Whenever I come across a new concept, my way to wrap my head around it is to oversimplify it. That simplification becomes an outline, and as I continue learning, I keep on adding details to that outline.

Fair enough, right? I imagine that’s how most people approach things.

I work in simplifications. People have told me “you oversimplify things”. Their favourite word is – “nuance”.

I totally get where people are coming from; there’s always nuance.

You’ve seen the light switch? You press it an appliance turns on, you press it again, and the appliance turns off.

Well, there’s nuance to it as well.

Except it’s not.

There are different kinds of switches. There are dimmers. There are three-way switches. The switch might control a relay rather than the appliance directly. There might be a smart switch communicating over Wi-Fi. There are electrical characteristics, voltage, current, AC versus DC, safety mechanisms, wiring conventions, and an entire electrical system sitting behind that tiny interaction.

And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, even “the appliance turns on” isn’t quite right. What does “on” mean? Does it immediately consume power? Is there a startup sequence? Does it have a microcontroller? Does it enter a different operating state?

You can keep going.

There is no bottom.

And that’s the problem.

You could always go deeper into things. There’s no limit to it. If your standard for explaining something is that you have to account for every possible nuance, you can never actually explain anything.

The problem is also not avoiding going deeper, the problem is going deeper when it is not needed. The problem is people using it as a “gotcha” in discussions.

“hey – you don’t know this one specific thing about it which I do”

(I’ll admit here that I’ve also done it a few times to sound smart)

The core of my annoyance with nuance is,

If I’m learning what X is, giving me all of that information at once isn’t necessarily making me smarter. It’s just increasing the size of the thing I have to hold in my head.

Nuance is useful when it changes the decision you’re trying to make.
Otherwise, it can just become trivia.