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posted by on Monday January 23 2017, @07:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the impudent-challenge dept.

The phrase "You are Not Expected to Understand This" is probably the most famous comment in the history of Unix.

And last month, at the Systems We Love conference in San Francisco, systems researcher Arun Thomas explained to an audience exactly what it was that they weren't supposed to understand.

Computer science teacher Ozan Onay, who was in the audience, called it "one of my favorite talks of the day," writing on his blog that "Nothing should be a black box, even when Dennis Ritchie says it's ok!"

The code comment originally appeared in the Sixth Edition Unix operating system, describing context switching — or, as Thomas put it, "the mechanism that allows for time-sharing and multi-tasking ... essentially how a computer is allowed to be shared by multiple concurrent users and concurrent applications."

Thomas reminded the audience of Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie's own "Comment about the comment" web page on the subject:

It's often quoted as a slur on the quantity or quality of the comments in the Bell Labs research releases of Unix. Not an unfair observation in general, I fear, but in this case unjustified... we tried to explain what was going on. 'You are not expected to understand this' was intended as a remark in the spirit of 'This won't be on the exam,' rather than as an impudent challenge.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Monday January 23 2017, @11:45AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday January 23 2017, @11:45AM (#457594) Journal

    This is a very common excuse used by dumb persons to ignore the smarter ones: They can't make me understand it, so they can't possibly have understood it themselves.

    Explaining it in a simple way can also be a fools game. "Simplifying" most of the time equates to telling lies to children [wikipedia.org]. If the audience tries to apply the knowledge, they will fail and blame the tutor for leaving out "the essential bit". If there is one smart-ass in the audience who knows a bit more or sees the contradiction in the simplified version, he will let the tutor look stupid.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Monday January 23 2017, @12:34PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Monday January 23 2017, @12:34PM (#457604) Journal

    "A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street."-- David Hilbert

    "If you can't explain your physics to a barmaid it is probably not very good physics." -- Ernest Rutherford

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday January 23 2017, @01:11PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Monday January 23 2017, @01:11PM (#457613) Journal
      My personal favourite:

      "The credit for an invention doesn't go to the first person to invent it, it goes to the one who explains it well enough that no one needs to reinvent it again" - Robin Milner.

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      • (Score: 3, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Monday January 23 2017, @03:06PM

        by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday January 23 2017, @03:06PM (#457651) Journal

        Quick, Some one tell Poettering!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @02:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @02:07PM (#457630)

      "A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street."-- David Hilbert

      For most people today "simple" implies "without mathematics", because "mathematics is hard". Good luck explaining a mathematical theory without mathematics. ;-)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @04:44PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @04:44PM (#457681)

        Isn't that basically the field of topology?

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday January 23 2017, @07:18PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Monday January 23 2017, @07:18PM (#457752)

        > Good luck explaining a mathematical theory without mathematics

        Don't think that will be so hard, now that we can refute facts with Alternative Facts

    • (Score: 2) by dlb on Monday January 23 2017, @02:52PM

      by dlb (4790) on Monday January 23 2017, @02:52PM (#457646)
      I bet Ernest didn't get many dates with that approach, though!
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Monday January 23 2017, @03:26PM

      by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday January 23 2017, @03:26PM (#457657) Journal

      Nice quotes and amicable attitude, but unlike Mr. Hilberts and Mr. Rutherfords work in Mathmatics/Physics, these statements are not proven and not exactly in their area of expertise, and therefore doesn't carry any more weight than any other opinion. (Their statements does make at least the assumption that the first man on the street / an average barmaid is willing to listen and to put some effort. I just have to try to talk to my wife to know that the average person is not willing. Also, even after reading books from Stephen Hawking, I still only have half a clue at best of what quantum-mechanics is about. And I don't assume Hawkins doesn't know what he's talking about.)

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      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday January 23 2017, @05:13PM

        by butthurt (6141) on Monday January 23 2017, @05:13PM (#457701) Journal

        > [...] these statements are not proven

        Agreed, but that goes for all the statements in this thread.

        > and not exactly in their area of expertise [...]

        Oh, but they are, for an important part of the work of a mathematician or scientist is communicating one's ideas or findings—if only to one's colleagues.

        • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday January 23 2017, @06:09PM

          by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday January 23 2017, @06:09PM (#457719) Journal

          Agreed, but that goes for all the statements in this thread.

          True. My statement was based on personal experience and what I consider common sense, which is to other readers probably not more than anecdotal evidence, maybe a hypothesis at best.
          If I wanted to cite quotes, I'd refer to this page [quora.com], citing 9 comments, partly from academics, related to your citation.

          and not exactly in their area of expertise [...]

          Oh, but they are, for an important part of the work of a mathematician or scientist is communicating one's ideas or findings—if only to one's colleagues.

          ... which is a very different topic. A colleague is a paid person, who can be expected to at least try and pay attention and to have some expertise on the general topic.
          But I really think we are not that far apart when it comes to the basic idea: If someone understands a topic well enough, he can structure it in a way that it becomes more digestible to others, and usually is able to give a comprehensive overview to a less informed audience.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @04:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @04:53PM (#457689)

      i prefer to believe that i am a very dumb person and that these guys really really would like
        everyone to understand their ideas because the opposite, that they are really smart and that
      they drap it into such a complicated form as to make it unintelligible for the average person
      so as to be able to "keep an edge" is far more scary ...

      ofc, if no one wants to know their ideas, they would go to bed hungry (if they can afford a bed) and thus
      have to part with some form of the idea but maybe just "simple" enough so the grant department
      of some university or research facility can understand it?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @03:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @03:17PM (#457654)

    Yet, I use it on myself sometimes to see if I have understood it... and it works very well in that case.

    As for "simplifying" things, they don't need to be lies. Just keeping details out, can help sometimes. The details can be filled in again at a later time when the person feels more comfortable with the subject. I've used this method on students a few times and most of the times it worked as intended.

    • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday January 23 2017, @03:37PM

      by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday January 23 2017, @03:37PM (#457661) Journal

      I understand (and agree to) the sentiment. I.e. I agree, that knowledge comes usually in three stages.

      1. Understand the principles of the theory
      2. Being able to apply the knowledge in practice (where the setup usually slightly varies)
      3. Being able to explain

      I also try to explain some things to some peers to test if I understood it, and sometimes even rehearsing an explanation to a puppet can help detecting inconsistencies. But that does not mean that really everyone (or even only every average person) must be able to understand a theorem for the theorem to have merits.

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