The development of an idea usually starts with some intuition, or “gut-feelings”. Often, this is a kind of subconscious, implicit understanding, and it gradually becomes more conscious and explicit. With enough time and experience, these nebulous feelings will solidify into a set of clearer concepts. Once these thoughts have hardened enough to take more tangible shapes, they can begin to be formalized, first in one’s own mind, then articulated externally.

This process of ideation means that there is a gap between what is understood and what is articulated. Since the articulated is essentially the explicit formalization of some understanding, it always lags behind the understood. The size of the gap between the two can vary depending on many factors. The complexity of the idea in question, the type (e.g. abstract vs. concrete) of the idea, the depth of the understanding, and the expressive talent of the articulator can all affect the size of the difference. But even a brilliant scholar’s articulation of a relatively simple and well understood concept is probably still not quite at the same level as the person’s own understanding, though the difference may be negligible.

Since articulation is the primary way we communicate, it seems that we are doomed to always exchanging thoughts in a lossy way. The amount of information lost by articulation is also not constant, since the complexity of the subject matter proportionally scales the difficulty of articulation, and along with it, the size of the loss. In reality, the loss is most likely even worse, as there are many other factors that contribute to the information loss during communication that is not just from the act of articulation.

The gap between understanding and articulation also implies that the best understanding of something is almost never articulated. Or, to put it the other way, the articulated is always behind the state-of-the-art understanding. The true frontier of knowledge about something will be at the edge of the limit of our ability to understand, and is most likely not in a form that can be systematized or even described. But of course, we rarely operate at this frontier for most subject areas, and so even the already-articulated, less “cutting-edge” versions of the knowledge is more than good enough for us to learn from in most situations.

However, this does raise questions on the effectiveness of articulated frameworks, especially in rapidly changing, highly competitive fields. In the technology world, for example, the landscape evolves at a much quicker pace than in most other industries, and people constantly fight aggressively to seek domination in specific verticals. Suppose some successful person writes a book on how to operate in a particular market segment. No matter how good the person is at expressing ideas, the articulated form in the book will probably always be somewhat sub-par to the version in the author’s head. So in this hypothetical example, even if you’ve read and understood all that is in the book, you will still be behind the author when it comes to expertise in this specific market. This is very much a unrealistic, spherical cow type example, but I think it does illustrate why many people gravitate towards learning about meta-frameworks based on first principles, rather than specific frameworks. Meta-frameworks are ideas about how to form frameworks in general, and are relatively timeless, which means that they have a much longer history of articulation, resulting in a smaller understanding-articulation gap.

There may also be ways to potentially bypass the understanding-articulation gap altogether, through other means of communication, at the cost of some other aspect. Articulation is our primary way to communicate because it is very high bandwidth: a lot of information can be expressed in a very short amount of time. Another way that we communicate is the observe and imitate method. This is how we learn from role models, and how people can “lead by example”, by watching how certain people behave, and then selectively copying them. This is a much lower bandwidth channel, since it may take a long period of observation to distill exactly what to imitate, but it is not subject to the understanding-articulation gap. It has its own gaps of course, but it acts as a very good supplemental way to communicate¹. Reading multiple works by the same person over time, in order to figure out their thought processes, and incorporating them as one’s own is a common way that this observe and imitate learning takes place in the modern age.