All the Things

For as long as I can remember, I’ve suffered from a condition where I assume that if I know something, everyone else must know it too.

I think it stems from the feeling that I’m not especially knowledgeable, nor do I think I’ve had a novel existence (no really, I haven’t).

In fact, as I’ve aged I’ve come to relize that I know less and less, by the second it seems! Perhaps, because of that I still fall into the trap of assuming others benefit from a shared context with me.

If I had to guess, I’d say that the majority of the time and effort spent in conveying a technically complex idea to another person is spent building context for the idea. An analogy would be the construction of a jig used to produce a tricky cut for a woodworking project. The jig has to be designed to convey the specific producedure to the material in just the right way, and after having done so, the jig might go forever unused.

I’ve tried to take short cuts. I catch myself trying to summarize an idea at an amazingly high level, which sometimes works, but often leads me into a situation where an astute member of the audience will ask a “what about this…” sort of question. This is good and bad; it’s good in that I know that the listener was indeed absorbing the information and thinking critically about it (usually the point of the conversation), but it indicates that maybe I should have just tried to set the context up in the first place.