Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by itsdevlin 3288 days ago
Being able to convey information in simple terms and pass along the depths of your understanding are two independent topics.

As an example, when we teach people how to fly a wingsuit, we essentially teach wingsuiting (which is a massively complex pursuit) as a set of nested arrays of increasing complexity.

For example, for a first jump course, the goals are as follows: - Exit safely - Demonstrate ability to navigate in-flight - Deploy

These are the most foundational aspects of flying a nylon dress out of an airplane.

After a few jumps, we'll add complexity to each of those, so to shift one point, it starts looking like:

- Exit in an unstable manner and gain stability in less than three seconds

In order to do that, you'll need to understand what causes a wingsuit to be stable, why it gets unstable, what happens when it gets unstable, and how to correct it. Additionally, you'll understand why I want you to do it in less than three seconds. However, at first, you just need to get out of the fucking plane. If I try to tell you all this extra shit you won't remember the foundational thing I need you to remember. You'll probably get unstable, you'll probably figure it out kinda, and you'll probably at some point deploy a parachute.

Teaching's hard.