Now, try an experiment next you do that. Explain by a completely inapplicable analogy, one that is logically coherent but does not apply to the problem at hand.

You win if your listener calls BS. I win if they don't.

You're probably not explaining anywhere near as much as you think. You're just making soothing noises until they are no longer willing to pursue the matter. You might as well be honest about that fact with both yourself and the client, as suggested in the blog post.

All you're really demonstrating by that thought experiment is that when there's a huge knowledge gap, the more knowledgeable person is well-positioned to get away with spewing a whole mess of BS.

That is obviously true. But it's also obviously nowhere close to being an appropriate (or even smart) way to conduct one's business relationships.

You do not have a "business relationship" if there is a huge knowledge gap. If there's no meeting of the minds, no way to evaluate each other, no way to sensibly compete in a free market, you're well along the path of a provider/consumer relationship or pure faith or at best something like feudalism or lifetime sharecropping.

A good analogy is asking about the business relationship between a parishioner and a priest. Its the wrong tinted glasses to look at the relationship. That doesn't mean it has to be a bad relationship, and no value judgement of inferiority. Its just evaluating the relationship via inappropriate criteria.

Tread lightly, this attitude is dangerous. There are really customers/managers who are not technical that instead rely on your previous words and commitments to gauge what's possible and what is getting done.

These people act dumber than they are, so they can extract more information with which to evaluate your character and disposition.

Again, that's not a business relationship, that is quite literally exactly how feudalism worked. Your liege lord was not an expert on your plot of lands agronomy prospects or the physical state of your knights, so he had to trust you.

Its possible some of the confusion is state based vs action based. If you define business relationship by state, then absolutely anything that happens in a cube farm while wearing a tie is a business relationship, from a free market to blackmail to slavery to blind faith. If you define business relationship by action as a theoretical ideal of how roughly equal participants in a competitive market in a rule of law system treat each other, you get a completely different analysis.

Explaining technical stuff to non-technical people is a skill or a talent like any other. Tim Hunkin, Carl Sagan, and James Burke are all great 'explainers.' It helps they have a wide body of experience across a lot of different fields which gives them a lot of material to draw on.

Mapping understanding from what someone does understand, to something they don't understand, is a problem in topology. Many times, if there is enough time to go through it, you can find that path for most people.

Where it breaks down is when you are dealing with people who have never learned to think critically or who are unable to reason about things they haven't personally experienced.

I appreciate the WPEngine guys who have been helping my sister with her Blog, she is smart, but not technical. Generally it just means that having her understand what is supported directly by the software and what isn't is more time consuming but ultimately possible.

Not everything is explainable by analogy. Analogy maps an abstract concept from a domain a person is familiar with to a domain with which they are not. However, for a number of technical areas many non-technical individuals completely lack familiarity with the fundamental concepts in any domain, and in some cases have intuitive beliefs that are inconsistent with these concepts. In these cases, no useful analogy can be constructed because nothing analogous exists in that person's understanding of the world.

In cases where people are lacking fundamental concepts, the only path to understanding is an inordinate investment in education, adding that concept to their repertoire. It can be done but it is not a small hurdle.

I will also note that more often than not the purpose of analogies is to convince the audience that they understand a technical subject matter even when they do not. It is a mechanism for creating agreement rather than understanding in many cases.

Agreed. It just takes time to explain how any computer system works (at least at a high level). One of my friends asked me once "what is code?" after I came home from work - I spent two hours talking with him, and at the end he had a rudimentary understanding of how source code, compilers, operating systems, and graphical user interfaces work. He made a reference to compilers months later that showed he remembered and understood.

Also, sometimes tech people are pretty ignorant too - I had to explain what a hash table was to my project manager once.

I agree. And you, on the software side, will often be surprised that you "don't understand" what the user wants or needs in an equivalent way.

Of course, sometimes your software is just mired in the legacies of bad decisions past, and it really is useless to explain (all you're doing is trying to communicate what "spaghetti code" means), because nobody is going to come out more enlightened on either side.

This completely. If you cannot explain something to someone else whom has no innate knowledge of the subject, using plain language, then your command of the subject is questionable at best. True command of a subject in my opinion contains within it the ability to relay what you know and make it understood.

"If you cannot explain something to someone else whom has no innate knowledge of the subject, using plain language"

If the someone has enough raw mental horsepower and an infinite supply of spare time... Let me teach you everything I know about electrical engineering, it'll only take 10 to 20 years of your time assuming you're smart enough to keep up.

Also note that its quite possible to get stuck unable to explain something to someone smarter than you, if you have an inherent talent and or huge experience that results in talent far beyond what your horsepower "should" produce. So both sides the student and teacher have sort of a "must be this smart to enter" carnival ride requirement.

I disagree. I never said anything about teaching everything you know. I can explain to someone why a certain metal in a product is better than a less expensive metal without getting into advanced materials science/crystal theory yet not use hand-wavy 'You wouldn't understand' language or mentality.

Pretty much anything I can think of, as long as you're willing to spend five to ten minutes on explaining it, can be discussed with a person without the same background. That isn't to say at the end they could or should be expected to be able to build a bridge safely, but at least the can understand why it's costing them so much.

I will concede that we both appear to agree that if you define "something" as "something very common and simple" then you win and if we define "something" as "something very complicated" then I win.

It would appear the main point of the discussion was how to deal with my definition rather than your definition...