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.)

  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    5 hours ago

    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:

    • Some people are bad at communication, and understand things they can’t explain, because their explanatory ability is hindered by their communication skills.
    • Some specific concepts are not easily reduced to words, so they are inherently difficult to explain. That doesn’t mean they can’t be understood, or that nobody understands them.

    Dropping back to only talking about the basics kinda ignores huge swaths of human knowledge and understanding.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
      1·
      35 minutes ago

      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.