[mensetmanusman]

The answer is statistics: what is more likely, that the best explainer of a certain topic is within a group of people you have access to, or that person is somewhere else in the world?

This is very analogous to the problem industrial research groups face trying to answer a certain problem, e.g. ‘how do we ensure that our team is the most likely to solve a particular problem first?’

This is why start up acquisitions are so common even among the best funded tech companies.

[lordnacho]

Might also have something to do with the explanation size: this Poisson thing is one little thing. With the internet, it's perfectly acceptable to just do a blog post on one little thing.

Previously, if you were to write a textbook or teach a tutorial, you needed to teach a bunch of things.

So in the internet age there's a bunch of fine grained "best explanations" coming from a variety of authors that beats the best that one guy can do across a range of topics.

[lanstin]

You are assuming that the best explanation can be given without interaction. I don’t have to be a great explainer but only have enough social skills to do an iterative search thru explanations, using my learning friends face and questions as metric, and find a very good explanation for that person at that time. If but only if they missed some but of linear algebra, i can sketch it out. And while Many people learn well by listening and note taking, many others also learn well by doing. We have documents and so on at work but when I see a good PR then I know the message is understood.

Start ups are better than large companies not because the people are so much smarter, but because the structure enables for so much more rapid learning and search of the solution space.