Simon Willison’s Weblog

Advice worth repeating

15th January 2004

Tim Bray’s Laws of Explanation:

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 Second Law

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

Posted 15th January 2004 at 4:54 am · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025

This is Advice worth repeating by Simon Willison, posted on 15th January 2004.

Next: This could be the most ludicrous tech patent yet

Previous: You mean there IS an IE team?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/01/15/explanation