I don't quite think the message-doesn't-exist example is caused by "dumbing down" too much. To me, the message "it no longer exists" is not the work of someone who, in trying to make layman understand, overdid it.
Instead, it's the typical kind of mistake made by writers who forget about context.
From the programmer's perspective, I speculate, the error _is_ indeed a case of something being non-existent. The code is written to fetch something from the server, the server says it's not there, and well, the application should tell the user about it.
Within the very narrow context of fetching it from the server, "doesn't exist" is correct. However, in the context of the user who's sitting there looking at the message, "doesn't exist" is simply false.
The message needs to be re-contextualized, such that it makes sense. "The message doesn't exist on the server, it exists on your computer at the moment, but just for a short while, so you better copy it".
It doesn't matter whether the user understand what a "server" is. Simply knowing that the message doesn't exist [at some place], is enough to make the whole sentence sensible.
Like if I go to a car mechanic, who just points to the whole car and say "it's gonna be replaced", it would be confusing. But if he says that "xxx is gonna be replaced", that's perfectly comprehensible, even if I don't know what xxx is.
It could say "cloud" instead of server and "your device" instead of cache and laypeople would get it, I think. It's unfortunate that servers are called cloud but at least there's a word that's commonly understood. Not sure if "on our end" would work, perhaps it would, too.
Contrary to GP I have no doubt that the original message was phrased the way it was to avoid explaining how things work, on the theory that it's bad form to explain this, because users understanding it is neither possible nor desirable. If a programmer was writing naturally, for their colleague or future self to read the message, the server and the cache would certainly make an appearance. They weren't omitted because the context was obvious but because exposing the context was considered undesirable; I think so because a more internal rather than end-user error message never looks like this.
Sometimes it feels like the trend online right now is to design everything to make you stupider, on the theory that if it asks less of you will go along with it more easily. For instance, Google results seem more "least common denominator" every month. No longer can I search for something subtle and get subtle results; their algorithm pushes me towards and unhelpful answers. Maybe it's because lots of people do respond better to this, so it shows up better in the data. Anyway I hate it. I would like to gradually learn more as I interact with things, and engage with the complexity in systems, not have it hidden from me.
It would be interesting to see, but my guess is that it would be exploited to death very quickly. There is a constant cat and mouse game between search engine and those who want to "optimize" their results. Going back and staying there would be like having the mouse stand still, not good.
It would have to be a different product, developed in parallel, rather than a snapshot of the past.
I don't think it's that simple. It's a cat and mouse game but the cat can't catch two different mice. If the classic Google algorithm is significantly different from the new one, SEO that's targeting the new algorithm wouldn't be as successful with the old one which is also barely used (so no one would bother optimizing for the old algorithm).
Then make it so the new algorithm penalizes people abusing the old/simple algorithm (and since the old algorithm is simple, it should be simpler to catch people abusing it too).
> Coca-Cola might have taken the cocaine out of their drink, but the company still needed to source coca leaves, which became more and more challenging. By 1914, the American federal government had officially restricted cocaine to medicinal use. So, as the government began debating an official import ban, Coke sent its lobbyists into the fray, pushing for a special exemption. Their fingerprints are all over the Harrison Act of 1922, which banned the import of coca leaves, but included a section permitting the use of “de-cocainized coca leaves or preparations made therefrom, or to any other preparations of coca leaves that do not contain cocaine.” Only two companies were given special permits by the act to import those coca leaves for processing — one of which was Maywood Chemical Works, of Maywood, New Jersey, whose biggest customer was the Coca-Cola company.
> This special loophole would carry over in every piece of anti-narcotics legislation that followed, including international agreements restricting the global trade in coca leaves. Over the ensuing decades, the company continued to demonstrate the lengths to which they would go to protect their supply, from supporting opposition to the traditional use of coca, to developing a secret coca farm of their own on Hawaiʻi.
I mean, yeah, there are certainly plenty of business models that rely on people not understanding what it is that they're buying. If you want to make your living that way, I can believe it's not that hard. But that doesn't mean that money can't be made by selling to intelligent people and attempting to educate the less informed. I know how I prefer to spend my short time here on Earth.
Many of you will be familiar with this story: military pilot gear was once designed for the average person, but then they realized that actually, most people deviate significantly from the average in at least one way. So they made the gear adjustable, and that greatly improved performance and reduced mistakes.
