Explaining the laws of explanation (thought that needed no explanation)

The Laws of Explanation are simple. I guess everyone can guage thier meaning. The person who gave the Laws is Tim Bray, the founder of XML. He had postulated the two laws when he faced a particular problem understanding how a software worked. Here is the explanation he gave for the first Law.

When you’re explaining something to somebody and they don’t get it, that’s not their problem, it’s your problem.

The practical take-away from this law is that for anything that’s deep enough to matter, you’re going to have to do a lot of explaining, and you absolutely totally can’t afford to get impatient or irritated when it isn’t going fast enough, you just have to explain better.

This is difficult, but not all that difficult. People who can’t get their message across usually don’t get too far in this world, so anyone who’s making an impact almost by necessity combines the articulateness and patience to (eventually) get the job done.

The Second Law is

When someone’s explaining something to you and you’re not getting it, it’s not your problem, it’s their problem.

The practical take-away is that you have to be totally courageous and truthful in saying “I don’t understand; please explain again.” Otherwise you won’t get the message and you’ll be the loser.

As far as I know, I felt that these two laws were somehow related to everything we do. Additionally, I thought that it perfectly matched what we had been discussing arguing discussing earlier. As for the Delta Law, I had given a small description about the Law below the law itself. So I don't think I should repeat myself. Hope you remember what "po" means. The Delta law was just another form of that po. I find this law very useful when I come up against a wall in my mind. This is more related to problem solving and creativity. The above two postings did not have any significance with the recent events. But Bharucha's Law was a quote I posted. I can't explain why. But maybe later. Manny, they are not about, 'unseen words'. It is about understanding the context in which the message is conveyed. A somewhat complex repostulation of the Theory of Communication (Claude Shannon/ Networks). Here is one more law I guess that might need no explanation.

Anything that can be misunderstood will be. - David G. Myers

BTW, could someone mail (postmark id) me a copy of the rediff article, not the link but the entire article? I cannot access Rediff at office. That was a good point on CED. I don't know about the quality of the course right now. But it definitely could not have got much better than ours. BTW, here is the link to Brahmos website. I had a couple of book reviews written down. But I decided to post it to QSS as it offers a category-wise listing. Here onwards, please find my book reviews here.