone else feel that this is a bottleneck on their ability to explain things?
A slight variation on this which I find a challenge is that when I start working on something the inferential distance between me and the target audience might not be that large. After I’ve spent a few hours/days/weeks thinking about something and researching it I might be a few inferential steps from where I started.
Going back and recreating those steps can be difficult unless I remember to note them down as I go.
I definitely struggle with how much to explain. For me, it’s like I can’t always track what ideas are novel vs. familiar to the reader, or what people will think is an argument for my conclusion vs. just pointless exposition vs. crucial background.
Weirdly, I don’t have this problem when teaching physics to people. So this skill seems surprisingly domain-specific.