I love listening to Adam Brown, he is doing a great job at explaining things. Definitely recommend his other video, a blackboard session on relativity.

However I could not stop and reflect on that moment when he said “this plot is so simple, even venture capitalist can understand it”.

If you look with your own eyes, the plot is so badly done, that even the venture capitalists have to tolerate it — because building things is more important for them than arguing about choice of units.

Why Adam Brown added those funky thick red arrows? Because whoever made up the plot did not take a second look at it. Why “better” is going down and not up? Why more compute is going from negative exponents into zero exponent instead of starting with small units and going up into infinity? A simple change in the units, inversion of the loss rate into “efficiency rate” (or whatnot) would take a few minutes, but produce a much more legible result.

And that’s the essense of the hacker’s culture. You sometimes do an excellent job and then utterly fail at explaining it effectively to the audience wider than your narrow social circle.

The problem here is not the aesthetic one, it is deeper. Failing to explain things clearly means that it’s harder to correct errors — for you or your listeners. If you cloud your idea, much fewer people would be able to understand what you are trying to say and offer the useful deep criticism that will help you improve your work and/or your explanation of it.

I’ve just been to a hacker’s meetup in Berlin. People do speeches about their crypto projects that they work on for years without much progress. Very few people in the audience connect with any given presentation, care about it or understand it. The speakers don’t understand what they are doing deeply enough to make a strong case for why their work is important and how it fits into a bigger picture. There is zero progress being made and it is admitted in almost every talk: “I’ve been talking about this last year and this is what it is”.