What's the Cost of Being Easy to Understand?

The cost of being easy to understand is that you have to leave things out.

That is not a flaw in communication. It is how communication works. Every useful explanation compresses reality by removing details, choosing examples, replacing specialized language, and deciding which complications can wait. The danger begins when simplification removes something that could change what someone believes or does.

So the standard cannot simply be “make it simple.” A better one is: make it no more complicated than the decision requires, and no simpler than the truth allows.

Understanding requires compression

Imagine explaining a restaurant to someone who asks whether they should eat there. You might say, “It’s an excellent neighborhood Italian place, but it’s expensive.”

In one sentence, you have compressed hundreds of possible details: the menu, chef, ingredients, service, noise level, portion size, wine list, décor, reservation difficulty, neighborhood, and even what you mean by “expensive.” Most of those omissions are useful because your friend probably did not want the restaurant’s operating manual.

But suppose the question came from someone with a severe food allergy. Suddenly, an omitted detail could matter more than everything you included. The restaurant has not changed, but what counts as an adequate explanation has.

Clarity therefore cannot be judged only by how quickly someone understands your words. It has to be judged against what they need that understanding for.

Some details are expendable. Others carry the meaning.

A subway map works because it is geographically inaccurate. It removes buildings, topography, most streets, exact distances, and many of the curves in the tracks so the information you actually need becomes easier to see: which line to take, where to transfer, and where to get off.

Now imagine making the map cleaner by removing the transfer stations. It would become simpler and less useful at the same time. That is the danger in simplification: at first, removing information eliminates noise, but keep going and eventually you start removing signal.

Suppose a company announces, “Customer cancellations fell 20 percent.” That sounds unambiguously good. Now add one omitted fact: “Customer cancellations fell 20 percent after the company stopped allowing customers to cancel online.”

The original statement was still numerically true, but the missing context changes how you interpret the result. This is why clarity is not the same as brevity. Sometimes the qualification is not extra detail. It is part of the meaning.

Simple subjects can expose shallow understanding

There is another kind of compression we often fail to notice: the compression happening inside our own heads.

Psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil studied what they called the illusion of explanatory depth. People often believed they understood familiar mechanisms better than they actually did, and when asked to explain those mechanisms carefully, their confidence dropped.

A zipper feels obvious until you try to describe precisely how the slider joins and separates two rows of teeth. A toilet feels simple until you have to explain what happens inside the tank. The research is not about polished explanations misleading people. It reveals something more basic: the feeling that something is understandable is not the same as understanding it deeply.

That distinction matters because concise explanations can make a subject feel complete before our understanding actually is. “I can follow that” and “I understand the underlying system” are not the same claim. One useful test is whether the listener could explain the idea back, identify what remains uncertain, or apply it to a slightly different case. If not, the explanation may have created familiarity rather than understanding.

Experts face the opposite problem

If one danger is leaving too much out, the opposite danger is refusing to leave enough out. Experts often communicate in compressed language because the people around them already know what the terms contain. A phrase that carries an entire concept for one audience may carry almost nothing for another.

A financial specialist might say, “We need to hedge because the downside exposure is asymmetric.” A colleague outside finance may recognize every word and still have little idea what the sentence means.

Compare that with: “If the price moves against us, we could lose much more than we would gain if it moves in our favor. We can pay to limit that risk.”

The second explanation is longer and less technically compact, but it gives the listener something usable. Jargon is not inherently bad. Among specialists, it is efficient. The problem begins when the communicator mistakes shared vocabulary for shared understanding.

Removing jargon does not remove complexity. It moves the work of unpacking that complexity from the audience to the person doing the explaining.

Ask what could change the decision

The practical question is not “Can I make this simpler?” You almost always can. The better question is: What could I leave out that would change the listener’s judgment, decision, or next action?

That test depends on stakes. If someone asks how your coffee machine works, an approximate explanation is probably enough. If someone is deciding whether to sign a financial contract, undergo a medical procedure, approve a safety plan, or invest millions of dollars, the acceptable level of compression changes.

Three things deserve particular protection: uncertainty, conditions, and consequences. How sure are we? When would this conclusion stop being true? What happens if the listener acts on this explanation and it is incomplete?

Those are often the first details to disappear when we optimize for simplicity because they make explanations messier. They are also frequently the details people most need in order to exercise judgment. A useful explanation does not preserve everything. It preserves what could change the decision.

Clarity should reveal the next question

We sometimes treat “Nobody had any questions” as evidence that an explanation worked. In many situations, the opposite is more revealing.

Someone who understands a subject better often asks more specific questions, not fewer. “What does this mean?” becomes “Which assumption matters most?” “I don’t understand the forecast” becomes “How sensitive is the forecast to the growth assumption?” “Is this safe?” becomes “What risk remains even if we follow the recommended procedure?”

Better understanding does not eliminate uncertainty. It gives uncertainty shape. That suggests a more demanding test for clarity: after hearing your explanation, can someone tell what they know, what they do not know, and what they should ask next?

An explanation has done its job when it removes unnecessary complexity without hiding the complexity that still matters.

📚 Bookmarked for You

The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker: A practical examination of why knowledgeable people become difficult to understand, including how the “curse of knowledge” gets between what a writer knows and what a reader can readily see.

Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath: Explores why some ideas are easier to grasp and remember than others, while showing the choices involved in turning complicated ideas into clear, concrete communication.

The Art of Explanation by Lee LeFever: Focuses directly on explanation as an act of choosing context, connections, and detail so someone can move from not understanding an idea to understanding enough to use it.

🧬 QuestionStrings to Practice: What Can We Safely Leave Out?

Use this sequence when simplifying an explanation that someone will use to make a judgment or decision:

“What does this person need to understand?” → “What can I remove without changing that understanding?” → “What uncertainty must remain visible?” → “What omitted fact could change their conclusion?” → “What question should they be able to ask next?”

The goal is not to preserve every detail. It is to preserve the details that carry the meaning. Being easy to understand always has a cost because understanding requires compression, and most of the time that price is worth paying.

Just make sure you are spending detail, not truth.

Explore another question tomorrow with QuestionClass’s Question-a-Day.

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