By the way, Eliezer has already explicitly rejected a similar quote attributed to Einstein. They're both of dubious authenticity anyway. (I searched around for this version too, and the earliest mention of it I could find was in a 1977 Reader's Digest, and that's only according to a citation in a 2006 book.) That has nothing to do with whether it's true, of course — if a vague maxim like this can count as a rationality quote at all, then that is independent of whether or not Einstein said it.

Maybe this detracts from my previous agreement with the quote, but there's a difference between explaining in person, vs. explaining in writing for a general audience. With the former, you can get immediate feedback as to which parts you're not explaining well and appropriately redirect your focus, while in the latter you have to cover all the possible confusions. This phenomenon was revealed most starkly in one of the articles in the quantum physics sequences, when I replied to the article by saying, [...] And Eliezer Yudkowsky said in response: [...] The fact that something can be explained simply doesn't deny the problem of inferential distance, in my view; it just means that each step is simple, not that there won't be many steps depending on how much of the listener's knowledge you can build on.