true understanding

For those who become serious scholars, the ultimate test of a good idea is the taxi-driver test. If you are on your way somewhere to present your idea and you cannot in five sentences explain what you are talking about well enough so that your taxi driver or the person in the adjacent aircraft seat can understand it and see why it’s interesting, you don’t really understand your idea yet. You aren’t ready to present it. This holds no matter how complex your idea is. If you can’t state it in everyday terms for an average person with no special interest in it, you don’t understand it yet. Even for those working in the most abstruse formalisms, this is the absolute test of understanding.

~ Andrew Abbott in Methods of Discovery

Think back to your first years in graduate school. The most mathematically complex papers required a great deal of time and effort to read. The papers were written as if to a private club, and we felt proud when we successfully entered the club. Although I copied the style of these overly complex and often poorly written papers in my first few research attempts, I grew out of it quite quickly. I didn’t do so on my own. I was lucky to be surrounded by mature confident researchers at my first academic appointment. They taught me that if you are confident in your research you will write to include, not exclude. You will write to inform, not impress. It is with apologies to my research and writing mentors that I report the following events.

The preference falsification in which I engaged was to intentionally take a simple clear research paper and make it so complex and obscure that it successfully impressed referees. That is, I wrote a paper to impress rather than inform—a violation of my most closely held beliefs regarding the proper intent of research. I often suspected that many papers I read were intentionally complex and obscure, and now I am part of the conspiracy.

~ from economist David Hakes, quoted on orgtheory.net