Understanding as Compression

Raw information is verbose. Understanding is discovering the pattern that compresses it.

  • Novice: Oversimplified (incomplete without knowing)
  • Intermediate: Verbose (no compression, reports all facts)
  • Expert: Concise (complete compression, brief but precise)

Compression isn’t eliminating details. It’s internalizing them deeply enough to regenerate them from core principles. The expert knows more facts than the intermediate; they’ve just organized those facts around fewer, more powerful concepts.

You cannot compress what you don’t realize is verbose. This requires acknowledged ignorance, recognizing the gap between what you know and what you understand.

The Cycle

Learning operates as a feedback loop with three phases:

Ignorance → Expansion → Compression → New Ignorance → Repeat

Phase 1: Acknowledge Ignorance

Before learning, declare what you don’t know. Not “I don’t know Rust” but specifically:

  • What assumptions do I have about this?
  • Where am I uncertain?
  • What questions can’t I answer?

This creates your learning target. You cannot compress effectively without knowing what needs compression.

Phase 2: Expand Through Research

Study the details. Accumulate facts. Read deeply. The information expands, becomes verbose, complex, overwhelming. This is necessary.

Learning with intent to teach changes how you process this expansion. You’re not just collecting information; you’re preparing to articulate it. This makes you notice:

  • What surprises you (challenges assumptions)
  • What patterns emerge across details
  • What questions remain unanswered

Phase 3: Compress Through Teaching

Teaching forces externalization, converting internal understanding to external communication. Write, explain, document. Constrain brevity. Avoid jargon.

This reveals compression failures:

  • Where explanation becomes verbose (pattern unclear)
  • Where you use jargon (avoiding precision)
  • Where you skip steps as “obvious” (curse of knowledge)

When you can explain briefly while maintaining precision, compression occurred.

The Feedback: New Ignorance Emerges

Teaching reveals what you couldn’t explain, questions you couldn’t answer, edge cases you hadn’t considered. This new ignorance is more specific than your starting ignorance; it’s informed by the expansion and compression you just completed.

This new ignorance becomes the next cycle’s starting point. Each iteration:

  • Improves compression (better understanding)
  • Reveals more specific gaps (higher quality ignorance)
  • Enables more targeted expansion (efficient learning)
  • Produces clearer teaching (better compression)

The Insight

Learning isn’t accumulation. It’s expansion followed by compression.

You cannot compress without acknowledging what needs compression (ignorance). You cannot compress without first expanding through deep research (details, facts, patterns). You cannot test compression without externalizing it (teaching). You cannot improve without measuring compression failures (new ignorance).

The cycle: Acknowledge ignorance → Expand through research → Compress through teaching → Discover new ignorance → Repeat.

This is how experts explain simply. Not because they know less. Because they researched more, then compressed more.