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Why do We Explain Things?

Explanations are a sequence of messages (text, verbal, non-verbal) from a speaker to a listener or audience to lead them to a target understanding. We apply our abilities at explanations when we want someone to understand our point of view, but there are also situations when we want them to understand some particular point of view that may differ from ours. We may use strategic simplifications (a simpler point of view than ours but suitable to achieve some purpose), and skilled public intellectuals often explain competing perspectives by steel-manning or straw-manning them (for good-faith or bad-faith arguments).

We explain things because we live complex lives. There is no possible way that any one human could ever obtain all the knowledge necessary to understand their roles and proper activity in the world. Nor is it likely that we will gain experience fast enough to catch up to every volatile situation we may face in life, so no one human’s intuition will ever be up to the task either. We rely on others to give us advice, instructions, and teachings to become more aware and more effective in our various roles in life. We also rely on many other people to receive our requests and responsibilities whenever we need to make commitments, which means we have to make our needs and intentions increasingly clear over time.

Generally, we transition into adults who have the wisdom and capability to take meaningful ownership over how we learn from others, but this is not necessarily guaranteed at all times or for all people. We may rely on trust or faith when we try to make sense of others’ explanations, even if we have qualms when trying to understand the details. On the flip-side, many people have a fear of public speaking, presentation, or forms of direct communication, so most people do not hit their max capacities regularly when they are trying their best to explain something to others. If the explanation has to do with something emotional, there are even more reasons why the speaker may not fully prepare their message, the listener may not fully digest, and the explanation will under-perform. As a result, we are all affected by explanations of both low or high quality as they are shared through relationships and communities.

Since producing and consuming proper explanations are both so instrumental to being successful in life, it would be to our advantage to have an effective understanding of their qualities in the hopes of hitting our max potential more often. We need to be on our guard about whether we are receiving shoddy explanations, and in turn we can become a more value-adding member of our communities by explaining ourselves and our ideas better.

Where do Explanations go Wrong?

Since the objective of an explanation is to lead a listener to a target understanding, they can go wrong in exactly 2 ways: (1) the listener makes some inferences that that are incorrect (according to you or some standard), (2) the listener struggles to make some inferences that would be correct (by that same standard). One way this can happen is that the listener may overfit to the points of your explanation and read too much into something you said or shared and move away from a correct understanding, or they may also underfit by hearing some particular point yet not noting or remembering it as particularly important.

With this simple framework for explanations, we can recover much of the most obvious advice as well as extend into more interesting territory. For example, if you’re making a short explanation, it helps greatly to focus on making a single clear point so that it sticks. If you’re making a slightly longer explanation, it helps to repeat the main points or concepts a few times. Above a certain message length, it helps if the standard of comparison (what is implicitly making the explanation meaningful) is made more clear for both parties. Basically, you offer some motivation for the explanation.

Eventually, every person gets to the really big questions in life, and new issues are introduced at this scale. Try to imagine how you might explain to a stranger what psychology is, or how to be competent at some tough job role like graphic design, or even what the Meaning of Life is.

First, any explanation of a highly complex topic will be difficult to express accurately in any short description, i.e. complexity is hard to reduce. You either have to think skillfully for a relatively long time about the explanation you’re making or receiving to refine it, or you have to look for a long time for the right resource to finally make it click, or you will have to personally invest significant time in embodying or practicing the understanding to really get it. This cost may be higher or lower depending on the complexity of the topic, our background and experiences in it, and whether we have tools to help us, but it’s a general trend that higher-complexity topics require longer, costlier explanations to do them justice.

In addition, any explanation will rely heavily on being built up over many examples. Think of a textbook you studied in school, and consider how many examples are used across the entire book, potentially hundreds or thousands. For many user manuals for products like apps or appliances, you similarly see dozens or hundreds of examples of specific user activities across all the pages. Depending on the context of the explanation, all these examples either come from the author’s personal experiences, the pair’s or group’s shared history, or the broader community’s cultural history. In many of the economics courses I took in college, the best professors would draw broadly from their own ideas or career experiences, current events or issues that we as a group could string across lectures together, and references to well-known economics papers, thinkers, and frameworks (a community of canonical references). As explained in my post on Narrative Analysis, the mere act of choosing examples introduces hermeneutic circles, or venn diagram-like circles of your audience who do or do not receive the target meaning of each of your examples or stories. Basically, sometimes your audience will not get the point of 0, 1, 2, 3, …, or N of your N examples. Some people (who have certain predispositions or cultural understanding) will even hear your examples and infer new implications or connections, so there are more hermeneutic circles than you intend. This can be good, if the listener makes a connection the explainer didn’t consider that enriches their individual or shared understanding beyond expectations. This can also be bad, when a listener infers a meaning into your explanation through a misunderstanding (inference from other knowledge) or infers a meaning into your explanation by extrapolating from others who use language and explanations similar to yours (maybe even themselves). I’ve seen this occur both with minor misunderstandings in work environments (“Oh, you said ‘table’ so I thought you meant a SQL table, not a Power BI table”) as well as explosive political disputes in social media environments (“You and everyone who uses the word ‘liberal’ obviously think that…”). The main idea is that explanations can have failed inferences or unintended inferences. Conflict and interference will then come up between these various sets of inferences, and this interference will decrease the likelihood that your explanation succeeds. Therefore, it’s generally worth some effort in choosing a variety of examples that resonate with your audience and don’t trigger unintended inferences.

