

You Don’t Truly Understand It Until You Think It’s Obvious - excid3
http://excid3.com/blog/you-dont-truly-understand-it-until-you-think-its-obvious/

======
espeed
This is akin to how a society comes to understand something and why genius
ideas sometimes take so long to become accepted. I believe "context" is the
underlying principle here.

Arthur Schopenhauer said, "All truth passes through three stages: First, it is
ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-
evident."

If you present a truth to someone whom doesn't have sufficient context for
what you are saying, it may seem outrageous and ridiculous to them because the
gap between their understanding and the insight you presenting is too great.

They would have to build up their understanding of the context around it until
it expands to a point where they find a connection to what they already know.
Then they can start to relate to it and eventually they may see it as self
evident.

Jeff Jonas has a great metaphor for explaining context in terms of puzzle
pieces and how it relates to big data (see this short TechCrunchTV segment -
[http://www.techcrunch.tv/watch/s4ZnZyMTrtWTaKSxWF2WEPPXkBtMj...](http://www.techcrunch.tv/watch/s4ZnZyMTrtWTaKSxWF2WEPPXkBtMjZc3#ooid=s4ZnZyMTrtWTaKSxWF2WEPPXkBtMjZc3)).

This is how Richard Feynman approached problem solving -- he wanted to connect
new ideas to what he already understood and understand the context of
everything around it:

"It's not quite true that Feynman could not accept an idea until he had torn
it apart. Rather, the idea could not yet be part of his way of thinking and
looking at the world. Before an idea could contribute to that worldview,
Feynman wanted to turn over the idea, to see why it was true, from any angle
that he could find...In other words, he wanted to connect a new idea to what
he already understood and thereby extend his understanding"
([http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/08/how-richard-
feynman-t...](http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/08/how-richard-feynman-
thought/)).

Once you surround a new concept with enough puzzle pieces, it attaches to what
you already know and then eventually it becomes obvious.

~~~
yxhuvud
Poe's Law seems very relevant to your comment.

~~~
espeed
Maybe in more ways than one. Paul Graham wrote about this in his essay, "What
You Can't Say" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html>).

------
Peaker
> I remember that in 7th grade when I tried to teach myself programming for
> the first time, I didn’t realize that you were supposed to reuse variables.
> I would just create a new variable for every single value I needed to store.
> Boy does that seem stupid looking back.

What? Making new variables is better. The compiler will generally figure out
the scope of variables and re-use the space taken by variables.

This tends to suggest that at least for him, the functional/immutable meaning
of variables was more natural.

~~~
excid3
This was a hangman game in GW-Basic. It was the messiest code I've ever
written. 38k lines for a simple 3 letter only hangman game.

~~~
nitrogen
Wow, that is indeed impressive. I admire the determination it must have taken
to get to 38000 lines of code for a three letter game. Was this text-based or
graphical (I can't remember -- did gwbasic even support anything beyond basic
CGA video modes?)?

Edit: Wait, was that BASIC line numbers reaching to 38000, or 38000 actual
individual lines?

~~~
excid3
Erm sorry, it was a 38k source file of text. I was actually hard coding
everything because I didn't understand it. the whole screen would get printed
out (without any sort of looping) each time you guessed a letter.

GW Basic did let you do basic graphics, I eventually got around to emulating a
side scroller at one point. Obviously it was just the foreground, but it was
quite a lot of fun.

------
gameshot911
I'd actually go one step further than that. I agree with Einstein, who said
“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough”.

~~~
pluies
Nicolas Boileau, French poet, said basically the same thing in the 17th
century:

 _Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, Et les mots pour le dire
arrivent aisément._

(Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with
ease.)

~~~
sixtofour
"Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with
ease."

And those words also flow with ease.

------
eggoa
But just because you think something is obvious, don't assume you understand
it.

------
jamesrcole
Ha! Being obvious to you does not mean you truly understand it.

At the start of my PhD my argument was obvious to me, but it's taken many
years of hard work to turn that implicit understanding into an explicit,
proper understanding (and I'm not fully there yet).

