Most ideas cannot be explained simply
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
I think this quote is wrong. Some ideas are too complex to be simplified—if you try, the simplified idea will be incorrect.
The quote is (erroneously) attributed to Einstein, but I think it’s popular because it appeals to your ego and makes you feel like you could be as smart as Einstein, just by simplifying something you already know.
In technical fields, conclusions are counterintuitive, and concepts are dozens of layers removed from basic reality.
A “simple” explanation of evolution is “survival of the fittest”. But “fit” does not mean “strong”, it means “suitability”, or how much you “fit in” to the environment. So, if the environment favors traits that might seem weak (e.g. conserving resources), then the weakest organisms are “most fit” to that environment.
“Evolution is survival of the weakest” no longer sounds intuitive now, does it? 🤔
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
Not only is this a misquote of Darwin, it is also wrong!
Like the Einstein quote, it soothes your anxiety of “not being good enough” and makes you feel like all you need is to adapt to your circumstances.
But this is not how evolution works—it’s actually more hardcore.
For a species to “adapt”, the unfit members will die. No individual organism changes, just the composition of the population. But “fit” means “suitability”, so in an environment where weakness is more suitable, we could rephrase this as “For a species to adapt, the strongest members must die”. Now this is not a catchy slogan for anyone who wants to misinterpret evolution as justification for their racism.1
Before humanity discovered science, we all had universally shared background knowledge.
When you discover a new oasis, you don’t have to explain to your fellow tribe members what an oasis is, or why it’s a good idea to drink water, or how to walk. […]
In the ancestral environment there were no abstract disciplines with vast bodies of carefully gathered evidence generalized into elegant theories transmitted by written books whose conclusions are a hundred inferential steps removed from universally shared background premises.
If you didn’t follow these steps of explanation with me—connecting the dots—you might have taken “evolution is survival of the fittest” at face value, instead of seeing the unintuitive idea that, in this context, it means “evolution is survival of the weakest”.
Science built our modern civilization, but it also drove us further apart from mutual understanding.
Understanding takes effort and humility
It takes effort to truly understand an idea, beyond just having the “answer”. Einstein’s theory of relativity is not about “time and space aren’t fixed, they can only be described relative to an observer”. Understanding relativity requires you to work through the math and grasp the equations.
People think that the observer effect means that “observing a particle changes it, therefore our consciousness can change the universe”, but “observing” in this context just means “shooting a photon at a particle changes that particle”—it has nothing to do with consciousness, and in any case accurately describing what’s happening requires you to talk about amplitudes and complex numbers.
If you’re not Einstein, you might feel insecure about not understanding this math, especially in the presence of someone who seems like they’re smarter than you.
But you wouldn’t be alone—no one was born understanding quantum physics—even the smartest people had to learn it at some point; Einstein didn’t come up with his proofs overnight.
To understand is to be ok with not understanding, and having the humility to admit you need help with “dumb” questions instead of pretending to get something right away.
Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand—no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince themselves of it, they won’t accept it.
To learn, you must make mistakes, so the most effective learning techniques are also the most frustrating.
There are no shortcuts to learning
Many important ideas sound nonsensical or backwards without the supporting background evidence. That’s why those ideas are so important—if they were obvious, we would have come up with them sooner.
Expecting an idea to be “dumbed down” blames the teacher for your lack of understanding. It’s an excuse to avoid your responsibility to understand complex ideas yourself.
But if you are the teacher, you have the curse of knowledge and need empathy and self-awareness to avoid assuming that people can catch up to your explanation quickly—you’ve forgotten what it’s like not to understand what you know right away.
Your skill as an explainer is not to “dumb down” an idea, but to engage the audience, inspire curiosity, and trim needless words; concision saves time as long as you don’t misrepresent the idea by oversimplifying it2, as there are more readers than there are writers.3
Your job as a learner is not to ask for the TL;DR, but to make an effort to determine if the author is hiding behind verbosity, or if you’re missing the requisite background needed to comprehend an idea that cannot be simplified further.
Simple explanations hold back our future
Our advanced technological society is only getting more counterintuitive. Oversimplification leads to misunderstandings that ripple through society, stifling out-of-the-box thinking, derailing public policy, and hindering scientific progress.
In a healthy democracy, we have a duty as citizens to consider and debate ideas that may initially seem unacceptable or counterintuitive, otherwise we’ll never make progress outside the Overton window with knee-jerk dismissals. Abolishing slavery, gender equality, or religious freedom all once seemed like heretical ideas.
It’s not about sounding smart at dinner parties. We have solutions for climate change, war, AI ethics, educational inequality, and political corruption that work. The question is, do you understand these solutions, or have you only heard the sound bites?
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Footnotes
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People have been misinterpreting Darwin for hundreds of years, ever since he published his ideas:
Recently, we asked some twenty-five reasonably well-read persons what the title of Darwin’s book was and more than half said The Origin of the Species. The reason for the mistake is obvious; they supposed, never having read the book, that it had something to do with the development of the human species. In fact, it has little or nothing to do with that subject, […] The Origin of Species is about what its title says it is about—namely the proliferation in the natural world of a vast number of species of plants and animals from an originally much smaller number of species, owing mainly to the principle of natural selection. We mention this common error because many think they know the title of the book, although few have actually ever read the title carefully and thought about what it means.
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You might be tempted to use familiar analogies to explain the basics, but reality is counterintuitive—bad analogies (like “relativity”) or poor word choice (like “fitness”) are what lead to misunderstandings. ↩
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As an explainer, it doesn’t seem “worth it” to make an essay more concise by 10 seconds if it costs me 1 extra hour to get there. But if 3,600 people read it, then I’ve saved 10 cumulative hours of my readers’ time with only 1 hour of investment on my end, a 10× payoff. This becomes even more favourable at scale—if 360,000 people read the essay then I’ve saved 1,000 hours, a 100× return on investment. ↩