Somebody commented on my YT vid that they found my explanations easy to follow. This surprised me. My prior was/is tentatively that I’m really bad at explaining anything to other people, since I almost never[1] speak to anybody in real-time other than myself and Maria (my spirit animal).
And when I do speak to myself (eg₁, eg₂, eg₃), I use heavily modified Englishand a vocabulary of ~500 idiolectic jargon-words (tho their usage is ~Zipfian, like with all other languages).
I count this as another datapoint to my hunch that, in many situations:
Your ability to understand yourself is a better proxy for whether other people will understand you compared to the noisy feedback you get from others.
And by “your ability to understand yourself”, I don’t mean just using internal simulations of other people to check whether they understand you. I mean, like, check for whether the thing you think you understand, actually make sense to you, independent of whatever you believe ought to make sense to you. Whatever you believe ought to make sense is often just a feeling based on deference to what you think is true (which in turn is often just a feeling based on deference to what you believe other people believe).
To make this concrete: the last time I spoke to anybody irl was 2022 (at EAGxBerlin)—unless we count the person who sold me my glasses, that one plumber, a few words to the apothecarist, and 5-20 sentences to my landlord. I’ve had 6 video calls since February (all within the last month). I do write a lot, but ~95-99% to myself in my own notes.
Basically, if you are confused about some topic, it does not matter how good communicator you are—your explanation will still be confusing.
Being a very good communicator can actually make it worse; for example you may invent a fascinating—but completely wrong—metaphor for something. You can create an illusion of understanding, without the understanding.
Somebody commented on my YT vid that they found my explanations easy to follow. This surprised me. My prior was/is tentatively that I’m really bad at explaining anything to other people, since I almost never[1] speak to anybody in real-time other than myself and Maria (my spirit animal).
And when I do speak to myself (eg₁, eg₂, eg₃), I use heavily modified English and a vocabulary of ~500 idiolectic jargon-words (tho their usage is ~Zipfian, like with all other languages).
I count this as another datapoint to my hunch that, in many situations:
Your ability to understand yourself is a better proxy for whether other people will understand you compared to the noisy feedback you get from others.
And by “your ability to understand yourself”, I don’t mean just using internal simulations of other people to check whether they understand you. I mean, like, check for whether the thing you think you understand, actually make sense to you, independent of whatever you believe ought to make sense to you. Whatever you believe ought to make sense is often just a feeling based on deference to what you think is true (which in turn is often just a feeling based on deference to what you believe other people believe).
To make this concrete: the last time I spoke to anybody irl was 2022 (at EAGxBerlin)—unless we count the person who sold me my glasses, that one plumber, a few words to the apothecarist, and 5-20 sentences to my landlord. I’ve had 6 video calls since February (all within the last month). I do write a lot, but ~95-99% to myself in my own notes.
Basically, if you are confused about some topic, it does not matter how good communicator you are—your explanation will still be confusing.
Being a very good communicator can actually make it worse; for example you may invent a fascinating—but completely wrong—metaphor for something. You can create an illusion of understanding, without the understanding.