~~~
Homunculiheaded
The more I've learned and studied various areas, the more I've come to realize
that true mastery is to really, really understand the 'basics' of a given
field. If you can really understand those foundational aspects of a field, all
else can be derived almost through intuition. Unfortunately it takes a few
years to realize that you don't in fact know the basics, and many more years
to really 'get' them ;)

~~~
dan-k
I think that hints at what I would consider a more useful criterion for true
understanding: being able to apply something in new ways. Any programmer can
learn to implement a linked list by being beaten over the head with it in a
data structures class until it seems obvious. Someone who truly understands it
will be able to pull out concepts like pointers from it and reuse them when
confronted with another problem, like making a hash table that can handle
collisions.

------
hoodoof
Edward De Bono has long said that "Every valuable creative idea will always be
logical in hindsight."

Also "What is obvious in hindsight may be invisible in foresight."

<http://www.edwdebono.com/msg19k.htm>

~~~
jackpirate
I almost like what De Bono says, but some of it just doesn't click. For
example:

    
    
      3. What is obvious in hindsight may be invisible in foresight.
    
      There is no magic in creativity.
    

It seems to me the magic of creativity is making your foresight see those
invisible things. If there really were no magic, we'd have real AI by now.

~~~
randallsquared
_If there really were no magic, we'd have real AI by now._

That's not at all clear. It could well turn out that more processing power
than is easily available is necessary to run the experiments that would give
us the answers to how intelligence works.

~~~
jackpirate
By virtue of P probably not equaling NP, I think the "more processing power"
argument is ridiculous. To think up a new math theorem using exhaustive search
of the space is simply unthinkable, no matter how much computing power you
have. Some currently unknown form of creativity must be applied to reduce the
search space considerably.

~~~
randallsquared
"new math theorem"?

I think it possible that we will not understand intelligence until we can run
and tweak intelligent software. Fortunately, we don't have to do anything like
an exhaustive search of the space because we have a working example of
intelligence that we can copy without having to understand how it works. Doing
this will require very large amounts of computing power, but not computronium.

~~~
jackpirate
_Fortunately, we don't have to do anything like an exhaustive search of the
space because we have a working example of intelligence that we can copy_

My point was just that anything besides an exhaustive search of the space is
applying some sort of "creativity magic."

Also FWIW, I believe that in order to simulate a brain on a computer we will
essentially need to know how it works, which we are no where near. That is my
opinion as an AI researcher, but there are certainly others who know more than
me and disagree.

------
bane
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok>

------
staunch
Related to Derek Sivers' idea.

Text: <http://sivers.org/obvious>

Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GCm-u_vlaQ>

------
fferen
Good article. I've had very similar experiences looking over my old code from
several months ago. Even basic concepts like procedural abstraction I've only
learned about and put into practice recently; in the past I may have used it
but wasn't consciously aware of it and didn't do it consistently. And yet I
was able to write a lot of awesome working software (that was hard to read and
maintain).

Sometimes I think I would have been better off with a little theory at first,
but then I wonder if I would have even developed the passion without the
immediate joy of creation.

------
nighthawk
interesting, although there's plenty that seems obvious but upon deeper
inspection one realizes he doesn't understand it at all. maybe that's true
understanding?

quick example - you hold a ball and let it go. "obviously" it drops, but think
about it - why did it drop and I'm pretty sure even the most advanced string
theorists couldn't explain definitively why it went towards the ground.

"true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing" - socrates

~~~
espeed
Yep, watch Feynman in "Fun to Imagine 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions...)"
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM>).

~~~
nighthawk
great clip!

~~~
espeed
Here's one that relates to your Socrates reference -- _"true knowledge exists
in knowing that you know nothing"_.

It's a Charlie Rose segment where Jim Collins is discussing his book "How the
Mighty Fall" (<http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10565>). He talks
about the five stages of decline in any great enterprise. Stage 1 is hubris --
thinking you know it all.

~~~
instakill
Great little epistemological thread.

------
ars
This is part of the trouble with patents.

You can't patent obvious things. But once someone invents something it
suddenly seems obvious, and people ridicule the idea of patenting it.

~~~
drcube
I don't think you can get more obvious in this day and age than adding "with
computers" or "on the internet" to mundane, centuries-old ideas like "showing
people things similar to what they are shopping for".

To be honest, I think your argument supports the abolition of patents more
than you think it does. EVERY idea was built on the back of previous ideas.
"Novelty" is only a matter of degree, and subjective degree at that.

------
joe_the_user
"...Truly Understand..."?

Sigh... It seems author doesn't yet have the breadth of experience to know
there are many different levels of understanding appropriate to many different
fields, tasks and kinds of mastery.

~~~
dan-k
I'm not sure the post really says anything about when such "true
understanding" is necessary. That's a whole different can of worms.

~~~
excid3
Agreed, I may never "truly understand" how a programming language works, but
there is a moment of clarity when you can say you really do understand why
they did it that way. There are, of course, multiple levels to that. You may
not know "how" they did it, but you do understand why aside from repeating
what others have said on "why" they chose that approach.

