❯The Obsession with Explaining

Nature loves to hide.

—Heraclitus

As our society becomes more centered around the external, the visible and the material it becomes also obsessed with explaining things.

This symptom deserves a closer look. It reflects a tendency to explain every dimension of human experience, including our inner mental states, through a simplified and materialistic perspective. In particular, I am referring to the tendency to frame cause-and-effect relationships exclusively in terms of material phenomena. For centuries, the West has drifted toward a reductionist worldview that forces everything down to the common denominator of physical substance, and claims, by supposed logical necessity, that reality is only what is "out there" and directly observable.

I believe this view has produced bitter fruits and, at least on first account, has led us to a deterioration of our understanding of reality, resulting in distrortions and paradoxes. This theme is vast, and it has been explored for centuries by philosophers and writers far more knowledgeable than me. I will not attempt a deep analysis here. in this article, however, I want to talk about the obsession with explaining things, which I think it's yet another manifestation of the modern zeitgeist and the ideas I introduced above.

The Psychological Aspect

Explanations typically follow a question, but not all questions are the same. For example, we ask questions for a variety of reasons. In most situations questions reflect a genuine need for information, yet, this is not always the case. Sometimes, beneath the apparent legitimacy of a question lies a desire to probe and investigate. And because of the roles we occupy and the constraints under which we operate, we may feel compelled to answer. Are explanation warranted in such cases?

The pressure to answer may lead us astray. Motivated by a sincere desire to help, we start by offering explanations. As the questioning continues, explanation gives way to pleading, and pleading to self-justification. What first appeared to be an innocent question has led to a slippery slope. This dynamic deserves careful attention.

The Phylosophical Aspect

There's no reason to believe deep knowledge and expertise can be easily and entirely verbalized. In fact we know more than we can tell, and this isn't an idea I came up with, it's Polanyi's paradox. He argued that vast amounts of human knowledge are embedded in our intuition, muscle memory, and subconscious processing. I believe there are different human types that learn in different ways. Some tend to build intuitive knowledge and feel confident with that. They are not obsessed with the need to explain it. They are not introverts because they don't seek external confirmations. It's easy to misunderstand these ideas but these differences must be understood.

Outsourcing of Cognitive Discomfort

Overexplaining has contaminated hiring. By prioritizing the ability to explain over the ability to do, we have inadvertently shifted influence away from expertise and toward presentation. It seems that many do think that explaining is a guarantee of capacity or skill.

Clear communication is undeniably valuable, but it's a categorical mistake to consider it equivalent to capacity or even demonstrative of understanding. I'll go further and say that it's not necessarily indicative of skill of other personality traits such as extraversion. A captivating explanation moves people's minds, although nothing has been achieved yet in practice.

Some say that code is just a means to an end. It's hard to believe that such practically minded individuals do not recognize the value of knowledge over presentations, and yet, I think that's what we're having, this seems paradoxical to me.

Conclusion

We're not always explaining things, sometimes, we're explaining them away, rationalizing them, distracting ourselves to placate uncertainties. At other times, we're excusing ourselves. We demand explanations from people whose knowledge may be largely tacit and cannot be replaced with a powerpoint. We answer questions that were never truly seeking answers.

The ability to explain complex subjects is precious but peculiar, it is not a cure for uncertainty nor a substitute for mastery. Some truths resist articulation. Some questions deserve silence. And some forms of understanding reveal themselves only through experience, not through words.