Every industry is full of non-technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
(The other post was technical hills. I changed the question to non-technical.)
Every industry is full of non-technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
(The other post was technical hills. I changed the question to non-technical.)
You’re digging in your heels in that they only can communicate in one medium. You then pick a language which I don’t know what your competency is.
If you can’t communicate an idea in any method of communication at all to a point where an educated person in that field can’t see what you’re trying to communicate, it shows that you don’t understand the idea. This is especially true if you can’t repeat the ideas in the media it was presented.
How else is someone supposed to show how they understand an idea?
No, some people are just bad communicators in particular mediums, and some mediums are bad channels for conveying other ideas.
Fundamentally, not every bit of knowledge is easily translated into words (or images). You see it a lot when teaching others how to cook (or especially bake), where smell, texture, feel, and all those are both important and knowable, while simultaneously difficult to describe. I can show people how to bake a sourdough loaf, but reducing it to text loses a lot, to the point where the typical person won’t be able to actually derive the knowledge from that text. And plenty of people I’ve tried to teach don’t have the attention to detail to be able to absorb it. I can be an expert in the actual craft while not quite grasping why other people in my orbit just don’t get it. That’s the phenomenon of superstar athletes retiring and then struggling to become decent coaches.
The experts in a lot of fields didn’t learn their knowledge in a book. Or even instructional videos. Limiting your definition of “knowledge” or “expertise” to only be the subjects that can be learned in those settings is too small a view.
No amount of book reading will teach someone how to be a good basketball player, a good guitar player, a good public speaker, a good friend, or even a good writer. That doesn’t invalidate their expertise, or even require they be good at explaining their craft to be considered knowledgeable in those fields.
At the end of the day, plenty of people are bad at communication. But just because someone is bad at communication doesn’t mean that they’re inherently not knowledgeable. And that’s the fundamental error in your view.
Using your cooking analogy, what I’m talking about are people who can’t even describe the basics of how to cook.
What ingredients do you need to bake bread? I don’t know.
What cooking equipment do you need to bake bread? I don’t know.
About how long will it take to bake bread and when do you need to start? I don’t know.
I’m not talking about how to communicate being an expert at a craft and teaching it to someone else, I’m talking about understanding the basics.
Ok, sure, if someone doesn’t know the basics, then they can’t be an expert in that thing. But that hasn’t been what we’ve been talking about in this thread, and your initial comment was that someone can only be said to understand a thing if they can explain how it works.
And I’m pointing out that:
Dropping back to only talking about the basics kinda ignores huge swaths of human knowledge and understanding.
The discussion I started was never about being an expert of something, just having a basic understanding. You chose to inflate having an understanding of an idea to being an expert.
I’ve also discussed cases where the expert level execution requires a lot of non verbal skills, but those experts can still describe the basic underpinnings of what they are doing.
However, unless someone has a severe communication disability, they should be able to communicate the basics of their knowledge. If they can’t explain it, maybe they don’t understand it enough to grasp the science behind why things are the way they are.
If you want to use cooking for example, a cook might understand how to use a recipe without understanding why the recipe requires certain ingredients or techniques. A cook could understand how to make a béchemel sauce without understanding what an emulsion is, what chemical reactions cause a successful emulsion, and which flavors propagate well in that kind of sauce. Being able to cook a béchemel sauce doesn’t mean you understand what a béchemel sauce is.