Every industry is full of non-technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
(The other post was technical hills. I changed the question to non-technical.)
Every industry is full of non-technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
(The other post was technical hills. I changed the question to non-technical.)
If you can’t explain how something works, you don’t know how it works.
Nah, some people are just bad with words. They can know how something works but can’t explain it because their vocabulary doesn’t capture some of the nuances. I’ve seen this a lot in self-taught experts, especially.
Plus there’s always the possibility that the vocabulary is limited from the audience perspective. I definitely know how certain things work, but detail is lost when I oversimplify it for my kids or something, because I’m explaining it to them rather than to a more knowledgeable adult with a stronger base.
I’m not a stickler for vocabulary when I ask people to explain something. You can use other words if you want, describe it like you’re a caveman, draw a sketch, even explain it with interpretive dance for all I care.
And it is fine if some detail is lost in the explanation. However, you should be able to communicate it in some manner.
I mean, the linguistic mastery necessary to be able to talk around gaps in vocabulary is still itself a skill set completely distinct from knowledge about a different subject.
Plenty of skills aren’t easily reduced to verbal explanations, or even the ability to teach. Plenty of world class athletes become mediocre coaches, frustrated that their players don’t seem to get things the way they used to. Same with musicians, actors, public speakers (merely repeating the words of a speech won’t necessarily carry the same charisma and gravitas), and all sorts of other experts.
One can know something without being able to explain it. That doesn’t invalidate the knowledge.
Which is why I mentioned other ways to explain things. If you’re dealing with a spatial problem but can’t draw what you are trying to explain, that is indicative that you don’t know what you’re dealing with.
It’s the reason why I mentioned communication beyond the written word.
I really feel like you’re digging in your heels on a fundamentally flawed point. Plenty of people are bad at drawing. That doesn’t make them bad at visualizing or reasoning spatially, or somehow invalidate the spatial understanding that they do have.
My ability to explain things in Spanish isn’t all that well correlated with my internal knowledge of those things, but is more closely correlated with my Spanish skills in those subjects. At the same time, there are nonverbal people who understand stuff without the ability to meaningfully convey messages to other humans.
The ability to communicate is its own skill, independent from other areas of knowledge, such that the correlation between ability to explain to others and the actual internal understanding is weak, at best.
You’re digging in your heels in that they only can communicate in one medium. You then pick a language which I don’t know what your competency is.
If you can’t communicate an idea in any method of communication at all to a point where an educated person in that field can’t see what you’re trying to communicate, it shows that you don’t understand the idea. This is especially true if you can’t repeat the ideas in the media it was presented.
How else is someone supposed to show how they understand an idea?