Explaining something to another human is hard for people "on the spectrum", in part because they don't have a strong "theory of mind".
Instead of understanding and/or inquiring how the other person's mind state differs from yours, and what gradual steps might lead them to greater understanding, they tend to treat people like a file system with a missing file, and stream the relevant data into them, assuming it will all be recorded.
This is not a simple problem to solve, but it can be done, and the first step is to realize the nature of the problem.
One simple process is getting feedback along the way. Instead of the 5 minute lecture, go step by step, and check that your counterpart has picked up what you're putting down.
When you drill down these discussion points, it all comes down to the fact we don’t exactly know how the human mind works so we can’t properly answer what is the difference between pretending to understand, and understanding.
This is speculative, but it has been suggested that some people's thinking is so advanced that we can't understand what they are trying to do. [1] So it could be the case that what you try to convey once you reach that advanced state isn't comprehensible by normal people.
Oh, but there is no need for such """correctness""".
The way is also well defined negatively - the lacks express their presence clearly -, and this page provides already a few examples:
-- "A is taller than B, B plays basketball, who is taller?"
If the system does not reply "A", then it does not understand the question; by a general consideration, it may be evident that it was designed to "guess" instead of "know", and there lies very patently the structural fault.
-- "A just left the house and is now in the market, where is A?"
If the system does not understand "states", etc. If it cannot build a world representation, etc.
-- "A fell from the flying helicopter, how is A?"
If the system does not understand "falling from an height", etc. If it cannot "tell itself a story" (Prof. Patrick Winston), etc.
The latter tells you about the logical relations between those "definitions" (of conjunction, so that (¬Av¬B)?¬C ). Prof. Winston defines "intelligence" as "the ability to tell oneself stories, which will also reveal outcomes of experiences you have not concretely lived". The definition may leave gaps when taken alone (especially if by somebody who confuses indications and definitions), but the lack of what is intended with such idea has full impact (no """inner storytelling""" - actually, I would say, no "productive engine" -, no "intelligence").
Not understanding someone means that I can ignore him/her, because I have to admit that I don't know enough to connect the dots.
Once I understand him/her, two things can happen:
1. I can see that there exists also some completely different, but also very rational, point of view from which one can see the whole facts and get a much better impression of him/her. I might still disagree, but now I have a better impression.
2. I can see how stupid the conclusions really are from which the other persons are. While before I could be ignorant (I knew neither enough that that this makes a good nor a bad impression on me), once I understood I can not anymore. In this case the impression can also become much worse.
So understanding (empathizing) is a very two-sided sword.
By that standard, how do you know another human being understands anything? All you see is their behaviour. You don't have access to their internals, you don't really know what "process" is going on in there. This road leads to solipsism.
The problem here seems to be that "lie" is a loaded term.
Understanding is a point somewhere between an absolute falsehood and the an absolute detailed truth. These two can be hard to define for some subjects but nevertheless.
People who don't have the mental capacity or knowledge to understand the complete truth can still benefit from a partial understanding of what's going on and that's what this is talking about.
I think it's similar to how programmers use libraries to hide abstractions. We don't need to know the details of what's going on at the lower levels of our stack to be useful even though we're operating with some "false" notions of what's happening under the hood.
> but that is still a reason why it is not true that if someone understands something, then they can also explain it
You are going after this rough heuristic as is if it some iron clad metric. Obviously some things are more difficult to explain than others -- I'm not sure how that affects the usefulness of the idea that, in general, being able to explain something well is a sign one likely understands it deeply. This isn't the only measure of understanding, and it isn't perfect, but I've found it be useful.
It seems similar to the notion that to truly know a topic, you must distill it down to concise articulations of the only the most fundamental aspects, as well as the key resulting dynamics that emerge.
Of course, being able to communicate such a rich mental model to others is not always easy, but doing so demonstrates that one understands their own mental model very well.
If you are saying that it isn't a perfect test of understanding, then we are in agreement. But I think that misses the point a bit.
It is always hard to learn from people several levels ahead of you. What they do is amazing and impenetrable. What they say seems to make little sense. You lack too much of the common background.
This is why, when I find myself in a situation like that, I try hard to understand the point. Why do these people do these strange things? What do they mean by saying these sentences that seem detached from the practice? Empirically, they are smart, so they mean something.
This is how you start to detect where the common context is lacking, and look for explanations. Eventually, with enough effort, you bridge the gap and understand what they meant, and why. This is how you grow.
Curious if you could explain how you did understand the blog post? This is recently quite an interesting topic for me, why when one person feels like they've communicated as simply as they can, still can get misunderstood by someone else who is probably also actually quite intelligent.
I've got a strong objection with "You don’t really understand something if you can not explain it using simple words."
While understanding and being able to give a simple explanation are correlated, this statement doesn't take into account that some understandings are deeply personal, require a pre-existing experience, or maybe a minimum level of intelligence on the part of the other person.
This type of reasoning usually makes me think the people doing it are clueless about life in general but are merely academically inclined.
> one basically needs to reproduce the thought process of how one would come up with the given model [...] people are much better at deriving the rules from a few examples than the other way around.
Indeed. I don't think this is as mystifying as some people seems to believe. There seem to be at least two errors poor communicators make.
The first is that communication doesn't transfer any content from one person to the other. We use signs and symbols with conventional meanings both parties accept to express things which are then interpreted by the other party. If you're not both on the same page, you have to first establish that common ground. Much of education involves building up that common vocabulary and system of signs so that we can even have the conversation. To think of communication as if you were some act of piping the actually semantic content from your mind to another's is to completely misunderstand communication and a recipe for failure and frustration because you will be unable to understand why someone cannot just grasp the content you think you've just poured into their head. "It's right there! I just gave it to you!"
This brings us to the second error. Knowing your audience means knowing what their current state of knowledge is. Part of that is knowing the vocabulary and system of signs your interlocutor knows. Explanation is therefore a matter of using what they already know to lead them to the conclusions you already have (introducing claims as necessary). Once the aim of explanation is stated that way, it starts to resemble something like a chain of reasoning...or an argument, which it basically is. I cannot derive certain theorems if I have not yet derived certain prior theorems, much less if I lack the axioms from which they are derived.
It sounds a lot like circular logic. How do you work out whether someone is smart or not? By whether you see them struggle?
I can only ask "how the hell?" And they would say something like, "oh, it's just this and that."
That could be someone who, once they understand something, can explain it easily. That doesn't (necessarily) mean that they reached the initial understanding easily.
As a person, you can tell what you think you do and don't understand, and you can explain what you think your reasoning is. In practice, people get both wrong all the time. People aren't always truthful about it, either, and there's no reliable way to tell if they are.
"Theory of mind" means, among other things, having a good mental model of what other people know and don't know.
Obviously, without understanding what piece of information the other person is missing, it's very hard to explain it to them.
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