Explaining things to others

Tim Bray shows us the philosophy we should all have when explaining things to others:

... when I explain something to someone and they don't get it, that's my problem, not theirs.

Then he asks for discussion about how to explain his topic effectively, but he doesn't allow comments on his web site

His point is well-taken. The way you explain something is entirely dependent upon your audience, and is contingent upon their background and experience. If you're not explaining things in a way your audience can understand, that's your fault, not theirs.

Explaining things in a way your audience can understand often involves leaving out information. Going into too much detail is often a problem people (including myself) have. Programmers and other technical people in particular like to show off what they know, and revel in the little details of how everything they're explaining fits together. Piece of advice: It's great that you know what you're talking about, but when explaining it, think about your audience, not yourself.

Sometimes, however, it's simply not clear what your audience will be able to handle. How far back do you have to go to make something clear to someone when what you're explaining depends on so many other things your audience isn't familiar with? That is often the hardest part of explaining, not getting the details right.

One problem I often have is that I don't want to lie to someone or be misleading, so I often feel the need to go qualify many things as I go along. The problem is that the person probably doesn't know the difference or even care, and would be better served if I did "lie" to hide unimportant details. That's a hurdle I have trouble getting over.

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FastTCP

Martin Links to the home page for that project I mentioned a few days ago, which if I hadn't been so lazy I would have taken the few seconds and done the Google search myself.

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10:07 (utc-4)

 

"No chance" of Evolution

Answers In Genesis: French Creation:

So, looking at DNA, and the machinery of heredity, you could never believe that chance processes brought these into being?

> Oh, no. In genetics, we deal a lot with probability. For instance, in something like the O.J. Simpson trial, you say, 'OK, there is one chance out of one billion that somebody didn't do such and such.' Because it's such a small chance, you reject it. But calculating the chance of just a small part of the genetic machinery arising by randomness, it's much, much less than that. If you take an entire DNA molecule, coding for all the proteins required for life, I think it's about 1 followed by 40,000 zeros (which is really no chance) that such coded DNA can arise by chance.

You have a Ph.D. in genetics, working at evolution-based secular universities. If all the evolution was taken out of your course, would that cause your ability to do scientific research to fall apart or would it make no difference whatsoever? Some people say that evolution holds science together, and it's the whole fabric of science.

> I could easily take away the evolution part of my study without losing any really important stuff from the scientific point of view. I would lose nothing, and would be left with real, observable facts, real science.

So evolutionary teaching is just a religious faith added to real science?

> Exactly. I agree completely. Most of the time, evolution will inhibit the study of real science. People begin with something they want to reinforce continually, namely evolution, and so all observations on the cell, for example, will be squashed into serving this end.

Answers in Genesis does absolutely great work.

They also have some neat stuff on Bees:

Bees: designed for flight

Some evolutionists have claimed that the compound eye is a bad design that no good designer would use, so it must have evolved. However, it is actually an excellent design for small creatures, enabling bees to navigate by the highly efficient optic flow method. Also, an assertion about what a designer wouldn't do is actually a pseudo-theological argument, not a scientific argument, that mutations and natural selection could produce this structure. It also invokes the idea that since creation or evolution are the only alternatives, evidence against one is evidence for the other. Strangely, evolutionists protest loudly when creationists use this approach! When it comes down to hard evidence for evolution, there are huge problems.

Recent molecular evidence counts strongly against the idea that compound eyes all evolved from a common ancestor, and instead points to multiple independent origins, consistent with separate creations by a single designer.6

At the time of writing, debate rages in Ohio, USA, about whether there is 'design' in nature, or if the teaching of intelligent design is even 'science'. However, as shown, the best robotics engineers have yet to design a navigation program as good as a bee's and run it on a chip with the energy efficiency of a bee's brain. So it's reasonable to believe that the bee was designed by a Master Programmer whose intelligence is beyond our own.

Extra emphasis mine. There's so much neat stuff about creatures you never think about. Answers in Genesis has a lot of this type of stuff.

Oh, and here's a bit of that sixth footnote:

Their abstract says, 'These results illustrate exactly why arthropod compound eye evolution has remained controversial, because one of two seemingly very unlikely evolutionary histories must be true. Either compound eyes with detailed similarities evolved multiple times in different arthropod groups or compound eyes have been lost in a seemingly inordinate number of arthropod lineages.'

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