Next, it’s harder to error-check our understanding of longer explanations. If we were to study a 1000-page textbook on physics, it’s hard as a student to confidently test our knowledge on every piece of it without some excessively high-cost activity in review, writing, or testing. Instead, we rely on high-level, chapter tests to see if we understand main ideas accurately, and we less frequently descend into stressing our understanding of specific formulas and values. It’s also hard for the author(s) who produced the textbook to be sure that they covered everything effectively without some similarly high-cost activity of review, which is why many textbook editions make painstaking efforts to make sure details and chapter references remain solid across multiple edits. Even if we remove the details of publishing/reading and focus just on the cognitive costs of understanding some explanation, many long, complex ideologies have a sort of “sagging” effect, where ideas laid down in 1 part of the canon do not seem to hold up or apply well to issues located in other parts of the canon. Shorter, nimbler philosophies seem more valuable to many listeners because they have tighter connections between their premises. In this category, consider the recent appeal of Scrum/Agile over more formal methods of project management, in part because of its nimbler, more cohesive framework. As a historical example, Thomas Paine, in his essay "Common Sense," made a point of arguing that the emergent form of democracy in the American Colonies would be superior to the bloated, unjustified common law of Great Britain primarily because of its simpler, more cohesive constitution. In short, maintaining internal consistency is more costly for longer explanations, and explanations that have internal synergy are superior.

“I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered; and the easier repaired when disordered [...]”

“[...] The constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine.”
- Thomas Paine, "Common Sense"

Finally, any high-complexity explanation will have challenges in application that scale with the complexity. When people feel confident they understand a 1-page recipe, they generally are able to apply that same 1-page recipe. However, people may feel quite confident in their understanding after a solid study of 10k words on a topic, yet undoubtedly have more subtle troubles in application. People may not fully understand your explanation which will reveal itself over time, or their memories / notes may decay between when the explanation is provided and applied as they finally realize the material. A sad truth is that a significant number of lessons from job training, college education, or other adult education do not remain intact when we are later in a position to apply them. This feedback likely will not come up while explanations are being delivered, and this gap is generally hard to notice or improve. Creative individuals (historically and online) have come up with many effective ways to solve this, and a consistent trend of these solutions is that they all scale with the complexity. When you consider methods like taking more or better notes, encoding, or delayed repetition, they all require more time or more effort to recall something with more complexity (e.g. more bullet points, a more intelligent encoding, a spaced repetition system with more flashcards or more reviews later). The details of these methods are outside the scope of this post. For now, it suffices to say that complex explanations require more effort to enact well in application, and the larger complexity means there is there’s more potential for a big misunderstanding.

If all of these issues can be solved effectively, then we have a high-quality explanation. The properties below are the reverse of the above points, and they all add up to explain what a high-quality explanation is:

1. It leads the listener to make the right inferences and connections, while avoiding incorrect ones

2. It is represented using as short a description as possible

3. It uses examples that are highly likely to resonate meaningfully with the audience

4. You can see clear synergy in see how the pieces fit together

5. The structure lends itself well to being applied or retold accurately later

These are just some of the qualities of an effective explanation, which we might use if we're trying to give constructive feedback to some explanation. The only requirement for something to be an explanation is that the speaker attempts to deliver some target understanding to an audience.

Examples of Good Explanations

No matter where you live, our culture loves high-quality explanations. There’s an endless supply of them being made all the time, and they include some of the most shared content ever, both on the current-day Internet and historically across generations. Below, I’ve shared some demonstrations of high-quality explanations.

1. An explanation doesn’t have to be long or even use many words to be effective. In just 20 seconds, I am confident this video will teach you a simple and immediately applicable technique to store plastic water bottles.

2. Claude Shannon’s 1-page essay “The Bandwagon” does a good job of briefly explaining the popularity of his field, Information Theory, and a key issue he wants to address in the academic community. Surprisingly easy to read, even if you know nothing about information theory, which hints at why it’s a good explanation.

3. The legendary stories of Maui. These stories have been popular in Polynesian culture for generations, and (in addition to being entertaining stories) are essentially explanations for wind currents, the chaotic nature of open flames, the flatness of palm-tree leaves, elements of Polynesian culture, and many other things.

4. The YouTube video “This Stock Analysis Costs $100,000.” At first, you’re laughing at some funny jokes and zingers, and before you know it you’re looking at probability distributions and learning industry lingo from a professional-quality stock analysis. This channel Benjamin is one of my favorites primarily because he makes heavy, dense analyses seem like troll-quality entertainment.

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Probably the highest-quality explanations available right now in the year 2022 are videos (YouTube or other) that use precise and well-researched scripts, vivid and meaningfully sourced visuals, and some memorable qualities to make it easy for the viewer to remember big points (often humor, charm, or visual effects). Many creative media now incorporate video footage or links to videos in some way, including live performances, journalistic articles, essays, and academic courses.

Summary

In this post, I’ve defined an explanation as a sequence of messages to lead an audience to a target understanding. I also developed a partial list of the qualities of a good explanation and some examples of my favorite explanations.

In future posts, I will explore methods to reliably produce quality explanations. As a philosophical point, there is no efficient general method for producing exact truths (emphasis on “efficient”, “general” and “exact”). However, many thinkers have come up with workable methods to help brainstorm or kick-start explanations, no matter the topic. First up, I’ll define a technique I’ve come up with that blends dialectical methods with Binary Search, a technique from computer science. We’ll explore this and other topics next time. 👋

Footnotes

1. If you didn’t understand this meme at all, I’ve got your back. It’s a reference to the Nickelodeon TV show “The Fairly Oddparents” that ran 2001 - 2016, where the main character reads a comic book series called "The Crimson Chin." I understood this meme on my first glance, but I also completely empathize with Walter in this meme 😅