Why is it that in tech we are often told a seemingly contrary narrative -- that everything is better, or at least more profitable, when targeted to some hypothetical average person, and who cares about the diversity of individuals?
Might be that military pilots are much more engaged with the product than the average google-user with search.
Or how these digital tools pervade spaces where everyone has to be able to use them, even if they're the type that refuses to engage with the text displayed in message boxes or technical jargon like "files" and "tabs", because they have the expertise that is more valuable to the business than the peripheral software. A greater expectation and insistence that things "just work", that the tools get out of the way instead of integrating with the user.
Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't.
> Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't
You design a different car to win F1 races, to take a couch across town, to drive a family on a weekend trip, to win rally races, to haul a boat … but in software we don’t want to do that. We want everything to do everything because “niche” markets are too small for companies to keep growing into the stratosphere.
See also: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. (zawinski's law)
There’s a military, and by proxy a government and a country’s populace behind a pilot who are all invested in a pilot’s success. In battle or on missions they don’t get many do-overs and pilots and planes are expensive to mobilize and to lose. Millions of dollars are on the line each time they take off, better to get it right the first time.
For ad driven search engine products the more you as a user flail the more ads you can be served on subsequent searches, so long as they ride the line of not driving you away entirely. A string of ten searches that fail you is bad because their product looks ineffective but two or three searches to get what you want is better for their bottom line than nailing it on your first attempt.
The military in general seem to be more rationally grounded than civilians, as far as work is concerned. Promiscuity with death must encourage a different "work culture".
I get the feeling that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of people that think the military is a competent meritocracy and the number of people that actually served in the military.
It’s a giant government bureaucracy, with plenty of stupid internal politics, and gross incompetency. No better or worse than any other large organization.
Thinking that people that have trait X in common to also have some admirable trait Y is unfortunately wishful thinking. The military may for some be one of the last areas of such thinking.
My direct experience is very limited, but I've heard a few decent things from people better involved than I am. I suppose "the military" is a wide thing, there must be consequential differences between, say, American bureaucrats and French field soldiers in Africa for example. The former shouldn't be as close to death, or to soldiers who are, on a daily basis.
I miss Norton Disk Doctor, not because I work on drive recovery but because it had an interface that respected the user’s intelligence.
Every other storage-related system I’ve ever used either had inscrutable gibberish like:
“Mode 5/7?” [Y]
Or overly dumbed down questions like:
Are you sure? [N]
What am I sure about!? What is mode 5? Or is it 7? Both? What!? [1]
Norton meanwhile had several paragraphs of text explaining what every decision meant. It explained concepts inline. It provided an explanation of the benefits and risks. It let you make an informed choice instead of just hitting Y over and over and hoping for the best.
This kind of respect for the reader / user applies to all forms of technical writing such as manuals, user interfaces, blog articles, and API docs.
Instead of trying to dumb down the text for a “lay” audience, try to educate all audiences to become more technical after having read and understood what you wrote.
[1] That is verbatim from a Hitachi SAN array that was holding all of the data for a government department. The manual helpfully explained that this option toggles between mode 5/7 being either on or off. If you choose wrong the array will erase itself and kill your cat. Or neither of those things. Who knows?
A similar point applies to settings menus in software, especially advanced settings. It takes very little effort for people who make these settings to include e.g. a short tooltip explanation for every setting. Yet this is rarely done.
I agree this is true if your goal is to inform. If, however, your goal is to increase clicks, decrease support tickets, and get engagement, I'd be surprised if being technically descriptive and accurate is better than dumbing it down to the point of inaccuracy.
None of that is to say that I agree with the goal of engagement over conveying information.
It's important to begin violently opposing, not just disagreeing with, the theory of engagement and revenue creation. It must become dangerous indeed for those who decide to pursue those goals.
freedom fighters take calculated risks, they believe there's a prize that they can win.
collaborators think that they are helping minimise harm and using the leverage/finance to help a lot more people than they could otherwise help/contribute to. nobody ever woke up and said, today I will do evil things. Man does not err willingly.
That's what you think; I think plenty of people have shown that they wake up and prioritise themselves and only themselves. They don't think in terms of good or evil. They think "will this benefit me? Will this make me more money? Give me more status? More power?"
My mistake for engaging with you; you have checkmated me. You are asking me for my sources now, whereas I should have asked you first what your source was for your claim about "nobody choosing to do evil". Alas, that now looks weak and desperate.
