The understanding of something in your head is a hyperobject.

If you're an expert, it's a multi-dimensional hyperobject, perhaps of significant, fractal detail.

Note that some of those details will be real, and some will turn out to be illusory and not actually survive ground-truthing with reality.

But it's impossible to communicate a hyperobject to others.

To communicate it its full detail would require you to exhaustively serialize its details, leading to a combinatorial explosion of detail.

That detail would take forever to actually unspool.

But more importantly, no one else will have the patience to listen and absorb it even if you did.

That would require an absurd amount of faith in the value of the hyperobject, because it could take years to absorb it all.

If you try to shortcut getting others to understand, you might get impatient at how they aren't understanding something that seems so obvious to you.

That impatience (especially if you outrank the receiver) might make them even less willing to spend the time to understand.

This can become a toxic spiral of distrust.

To get the hyperobject actually absorbed, imperfectly, into others' heads requires figuring out compressed requirements, concepts, and ideas that give significant understanding efficiently.

Perhaps it can get 80% of a given idea covered, in 20% of the overall complexity.

This is the leverage necessary to get even a part of the hyperobject into other people's heads.

Finding the "backbones" of the ideas is an enormously expensive and challenging process to do.

And yet if you want others to understand and want to move in the same direction, it's a requirement.

The only way to make progress in this kind of situation is to distill the simplest concrete smaller hyperobject that is on the path towards the longer term hyperobject.

That allows coordinating with others, and also starting the all-important process of ground-truthing.