
A Basic Guide for Curious Minds: Review of “Thing Explainer” - mhb
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Thing-Explainer
======
mavhc
Amused that the first sentence is "Terminology is an occupational hazard of
philanthropy", I think he meant "hard words are often used by people who give
money away"

~~~
sp332
An occupational hazard is a danger that engaging in a profession opens you up
to. Like injuries in football, or getting sued for malpractice as a doctor.

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mc32
Gates is spot on and Munro extraordinary. Too often managers feel obliged to
use technical language where none is either needed nor natural.

People talking about budgets and fiscal planning making use of hi-tech
specific, bio-tech, etc. Anything which passively indicates that they are up
to date on cant and argot of totally unrelated fields but serve as signal of
being at the edge or on the cusp of all things new and modern and
professional.

Examples, using MM for millions, or K for thousands (is that metric K or
computing K), or saying "spend" as a noun. Having to sound like one knows and
is up to date with all the different industry terminologies must be taxing.

Best of all is when a person is actually familiar with the terminology and
senses the forced nature of the out of context use. They can only smile at the
stilted use.

~~~
pjc50
Two great essays on language that is neither needed nor natural:

[http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...](http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/)

 _" I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of
the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

    
    
        I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
    

Here it is in modern English:

    
    
        Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

"_

[http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.h...](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.html)
: targeted at legal writing, but the suggestion to have a point and stick to
it is universally applicable.

~~~
_kst_
Can you format the quotations as quotations (leading "> ", I think) rather
than indenting them? As it is, you have to scroll right to read the entire
quotation.

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gramasaurous
Reminds me of this[0] talk by Guy Steele where he explicitly defines any word
outside of a given set before he can use that term in his speech. Interesting
language exercise, definitely worth a watch!

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0&feature=youtu.be)

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maweki
Yeah, the book is real fun. Amazon seems to have sent it early and I am not
complaining.

It's a lot of text in comparison to the original poster-comic and a lot of
stuff seems very repetitive (it's bound to be, right?) since many principles
of planes, submarines, rockets are the same (physics). Still a fun read if you
don't plow through it in one sitting.

~~~
sanderjd
Do you think it would be educational for children, or is it mostly an amusing
curiosity for adults?

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amelius
I'm now hoping for a book titled "How to build civilization from scratch".

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gadders
This book comes close: The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World After An
Apocalypse

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-Rebuild-World-After-
Apocal...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-Rebuild-World-After-
Apocalypse/dp/0099575833/)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Most of the trouble building a world after Apocalypse, is all those working
hard against you - the raiders and thieves and generally chaotic elements.
Otherwise, it'd be no harder than setting up a new town somewhere.

~~~
gadders
In the book he does distinguish between two types of apocalypse - the first is
where lots of people die, such as in a global plague or nuclear war. The
second type is where the number of people is the same, but infrastructure is
wiped out such as a massive solar flare.

In the latter you'll have massive famine and also likely fighting against
other survivors.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
In any breakdown of society, you'll have broken desperate people who turn to
raiding instead of rebuilding. I don't think the two will be very much
different?

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PhasmaFelis
In the former case, you have a few people and (relatively) a lot of resources.
In the latter, you have a lot of people and nowhere near enough resources.
That's going to lead to more desperate violence, by many orders of magnitude.

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dean
Love the idea. But maybe he should expand his vocabulary a little bit beyond
1000 words. Saying "food holder" instead of "dish", obscures instead of
clarifies, which defeats the purpose. Same for "up goer" instead of "rocket".
And "funny voice air" instead of "helium". I'm intrigued enough to pick up the
book, but I know stuff like that will just be annoying.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I don't think it's necessarily meant to clarify. I think it's an exercise in
constrained writing.

~~~
dean
Maybe you're right. But to me, the purpose of using plain words instead of
technical jargon, is to clarify meaning. On the other hand, maybe he's just
trying to be funny.