Many collaborators I've talked to have shown confusion about why they should do things to cause some far away revolutionary improvement to their own lives, or even less the lives of others, when it would involve putting themselves and loved ones at risk.
Like not only do they feel the risk is too great and the payoff too little. But they also can't comprehend what would motivate anyone to act that way. Sometimes they even insist that revolutionaries must be insane or mentally deficient.
But I don't know if it's the case that people make a decision to be this way. I think it's just the default way to be, given a relatively stable life.
People won't really be able to account for why they became this way, or think of a time when they weren't this way. To them it will just be common sense, while revolutionary thought will just seem dangerous, anathema, and basically unthinkable and wasteful.
I think it's like a mental block that evolved to let us form stable social groups. And I think that certain circumstances can unblock it.
In particular I think that a person can get so traumatized by the state of affairs and things that happen to them that they have a strong reaction that causes them to give up hope for getting rewarded by the current regime. Then a person begins investing significant portions of their effort not in just surviving the current regime, but in overthrowing and changing it in a positive way. They begin to live on the hope of justice they can bring for not only themselves, but also others. They see their own lives as irrevocably altered by the trauma, and become agents for the cause of breaking that cycle. To them, the dream of a future generation not having to experience that trauma can be more motivating than thoughts of their own survival.
I believe that just like the first mode evolved to keep societal groups stable, the revolutionary mode evolved to let groups compete with each other and achieve beneficial new power structures.
Why bring that up? We all know it's BS, and the people who do it are expletive deleted morons. We're interested in what the smart people do .. and even better smart with a touch of class.
The older I get the less and less patience I have with people pushing the "it's all politics", "everybody lies and manages up/down and if you don't you're a fool", or it's all about image.
While there's smallish elements of truth to each in individual cases, this just cannot be the knee jerk reaction.
Know BS when you see it then say it. It's not tough.
The corruption is systematic and automated, so the struggle and response must be systematic and automated as well as forceful. Not knee jerk. But more organized than simple individuals doing the right thing. And much more forceful.
It must become very dangerous to be an exploiter of the human condition. Must become very dangerous for capitalists, executives, marketers, and so on.
Force and systematization/automation are required to gain power. And power is required to end capitalism.
Do you realize that you're on the Ycombinator news site?
Do you realize that ycomb is an incubator of startups?
Ycomb actively engages in the 'engagement and revenue creation' as S.O.P.. It's kind of their whole schtick. It's most people's schtick because that's how we feed ourselves.
How else would one frame the 'information age' except through engagement and revenue creation? Engagement = data. Data = money. Money = stuff, fun, alimony, child support, back taxes, and a drinking habit. I'm just sayin'.
I struggle a lot with this in my work. I can’t assume that my readers are fluent English speakers, nor that they understand the topic. I can’t even assume that they care to understand. I have adopted a plain and unambiguous writing style that hopefully accounts for it. I am now experimenting with formatting that allows them to skim everything and still get the gist of it. In my opinion, nhs.uk is the best example to learn from.
People are not stupid, but they are busy, tired, lazy, or simply not that interested in the finer details. There is a balance between respecting their intellect and respecting their time.
That's a cool observation - it could just be GP's natural turn of phrase. I know a few people who never use any contractions when they speak. I assume it's a local/familial style.
Funny, I always thought Feynman's Razor was along these lines (from 1979 QED lectures in New Zealand, response to audience question):
> Q: "Do you like the idea that our picture of the world has to be based on a calculation which involves probability?"
> A: "...if I get right down to it, I don't say I like it and I don't say I don't like it. I got very highly trained over the years to be a scientist and there's a certain way you have to look at things. When I give a talk I simplify a little bit, I cheat a little bit to make it sound like I don't like it. What I mean is it's peculiar. But I never think, this is what I like and this is what I don't like, I think this is what it is and this is what it isn't. And whether I like it or I don't like it is really irrelevant and believe it or not I have extracted it out of my mind. I do not even ask myself whether I like it or I don't like it because it's a complete irrelevance."
As far as complexity and how to explain things to people without technical experience of the subject, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. Here's a nice quote from the rotation in space section of the caltech lectures:
> "We shall not use these equations in all their generality and study all their consequences, because this would take many years, and we must soon turn to other subjects. In an introductory course we can present only the fundamental laws and apply them to a very few situations of special interest."
