Today, let’s think about how to explain things well.
What is an explanation? It’s the act of getting something I know into someone else’s head. So the point isn’t reciting what I know. It’s making the other person know something.
Is there a way to do it well? Start by not getting the facts wrong, since a wrong explanation plants wrong knowledge in someone’s head. But explain enough things and you notice that explaining isn’t a question of accuracy. Accuracy doesn’t guarantee the other person understood.
Inaccurate but useful explanations
A student asks, “How do I get into Seoul National University?” If you answer “get nearly every question on the entrance exam right,” you’re being extremely accurate, and it’s a bad explanation. Give up some of that accuracy instead. “Sleep about seven hours and cut your time messing around as much as you can,” or “keep a proper error log so you stop repeating the same mistakes,” and now the answer is genuinely useful. If you know the student’s situation, you can personalize it: “you need to break the habit of slipping up on easy math problems.”
As the example shows, a good explanation should be judged on usefulness, not accuracy. And you can only explain well if you understand the person in front of you. Say you’re teaching a kid to brush their teeth. “Brush up and down to get rid of bacteria and plaque” is fairly accurate, and the kid doesn’t get it. Say “sweep up and down like a broom so the bits of rice stuck between your teeth fall out” and you’ve given up some accuracy, but at least the kid can follow it. The second one is the better explanation, because it ends with the kid actually brushing, however clumsily.
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So a good explanation has to be simple enough for the other person to follow, and some accuracy can go in the process. Metaphors work the same way. We reach for them constantly when we explain, and a metaphor is exactly that trade: accuracy for comprehension. Push further in that direction and you get stories like Santa Claus, wildly inaccurate and extremely easy to understand. Instead of explaining a complicated moral law, you use an invented character like Santa or the bogeyman, and the incomplete explanation still lands.
An explanation the other person didn’t understand is worthless no matter how accurate it is. It’s like ordering a hundred packages and having every one of them vanish at the Gonjiam sorting center, so nothing reaches your door. What counts isn’t how I explained it, it’s what the other person heard and understood. An explanation nobody hears, and for that matter any communication nobody hears, isn’t useful.
Explaining and persuading
In that sense, explaining has some of the character of persuading. People think an explanation delivers a statement of fact (teeth rot if you don’t brush them), but a lot of the time it’s delivering a statement of value (you should brush your teeth). Delivering a value statement is persuasion, and persuasion runs on how convincing you are, not how accurate.
And that isn’t the end of it. Another factor is interest. Every reader has the option not to read. However loudly someone talks at the front of the room, you can look at your phone or drift off. (Same goes for you, reading this right now.) The most convincing, most accurate thing in the world does nothing if nobody listens.
Another factor is self-interest. Charlie Munger tells this story. The general counsel at the investment firm Salomon found a trader behaving dishonestly and explained to the CEO that they had to report it to the authorities. But the CEO hadn’t been involved in what the trader did, so it wasn’t his neck on the line, and the lawyer’s only argument was “reporting it is the morally right thing to do.” The CEO treated the whole thing as an annoying, unpleasant chore and never reported it. The case grew, and the general counsel lost his job for failing to deal with it early.
Look at the story and you see a lawyer who explained accurately, but who said only things the CEO didn’t want to hear and got nothing from. Munger’s view is this. If the general counsel had told the CEO “if you don’t report this now, your reputation and the firm’s reputation go in the ground, and you could be looking at an enormous fine,” appealing to the CEO’s own interests, he might have changed the man’s behavior. So an effective explanation may have to account for interests too.
Getting used to being incomplete
Knowing something and explaining it are different jobs, and explaining seems to be the harder one. You have to act as the situation changes. In practice an explanation has to weigh accuracy, comprehension, entertainment, and interests all at once. A good explanation is short on none of them and sits at a Pareto optimum. Usually the weakest of those factors decides how much force the explanation has. If a car’s engine lasts twenty years and its wheels last five, the car lasts five. So we have to explain in a way that gives every factor its due. And to explain effectively, we first have to get comfortable with incomplete explanations.
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P.S. Even a single explanation needs several approaches held together like this. An accurate but boring explanation and a convincing one that cuts against the listener’s interests both go nowhere in the real world. You solve real problems by weighing all the factors. As I always say, reality is complicated. To deal with that, we need as many perspectives as reality has moving parts. This is called the “latticework model.”
A latticework, where every part holds up every other
I’ll cover what the latticework model is and what you get from learning it in the next post. Subscribe and get the notification!
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