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.

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.

If you’re dealing with a spatial problem but can’t draw what you are trying to explain, that is indicative that you don’t know what you’re dealing with.

I really feel like you’re digging in your heels on a fundamentally flawed point. Plenty of people are bad at drawing. That doesn’t make them bad at visualizing or reasoning spatially, or somehow invalidate the spatial understanding that they do have.

My ability to explain things in Spanish isn’t all that well correlated with my internal knowledge of those things, but is more closely correlated with my Spanish skills in those subjects. At the same time, there are nonverbal people who understand stuff without the ability to meaningfully convey messages to other humans.

The ability to communicate is its own skill, independent from other areas of knowledge, such that the correlation between ability to explain to others and the actual internal understanding is weak, at best.

I mean, the linguistic mastery necessary to be able to talk around gaps in vocabulary is still itself a skill set completely distinct from knowledge about a different subject.

Plenty of skills aren’t easily reduced to verbal explanations, or even the ability to teach. Plenty of world class athletes become mediocre coaches, frustrated that their players don’t seem to get things the way they used to. Same with musicians, actors, public speakers (merely repeating the words of a speech won’t necessarily carry the same charisma and gravitas), and all sorts of other experts.

One can know something without being able to explain it. That doesn’t invalidate the knowledge.

Nah, some people are just bad with words. They can know how something works but can’t explain it because their vocabulary doesn’t capture some of the nuances. I’ve seen this a lot in self-taught experts, especially.

Plus there’s always the possibility that the vocabulary is limited from the audience perspective. I definitely know how certain things work, but detail is lost when I oversimplify it for my kids or something, because I’m explaining it to them rather than to a more knowledgeable adult with a stronger base.

I like to call it lost wages.

Mammals evolve into ant eaters.

Yeah, for those of us whose school-provided sex education was actually informative, including puberty and sexual health units in mandatory health class in multiple different grades, I don’t see why this would have to be inherently badly taught.

It’s a weird “oh it’s impossible to teach anything properly so let’s not try” attitude that applies to a lot of discussions about education, even core academic subjects like math and science and history.

The real advice is to realize that every job has components that are not fun.

There are professional athletes who still love to play their sport, and intend to retire into coaching, but hate dealing with marketing and promos and media availability. Lots hate the travel. Some don’t like some of their teammates or coaches.

I know doctors who hate dealing with the paperwork, and programmers who hate dealing with documentation or testing, and lawyers who hate tracking their timesheets. But each of these are part of the job. The question is whether the entire bundled package deal is a pretty good job or not for yourself.

Every interaction between a man and a woman that I personally experience involves the same man, me. Therefore no matter what my sample size, the sampling bias will only observe what is true of this one specific man.

On the flip side, every man-woman interaction that a woman experiences is with the same woman.

As a result, I’ll have a lot of experience interacting with many women, and women will have a lot of experiences interacting with many men. When women protect themselves from certain traits of other men, even when those traits are not true of myself (the only man I’ve directly observed in these 1-on-1 interactions), they’re inherently building on those worst-case scenarios. I’m not too worried about it, like when my neighbors lock their doors (despite me not being a burglar).

This community is really interesting to me that these types of comics, by women, about being a woman who interacts with men, are both so popular here and so angrily criticized in the comments. It’s a fascinating combination.

I moved cities about 5 times between 18 and 30. Each time I had a pretty easy time making new friends in the place where I found myself, and learning a bit about myself and what I’m looking for in friendships, what I have to offer in a friendship, and the types of people I get along best with.

By the time I sorta settled down in my 30’s in one more new city, I had decades of building that actual skills of meeting new people, becoming good friends with the ones who got along with me, and then maintaining those friendships over time.

Now, in my 40’s, even with kids, I still make friendships at work, in the neighborhood, through my kids’ schools and activities, etc. Making the leap of “let’s hang out outside of the context where we met” grows easier when you’ve done it a million times before. And the act of scheduling friend interactions on your personal calendar becomes second nature over time, as well.

All this is to say that it’s a feedback loop, and you want to be in the virtuous cycle, not the vicious cycle. But if you are in the spiral, breaking out of it can pay dividends faster than you’d expect.

This is several of the plotlines running through Superbad.

I buy stuff from all sorts of places. I’m pretty serious about food and cooking, and I run through a pretty wide variety of cultures and regional variation in making my food. So for me, this is how I buy:

Fresh produce in season: street markets

Fresh produce out of season (greenhouse grown or shipped in from another latitude): Whole Foods

Mainstream American prepackaged foods: nearest big box corporate supermarket.

Day to day meat, dairy, and seafood (chicken, beef, pork, shrimp): Whole Foods

Specialty meat (aged stuff, unusual cuts): local specialty butcher, ethnic grocery stores

Specialty seafood (live seafood, less common items): specialty seafood shop

Fancy cheeses: cheese store in my neighborhood, occasionally Whole Foods

Various ethnic specialities (Kim chi, tortillas, paneer, certain types of Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese vegetables, Mexican/Indian spices) that are perishable: ethnic grocery stores

Unusual or imported prepackaged or shelf stable foods/spices: ethnic grocery stores, Amazon, other online stores depending on the item.

The current ratio is probably 10 to 1

In terms of compliments you give, what’s the ratio? Be part of the solution.

I compliment my friends all the time. It’s an easy way to support the people you care about.

I had the luxury of watching it twice in a week (was visiting family for Christmas that year, not a ton to do around the house but watch movies), and I thought that it was a really satisfying film to watch over two viewings. It’s definitely an interesting artistic choice to make a movie that benefits from a second viewing, and I can see why that turns people away, but I really enjoyed it.

I’m pretty sure his father gets arrested and he has to keep the family together by taking over their real estate development business.

obversion

obsevation

I was hoping that by observing your comment these would collapse into the spelling “observation.”

What does “malicious” mean here? Structural racism often doesn’t have ill intent from any individual people, and nevertheless still affects people’s daily lives.

On which scale? Because that kinda matters.

The rate of sweat I produce, in terms of ml of sweat per minute.