That’s such a typical Feynman answer too. charitably he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to misspeak or suggest something untrue from his position of expertise - but it does also come off as being dodgy about answering people’s questions. He does the exact same thing in that video clip where an interviewers asks him how magnets work .
That's just part of the answer, he goes on to say that if you ask questions of nature and don't like the answers then that's just too bad, you don't get to dictate to nature how to behave. Scientists who don't like particular results because they don't match their philosophy of how things should be (most famously Einstein and QM) tend to end up tilting at windmills and not making any more progress.
However, humans can't help having likes and dislikes but I think the trick is to save that for other areas of interest - e.g., art or music or people or activities that you like for entirely subjective reasons.
(I find this noteworthy because I've been putting all this effort into writing a series of blog posts about the scientific method and I've gotten very little feedback on that. But this little throwaway comment, that gets attention! Life is funny sometimes.)
That won't work because many people here post anonymously. They have a throwaway account and make a new one now and then to leave no trace to their real identity. Leaving an email address would mean having to maintain a throwaway email in sync with the HN account.
Nowadays that's even harder to do since HN shadowbans new accounts for a while. You write a comment and you are surprised that nobody replies. It's because nobody but yourself can see it.
Which, ironically, contributes to the issue disussed here.
I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now.
Funny that the author himself failed to reproduce Feynman's quote: it should be "And there are now sixty two kinds of particles", not "And there are not sixty two kinds of particles".
If something can be explained without technical jargon in a way that satisfies novice and expert, what use is the jargon?
I feel the example given in the article is bad because it isn't useful to either person, and jargon doesn't improve or lessen it. It's simply a poor explanation, which makes the argument weak.
I agree. I think that most of the time highly specialized topics have a lot of subtle context required. You either communicate all of that, or use jargon to get around it.
In some cases I think it's possible to do this and satisfy both groups but it's harder and takes more words (which is important in a media context at least).
That said I imagine there's a spectrum here and you can usually find suitable middle ground.
>what the hell does this mean? The message doesn’t exist, but I can copy its contents? If I can copy its contents…why can’t I save it?? If it doesn’t exist why do I have to discard it??
Maybe it should be even less descriptive.
"This message will soon no longer be available. Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you discard if you want to use them later."
Talking about the cache doesn't help the user. Really the solution is to add a button at the end of the message that says "save message contents to device." Then the message is clear and easily actionable.
The message could also give both this actionable advice and lisper's more technical explanation. You could label the more in-depth explanation or even put it on a second screen accessed via an 'advanced explanation' button.
The "This message can't be saved" text is not that bad, actually. The important thing is that the second part tells the user what to do. The first part could be rewritten "An error occurred" and that would be fine, too, since the details are not likely to matter to the user -- the important thing is what the user ought to do next.
A driver does not need to know the reason for a detour. All that matters is whether the alternative route is clearly indicated.
It’s pretty important to know the cause, though. “The message doesn’t exist” is fairly different from “You password/token/auth is expired and thus, the message can’t be saved”. Or “the hard drive is unavailable” or “the network has timed out”.
It’s also important to know what action can’t be done. “The message can’t be saved” from “The message can’t be viewed anymore” which hints that it may have been properly saved.
Please don’t bring back the fashion of dialog boxes just showing “Error in the system”. Or even “Error 1521”, which, although nowadays it would help for a perfect StackOverflow search, is still annoying.
Nah I like New Scientist and Quanta Magazine etc… to give me an insight into a complicated topic. It isn’t adequate for a professor to understand the subject to write a thesis sure, but there is no harm in more people kinda understanding something. This is especially true of the sort of dumbing down the big short film did, when the impact on society means everyone should sort of understand what happened Nd why the economy tanked.
Quanta is a great example! They don't dumb things down. It passes feymans razor because the professor can read it and know what it's talking about
I think it'd be a fun follow-up and talk a quanta article, and some PhD in the topic, and walk through why it does (or does not) pass this razor.
I think one very simple but important thing they do is they don't shy away from mentioning the technical terms. I just opened a random one and in the first paragraph they say the word "Hamiltonian cycle", and explain it. The explanation is probably super simplified, but that's fine, it's (1) an anchor for the curious layperson to read more/Google it (2) it's a marker for the expert, he immediately knows what they're talking about, and doesn't have to try to reconstruct it/guess
I dunno. We now have ChatGPT to dumb things down for us __and__ allow us to ask questions. I think the importance of these popular science magazines may be disappearing.
