Clarity

[Brad De Long]

>
>Communicating ideas is one thing; but thinking them through, or creating
>new ones, is quite another. Sure, as a teacher, of course you need to make
>things clear at first, but true learning is the mastery of complexity, of
>thinking against the grain and transcending, laborious and painful as this
>might be,

But as Marx once wrote, the order of discovery is not the order of
presentation. To make readers repeat one's own intellectual journey--with
all of its missteps and confusions--is to inflict upon them cruel and
unusual punishment...


>what we already know (or thought we knew). If you've ever read
>Richard Feynman's wonderful books, you'll discover that the true art of
>thinking is being simple *and* stupendously complex at the same time.

Yep. A combination only achieved by sweating *much* blood...