You don't need to eat your own dogfood in explanation science

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Sometimes people like to criticize a piece about pedagogy (i.e. not a pedagogical piece itself) by saying it's difficult to understand, or that it doesn't follow its own rules. But I think people also feel a pressure to "eat their own dogfood" when writing about explanations. However, I think this pressure is at least a little bit harmful, and here is how I like to think about it:

Nobody mistakes a critique of a film, or exposition about how to make films, (or video games, or a piece of painting, or whatever) for a film itself. It's only an accident of exposition and commentary both being non-fiction texts, that people try to apply the "so you're trying to distill this thing, but your explanation of what distillation is kinda sucks?" line.

It's fine for an explanation and commentary on that exposition to be separate things, and they should be thought of as being in separate literary genres.