The original message is enough information to deduce what’s probably going on as an expert and not feel alien to the customer base.
What’s the point of conveying root causes to the user? In this case the error tells you what you need to know: copy the message. Send it again if you want.
The point of communication isn’t always education. This isn’t a razor. It doesn’t do anything to help you consider audience. It will lead you to bad conclusions.
There's an association here to another topic which came up recently: a review of Matt Strassler's new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea [1]. Professor Strassler says a big motivation for writing this book was what he calls 'phibs': 'explanations' of physics so bowdlerized that they are not just uninformative, but at least misleading and sometimes outright wrong. The particular phib which got him started was a commonly-repeated attempt to give an idea of how the Higgs field gives rise to the masses of certain particles [2]
Funny thing is I think this about Feynman’s own writing for “the layperson”.
I think things like Feynman’s “little arrows” descriptions in QED only muddied and added to the mystique and mysticism of the physics he loved.
Which is interesting because his written lectures[1], though, in their breadth and complexity require effort, seem as if they are intended for experts while being approachable to ”the layperson“.
My only real complaint about those lectures is that even when I understood I rarely felt I had actionable tools for that new knowledge.
The best descriptions of physics I feel that can sufficiently inform “the layperson” are ones that implements the physics in code[2], or through numerical methods.
In fact he didn't like the lectures and thought they largely failed at pedagogy. The actual Caltech students who listened to them didn't get much out of them. Instead they were primarily useful in explaining the subject to other physicists. I think he says this in the foreword? (if not, I read it somewhere else).
What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t). I suppose you could try and do it with more commonplace trigonometric functions, but then you lose the simple vector interpretation of adding the contributions. Or are you arguing that you should always try and teach complex numbers and the Euler identity to avoid strained analogies?
> What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book?
It’s difficult to articulate, but two aspects are:
The amount of times I have only confused people more by trying to explain even modular arithmetic by calling on the clock analogy.
And the fact that the little “clock hands” are a complete abstraction from both the physics being described and the mathematical models that describe that physics. ~“Quantum physics is just about adding clocks?”
> I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t).
As I noted in the gp I think code implementations or numerical methods should be the goal.
The solution to the confusion about referencing clocks when talking about modular arithmetic was just to write down a complete numerical example, ie all natural numbers mod 6 up to 10, and use that as the abstraction for further discussion: negatives, reals, periodicity, infinities, applications, et al.
> As I noted in the gp I think code implementations or numerical methods should be the goal.
I’m 100% with Feynman on this one. I loved the book because of the intuition it gave me about quantum physics. He even has this amazing analogy for how to teach arithmetic without numbers. Now, you could absolutely claim that he fails in his analogies (I’m not among the .1% of people if not less who can debate that), but I can still say claim confidently that math is not the goal. Abstraction is not intuition.
In mathematics, geometric and algebraic explanations are complementary.
If you plot a function, you can observe many properties easily, for instance where does it cross the axes? Is it symmetrical? How quickly does it grow?
However there are also many properties that are easier to observe algebraically. For example if you plot x^n you can see if n is odd or even, but you can’t see what value n has because x^10 looks very much like x^12. But if you have the algebraic representation you can read it off.
The issue with Feynman’s clocks is that he only provides the geometric explanation (what physicists would call “intuition”), and not the algebraic explanation.
This only helps two kinds of people: 1) people not capable of understanding the algebra, 2) people who already know the algebra and want to develop intuition.
For the third group of 3) people are capable of understanding the algebra but haven’t learned it yet, only talking about clocks is a bit dizzying.
I strongly disagree. The geometric explanation lets you understand the main concept without the hassle of algebra. The algebra isn't needed for these fundamental topics.
There's no requirement to do opaque algebra before approaching intuition.
Feynman invented Feynman Diagrams, which are a major contribution to Physics because they avoid algebra, and physicists are certainly capable of algebra.
And after you'll learn negatives, reals, periodicity, etc., you'll find that a rotating clock hand is a completely fine analogy. So, maybe it's not that bad to have this analogy from the beginning to not lose the forest behind the trees.
> Or are you arguing that you should always try and teach complex numbers and the Euler identity to avoid strained analogies?
