"Back then, I was young and stupid." This is one of my catchphrases. I think about my past decisions, my mistakes, my achievements. Every time with the same conclusion: I made progress. I learned a bit more, I procrastinate a bit less, I manage my time and my goals better. In my fantasy world, I climb constantly the ladder of Personal Accomplishment.
Of course, I expect the pattern to repeat itself: fast-forward a year and I'll judge my current self stupid and misguided. I know I still have many flaws to compensate, and new domains to explore. I'm not afraid of those challenges. My problem is, the ladder which took me where I am has fallen.
I forget the path I walked, little by little. I don't know in which order I learned things anymore. When I read the books, the blogs that guided me, for the second time, everything sounds obvious. I can't climb down, put myself in the state of mind I was back then. Worse, I forget how hard the path was. I talk about my knowledge and experience to people who have climbed other mountains. Who didn't follow the same steps than mine.
I describe my research to diverse groups of people. Family, friends, colleagues. I adapt my explanations to each person. The complexity of the subject isn't the point, I don't have to dumb things down for anyone. The point is my field as prerequisites. In front of a jury of my academic peers, I can throw jargon, "syntactic features", "optimisation problem", "structure decoding". I often use those technical terms, with their precise meaning. My jury does as well. I need those terms to express my ideas clearly and concisely.
If I have to present my work to someone else, I have to "unfold" all those terms. I can explain them one by one, using other concepts, not necessarily simpler, but more familiar. Sometimes I have to reiterate the process. All of this takes time. Even if I expanded on all possible prerequisites, the length of the whole thing would undermine its understanding. In the same vein, acquiring new concepts in an unknown domain also takes time. There's no shortcut, the listener must climb too. Already having succeeded doesn't make it easier nor faster for others.
It takes little to forget this distance before introducing something. Of course everything's clear in your own head. If it feels so natural for you, it should be easy to explain, right? Far from it! To understand exactly as well and quickly as you, your audience would have to read your mind. The same phenomenon exists for emotions. It's the "illusion of transparency" which I'll expand on in a later post.
From these observations, we can start many discussions on the topic of knowledge transmission. How to ensure people don't overestimate the clarity of their explanations? Are written notes exploitable by someone other than their author? Should we create writing guides, well-structured tutorials, carefully crafted manuals, to enhance the reader's understanding, at a price?
I need more experience in communication to even start answering these questions...