Carrion Luggage

Earning Learning

Earlier this month, I did an entry on smarts: "We Are Very Smart" . In it, I said, referring to Richard Feynman, "I wish I could find out who said something like 'If you really want to learn something, figure out how to explain it to a fourth-grader.' I thought it was Feynman, but I'm having trouble finding the quote. If indeed it exists."

Well, I didn't find the exact quote, nor was I expecting to because I wasn't sure about its wording. But after I did that entry, I found the following article, an older one from Medium, and it describes a similar idea.

    The Secret Algorithm Behind Learning  

The famous Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman understood the difference between “knowing something” and “knowing the name of something” and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success.

Well, that, and being really very insanely smart.

Feynman stumbled upon a formula for learning that ensured he understood something better than everyone else.

"Be very smart?"

There are four steps to the Feynman Technique.

Actually, there are five. The zeroth one is: you have to want to learn. Without that, you'll just be staring out the window, chin in palm, sighing, after asking "when are we ever going to use this in real life?"

Step 1: Teach it to a child

Write out what you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to a child.

This, I think, is from where I got the mangled quote above.

A lot of people tend to use complicated vocabulary and jargon to mask when they don’t understand something.

Yes, a lot of people do that, especially in the business world, which is all about optimizing synergies for sustainable innovative solutions to resource allocation issues (for example). But other people use it because it expresses nuance in a way that simpler near-synonyms cannot. While I agree that there's almost never a reason to use "utilize" instead of utilizing "use," "complicated vocabulary and jargon" are compression algorithms. Instead of using lots of words like "it's made up of different little parts that connect to each other" we can say "it's complicated."

Still, I agree with the basic idea: run a decompression routine on the jargon. Not only does that show you've got a handle on the subject matter, but it makes it easier to communicate to outsiders (and children).

There are, of course, three other steps, as the article notes. I don't need to reiterate them here. Mostly, I just wanted to clarify the Feynman connection from the earlier entry.

One thing I've found from experience is that teaching something (it doesn't necessarily have to be to a child) is a way to firm up and increase one's own knowledge of the subject matter. It may be one motivation for my blogging.