I think it’s okay to be explain complex numbers. I think it’s just best to additionally explain why. That is, show why (real, imaginary) is a better numerical system than the more broadly taught (x,y) of the 2 dimensional space being explored.
As for the Euler identity I suppose you could include that when explaining why we use the exp() function, which is because it plays nicer with integration and derivation than other numerical representations.
I want the analogies to be representative of the work rather than my own mental model of it.
The case of the original error message does not really match what Feynman was concerned about. The original error message was not too simple, but its first part was some hocus-pocus that made (almost) no sense -- the less, the more the reader is a layperson. Only an expert had a chance of guessing the explanation. In the quoted passage, Feynman instead was concerned about popular accounts of science that are not useful for the reader -- not because they are unintelligible or wrong, but because they are too simplistic and provide too less information.
Feynman confused pedagogical skill with expertise in a given field. He insisted that experts could explain things. No, that's what a teacher does. Feynman was good at both and apparently had no one to challenge him on his claim that they were the same.
It's possible to be a great teacher without being an expert on given subject matter. And it's possible to have the most expertise but be inscrutable.
In the case of this quote, Feynman wasn't talking about expertise at all, but about explaining a thing with enough relevant details to be understood. Without those, a layman would not understand either.
From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding.
Language and knowledge are linked to a degree.
Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
> From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding.
You also have to give yourself permission to step several tiers back and think about how to distill "next pieces" into what they know.
I also find myself handwaving away a whole lot of edge cases or rigor away in order to have a bite-sized step that will help the student make progress.
> Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
Conversely, I find every time I've done this exercise of stepping back and breaking it down for someone else, my knowledge has deepened.
My biggest challenge with explaining things to people is the stuff they already know that's either wrong or not relevant. To save the effort of finding out later, I now ask people to explain it to me first, tell me everything they know about this, before I can figure out how far back I have to step before explaining it all.
I'm also a "What do you think happens?" person. It both gives me a place to start, and a bunch of stuff to peg other stuff onto that I'm about to say. If you can link points of a good explanation to points of a bad, but intuitive naïve explanation, it makes it easier to remember the good explanation.
That is the the special skill of a teacher. But any expert should be able to competently explain something to someone who isn't harboring a mistaken belief.
I think the ability to explain well requires you to be an expert, but also be able to quickly trace back all the definitions to what your student already knows.
Feynman was not a great teacher. Lots of people love his lectures now. But they're not getting graded on it.
Actual students were considerably more mixed. Obviously individuals vary so if I post how most of his students were totally lost in class, they'll post how one student went on to win a Nobel prize and say gotcha.
There are two types of teaching. One is teaching things to a complete beginner. The other is teaching things to someone who has already mastered the mechanics of a subject.
Feynman was a world class second type teacher. If you already know how to work with physics equations and solve problems, then Feynman's lectures will improve your understanding considerably. The simplification process he does, gives you a grand understanding of the theory.
Due to this, much of Feynman's pedagogy is not suitable for the first type of teaching. And should not be used as such.
This reminds me of University Physics by Young and Freedman. The things I already understood were really dumbed down, and the things I didn't understand were inscrutable. I ended up using it as a door stop for the rest of the year until it fell apart and I had to throw it away. It was one of the first ones where the book came with a code that you had to use online to do the homework, so the book was also useless as second hand, after being useless when bought new.
While there really is a trend to overly dumb down things, I'd just like to speculate that the "message no longer exists" part is simply these when someone adapted the reasonable error for a delete message, and forgot to actually check if that phrasing work anymore.
Small changes creeping up into something stupid is a common thing as well when everyone just does a tiny isolated part.
Something I’ve been doing recently is declaring a variable, writing a comment explaining clearly what the variable actually does, then renaming the variable to reflect the comment. If I have to explain the variable name too much then it’s not a good name.
The author introduces a distinction that I hadn't fully considered before: difficult writing is not all equally problematic. Being misunderstood is a problem, but how and why you are misunderstood matters.
> In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions.
I'd say maybe the rule here allows one to eliminate the useless parts of an explanation, thus simplifying the process of coming up with explanations for complicated things.
A razor is when you have a large number of potential explanations and want a simple rule to check if it worth further scrutiny. Occam's razor is the most famous, it says that the simplest explanation is probably the right one, Hanlon's razor is another one, it says that stupidity is more likely than malice.
