Sublime

simplicity is difficult because there's no room to hide the lack of clear conviction that complexity affords

I find explaining any actually interesting idea usually requires explaining like 5 subsidiary ideas. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky it’s like 25 and either they’re ready for a three hour lecture or you’re not going to succeed.

Jargon hides our lack of understanding. When forced to write out an idea from start to finish in simple language, you discover where you struggle … where it doesn’t quite make sense … where you get frustrated … where you don’t really understand as well as you thought. Only by identifying gaps in your knowledge can you fill them. 

High-Level Overview on N...

- complicated ideas take more energy to transmit than simple ones

- for every complex idea there are a large number of stupid copies

- people can often understand things without being able to articulate them, so when a person is helped by a complex meme, they will often reproduce and transmit a simpler variant of the original complex meme

- for some p... See more

Here's what I've come to see as the guiding light of my life: simple ideas, explained very clearly. You only really need, like, one or two compelling ideas that you deeply understand. And then you have to be able to make other people understand them, which is the hard part. You have to distill, and in a way distillation is harder than creation. Sim... See more