Explain Like I’m Five!

Here’s a question for you, how would you know that you have understood something clearly and that you’re confident enough to teach it to others? Well you’re your own judge but consider this:

Einstein, having a final discussion with de Broglie on the platform of the Gare du Nord in Paris, whence they had travelled from Brussels to attend the Fresnel centenary celebrations, said “that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description ‘that even a child could understand them.’ ~ Einstein: His Life and Times (1972)

“You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.” ~ Richard Feynman

So if you can explain something in a simple way that a child or a novice can wrap their heads around a complex concept, then you have a clear understanding of that concept. Computer programmers use a similar technique to understand and debug their code; it’s called Rubber duck debugging.

This is very helpful because this helps not only us in understanding the world around us but also helps others who are very new to a concept to understand and further explore those concepts. I personally believe that learning should be fun and we should enjoy both learning and teaching. It’s also said that the best way to learn is to teach; and to teach you have to be clear of what you’re teaching. Considering that, I feel that creating a community around this idea of learning and teaching will help us all :D

This community will be specific to Artificial Intelligence and the intent will be to simplify the concepts in the domain. Be it an idea, an algorithm, a paper or techniques, the goal is to make them easy to grasp and have a clear understanding of the same. I’ll be starting off with a publication under medium and a channel using telegram.

Looking forward to have fun learning with you guys :D