# Explain it like I’m Five Explaining something like someone is five entails unpacking specialized terms and jargon. Specialized terms and jargon are a way of compressing information - it encodes an idea along with assumptions. [[Jargon is a mechanism for compressing information]]. This compression is useful when you need to communicate the whole thing quickly. There are two problems with specialized terms/jargon: 1. It requires the person you’re communicating with to have acquired the prior knowledge to know all the bundled assumptions. Otherwise [[Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context]]. 2. Those bundled assumptions become ‘frozen’ - if they no longer hold or you could solve a problem by changing one, you literally don’t think of it when using the specialized term. Explaining something to a five year old requires you to unpack all the context because five year olds clearly have none of it. You can think of explaining to a five year old as decompression. The fact that jargon freezes knowledge suggests that explaining something to a five year old is useful for finding secrets in the world. When you break a problem statement open to look at each of its parts, you might realize an assumption that can be shifted. [[Explaining things like I’m five helps avoid the Einstellung Effect]]. See ([[And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared]]) #### Lots of smart people endorse explaining it like I’m five [[Earnest Rutherford]]: “it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.” - from Page 418 of *Einstein: His Life and Times* (1972) [[David Hilbert]]: “A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.” (*Mathematical Problems* given in 1900 before the International Congress of Mathematicians:) [[Albert Einstein]] said “that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description ‘that even a child could understand them.’ “ (He did not say the thing about a six year old) “[[Richard Feynman]], the late Nobel Laureate in physics, was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he told the faculty member, “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.” - From David Goodstein’s [[Feynman’s Lost Lecture]] [[Richard Feynman explains fire]] <!-- #mental-model --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Explain+it+like+I’m+Five) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Explain+it+like+I’m+Five)