[dajonker]

That's usually how you can identify good people: when they can explain complicated things using simple words, in a way that their audience can understand it. People that need lots of expensive words and leave you feeling dizzy at the end of their presentation often don't know very well what they are talking about either.

[wenc]

An alternative explanation is that some people are just good explainers.

I've had profs in college who were brilliant but couldn't teach, and profs who could teach but weren't brilliant (didn't produce much original research).

I wouldn't say the former group "didn't know their material well", but they didn't build up the material systematically. Pedagogy was neglected. Explaining things is an art that not every has the inclination to master (but they should).

[james_s_tayler]

Professors can massively improve their pedagogy if motivated to do so.

I once had a professor who was new to teaching. It was a very painful experience and the entire CS class spent every lecture murmuring among themselves how terrible the lecture was. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and waited to 2 weeks to see if the lectures would improve. They didn't. At the end of one lecture I went and spoke to him and told him directly he was by far the worst teacher I had encountered at University and that as students we expected higher quality instruction.

From the next week on he was a good lecturer. It was a total transformation. I was seriously impressed. I guess he just never really thought about the pedagogical side of things before but to get such a rude wake up call really jolted him into action and he actually had a pretty good capacity to teach after that.

[wallace_f]

I would have loved to earn a degree by watching lectures online of the best teachers, and then having, instead of lecture hours offered in-person, an interactive Q&A session.

But what would be the best is if you are allowed to skip ahead lectures, etc at your own pace. The competitive incentive here would have been a big extra motivator.

Of course, you cant blame stagnating scientific discovery, stagnating prosperity, and soaring academic costs on the Academic Complex. Teachers, especially, are beyond reproach.

[iKevinShah]

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. - Albert Einstein

[copperx]

Feynman said that if he couldn't teach something to undergrads, he didn't understand it well enough.

[1000units]

Good or smart? They're not entirely unrelated but there's a big difference.

[apocalypstyx]

People's talk of complexity tends to remind me often of their (many believers I have seen) conceptualization of god, that is, he is only beyond them in such a way that is in itself within their horizon of understanding, just more so, as it were. That is to say, it they themselves who are the measure of god. And I see much the same thing happen in other fields. And it leaves me wondering, if we truly can explain everything to 12 year olds, why aren't twelve year olds...doing anything other than being 12 year olds? Perhaps we have to admit that in bestowing this "understanding" through the equivalent of and episode of Nova, we really do have to leave out so much, that to call it either understanding or communication in any serious sense is farcical and a lie promulgated to an audience that's just acting out evolved desires both to want to acquire and mating advantage possible and also to have some innate feature of attraction that is unacquirable by others, while those communicating get to act out their own desires to positions themselves higher within that hierarchy (because are the people in these audiences ever going to be considered 'on their level'? The answer to that should illuminated the whole situation.)

---

So what if—just another fancy idea of mine—what if Chomsky cannot find anything in my work that goes "beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old because" because, when he deals with continental thought, it is his mind which functions as the mind of a twelve-year-old, the mind which is unable to distinguish serious philosophical reflection from empty posturing and playing with empty words?

--Slavoj Žižek

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarif...

[agumonkey]

I'm not sure complicated is a sign, that said trying to match your listener is mandatory, otherwise you're just speaking out loud.