The idea that popularity must be a sign of shallowness, and hence unpopularity or obscurity a sign of depth, sounds rather shallow to me. My attitude here is more like, if supposedly world-shattering insights can’t be explained in relatively simple language, they either aren’t that great, or we don’t really understand them. Like in this Feynman quote:
Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he came to me and said: “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
I think it’s necessarily truth given the statistical distribution of things. If I say “There’s necessarily less people with PhDs than with masters, and necessarily less masters than college graduates” you’d probably agree.
The theory that “If you understand something, you can explain it simply” is mostly true, but this does not make it easy to understand, as simplicity is not ease (Just try to explain enlightenment / the map-territory distinction to a stupid person). What you understand will seem trivial to you, and what you don’t understand will seem difficult. This is just the mental representation of things getting more efficienct and us building mental shortcuts for things and getting used to patterns.
Proof: There’s people who understand high level mathematics, so they must be able to explain these concepts simply. In theory, they should be able to write a book of these simple concepts, which even 4th graders can read. Thus, we should already have plenty of 4th graders who understand high level mathematics. But this is not the case, most 4th graders are still 10 years of education away from understanding things on a high level. Ergo, either the initial claim (that what you understand can be explained simply) is false, or else “explained simply” does not imply “understood easily”
The excessive humility is a kind og signaling or defense mechanism against criticism and excessive expectations from other people, and it’s rewarded because of its moralistic nature. It’s not true, it’s mainly pleasant-sounding nonsense originating in herd morality.
The idea that popularity must be a sign of shallowness, and hence unpopularity or obscurity a sign of depth, sounds rather shallow to me. My attitude here is more like, if supposedly world-shattering insights can’t be explained in relatively simple language, they either aren’t that great, or we don’t really understand them. Like in this Feynman quote:
I think it’s necessarily truth given the statistical distribution of things. If I say “There’s necessarily less people with PhDs than with masters, and necessarily less masters than college graduates” you’d probably agree.
The theory that “If you understand something, you can explain it simply” is mostly true, but this does not make it easy to understand, as simplicity is not ease (Just try to explain enlightenment / the map-territory distinction to a stupid person). What you understand will seem trivial to you, and what you don’t understand will seem difficult. This is just the mental representation of things getting more efficienct and us building mental shortcuts for things and getting used to patterns.
Proof: There’s people who understand high level mathematics, so they must be able to explain these concepts simply. In theory, they should be able to write a book of these simple concepts, which even 4th graders can read. Thus, we should already have plenty of 4th graders who understand high level mathematics. But this is not the case, most 4th graders are still 10 years of education away from understanding things on a high level. Ergo, either the initial claim (that what you understand can be explained simply) is false, or else “explained simply” does not imply “understood easily”
The excessive humility is a kind og signaling or defense mechanism against criticism and excessive expectations from other people, and it’s rewarded because of its moralistic nature. It’s not true, it’s mainly pleasant-sounding nonsense originating in herd morality.