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gadders
I would just like to take this opportunity to do my annual joke that Bill
Gates should try and monetise his blog with affiliate links or he'll never
make any money.

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Jabbles
What rule allowed him to use the word "goer"?

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visakanv
Here's the thing– the "rules" of grammar only really exist to facilitate
effective communication.

Every so often, a skilled communicator chooses to bend a rule in order to make
a point. If the point is well made, it sticks, and people start imitating it.

Next thing you know, the newly-coined word becomes an "actual" word with real
currency. (I put "actual" in quotes, because if you think about it, all words
are made up. All "rules" are really just general guidelines.)

~~~
will_pseudonym
All the rules are made up too! Like fashion, language is one of those things
where popularity rules.

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rdlecler1
This would make a great Wikipedia! Score for brevity and using words with high
frequency.

~~~
kevinmchugh
There is the Simple English wikipedia:
[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

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kbutler
Although I enjoy the Saturn 5 "Up goer five" description, I doubt that "goer"
is in the top 1,000 most common words...

Edit: He's taken the common word list and added different forms as he needed
them. Go -> goer and goers, because he wanted to use them. Grow is allowed,
but grower and growers are not, because he didn't need them.

~~~
jerf
Looking at the simplewriter's JS [1] that lists the legal words [2], it
appears to have 3634 entries in it. I assume that under the "rules" alternate
forms of the top 1000 words are permitted. I'm not sure the "rules" have been
explained elsewhere. (Perhaps in the book but that's not out yet.)

"goer" is a legal form of go. I mention this because I actually thought for a
moment myself it might not be, but of course Googling it revealed it is
extensively used in compound words like "movie-goer". Not sure I've ever seen
it in the wild standing on its own, but I'll concede the point. One must grant
a certain amount of flexibility here...

(And from the "surprisingly klunky translation" department, what player of
Final Fantasy X could forget the Blitzball team name the Luca Goers? [3])

[1]: [http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/](http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/)

[2]:
[http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/words.js](http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/words.js)

[3]:
[http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Luca_Goers](http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Luca_Goers)

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urish
I wonder at what point does using fewer words become detrimental to
understanding.

~~~
sopooneo
I think it depends entirely on the audience. If a word is appropriate, and
your audience is comfortable with it, then not using it is detrimental.

What if _some_ of your audience knows the word? Then it's a judgement call.

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AC__
I wonder why this book doesn't explain the fractional reserve banking system.
Oh wait, never mind, I know why.

~~~
IIAOPSW
Some of your money that is left in the bank is given to other people so long
as they promise to give back even more money. Even though the bank doesn't
have all the money that it has taken, so long as most people do not ask for
their money at the same time the bank will always have enough for people that
want their money back. The bank gives you some extra money for letting them do
this. When a lot of people believe the bank can't give their money back, it
may cause everyone to try and take their money out. This is called a bank run
and can be very bad.

It checks out: [http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/](http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/)

~~~
chrisbennet
That's the description of banking we were taught in school and though it's not
wrong, in practice, banks don't really work that way.

Banks deposits are a tiny source of the money banks loan. In practice, they
loan out a portion of the collateral that they get when issuing a loan.

Example: They give Bob a house loan for $100K and in return they get the deed
to a house worth $110K and an IOU from Bob for $100K (plus some interest). The
bank can now treat the house as a $100-110K asset on their own balance sheet
and loan part of that asset ($90K) out to another borrower.

Or something like that. ;-)

~~~
VLM
Its weirder than you think. No banks have owned loans for a very long time.
They're resold to various quasi government-ish organizations (think, like the
IRS or the federal reserve, although not the IRS) in exchange for cash raised
by selling mortgage backed security bonds. All kinds of random individual and
orgs own those bonds. They pay off pretty well almost a sure thing when the
first derivative of interest rates is negative, not so well at zero to
positive.

Banks and mortgage brokers act as commissioned sales forces for the MBS bond
market, basically.