Here it is just a guideline "don't dumb down", but there is no simple rule that tells if a message is dumb or not. For example, in the topic of science, a razor could be "numbers without error bars are dumb". It only takes a few seconds to see or not to see error bars, so you can quickly drop the ones without to focus on those that have.
How so? If you have a pile of explanations, you now have a way of dividing up the pile into ones you may want to keep and ones you should discard. That way is by asking whether an expert would understand what you're talking about.
Occam's Razor takes a pile of explanations and discards all those with extra assumptions or components. Feynman's discards all those that don't convey anything to an expert. I once told my son that any good story involves surprise, a relatable character, and some mention of a giant talking carrot. All of those are razors. (Some razors might be more useful than others...)
In UX, the right way to think about your users is not that they are dumb, but that they are very smart but very busy, and don't have time for your app's bullshit. It puts you in the right frame of mind when designing interfaces. It's not about dealing with dunces, but about being efficient with peoples time and attention.
Why this obsession with "all words must be known"? People are perfectly capable to understand the core of the message even if it contains unknown words. It happens not every time, it doesn't happen for example when each one of the words is unknown, but the message:
> "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted."
can be understood. Even if the first sentence looks like a technical garbage, the second gives the clear instructions. And I don't believe that the first sentence is a complete nonsense to a layman. It can be understood as "message is halfway through the process of the deletion".
To be great is to be misunderstood, and Feynman was a great man. I'm still not sure who decided to abuse some quotes and invent this "razor".
I don't believe Feynman ever meant to overconstrain and corrupt information based on (likely incorrect) assumptions about his audience. There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children.
The information is either there or it isn't regardless of who can comprehend it. Losslessness is non-negotiable. The real problem is how you present that information, not whether you should leave it out. The only time you should leave something out is if it has little to no relation to the rest of what you're trying to say.
> This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted.
Oh yeah also let's solve the "puzzle" from the middle of the blog post in Microsoft-y language everyone is familiar with by now.
"This message was deleted due to your organization's retention policy, spam filter, or administrator. It temporarily remains on this device, but is at risk of being lost forever. Do you want to save a copy?"
I believe in the real world Outlook doesn't even bother and has you and your message eat shit. If it was deleted it will never tell you about a cached copy and to the layperson it's just gone. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and indecision only makes communication harder.
> There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children.
This is so wrong that I can't imagine you actually meant it in the way that it quite obviously reads like.
When my 3-year old just saw is favorite toy fall from the sofa because he put it in an .. unstable position, then obviously it won't help if I explain the theory of relativity to him, cause ultimately it was gravity causing the mess. It won't help either to "dumb it down" by only explaining Newton's mechanics. What he actually needs to understand is that things fall down. Why exactly can be explained later. Much later. When he goes to university perhaps, if he chooses to and still wants to know.
I don't think we disagree at all about how to explain falling objects to a 3 year old. I did say it's best to leave out irrelevant detail.
You might not like this, but full detail physics explanations are usually irrelevant to everyday life. I try to explain in terms of what's necessary to accomplish a goal, not what's necessary to fully understand.
e.g. "if you tip things over close to the edge it will end up on the floor, so don't do that"
As a side note, kids often put stuff in precarious places because they can't reach anywhere better.
Anyway, the exceptions would be when the goal involves fully and arbitrarily defined contexts such as code or law. You can't assume much to get on with a task before being given a full explanation.
Instead, it's the typical kind of mistake made by writers who forget about context.
From the programmer's perspective, I speculate, the error _is_ indeed a case of something being non-existent. The code is written to fetch something from the server, the server says it's not there, and well, the application should tell the user about it.
Within the very narrow context of fetching it from the server, "doesn't exist" is correct. However, in the context of the user who's sitting there looking at the message, "doesn't exist" is simply false.
The message needs to be re-contextualized, such that it makes sense. "The message doesn't exist on the server, it exists on your computer at the moment, but just for a short while, so you better copy it".
It doesn't matter whether the user understand what a "server" is. Simply knowing that the message doesn't exist [at some place], is enough to make the whole sentence sensible.
Like if I go to a car mechanic, who just points to the whole car and say "it's gonna be replaced", it would be confusing. But if he says that "xxx is gonna be replaced", that's perfectly comprehensible, even if I don't know what xxx is.