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> Why is it hard? It is an incredible mental balancing act when you think about it. Your goal is to get some information into someone's head. To do that, you n

> Why is it hard? It is an incredible mental balancing act when you think about it. Your goal is to get some information into someone's head. To do that, you need to actually simulate their brain using yours. You have to think about how that person learns, what they already know, and how to incrementally build up your information in a way that makes sense to them. You have to think about what words and idioms they're familiar with, whether they learn top-down or bottom-up, etc. In order to get into their mindset, you have to temporarily pretend to not know the thing you are explaining. At the same time, you are explaining it, so you have to simultaneously hold that very same thing in the forefront of your mind. Now consider that each potential reader learns differently and knows different things so when imagining your audience, you have to do the whole process above in parallel for a number of different imagined audiences. Doing this well requires a lot of theory of mind skill, and that's something that I think a lot of technical people are not very good at. My experience is that a lot of people who are drawn to tech are that way because they've found it easier to get along with machines because machines "make sense" and are simpler, which to me points to less theory of mind ability.

BurningFrog 7y ago
> Doing this well requires a lot of theory of mind skill, and that's something that I think a lot of technical people are not very good at So very true. "Theory of mind" is a good term. "Empathy" is another.
- munificent 7y ago
  It is a good term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind My wife and daughter are on the spectrum and it has been an interesting (and often difficult) experience to spend a lot of time around people whose intuitive theory of mind isn't as strong as a typical person's. It made me realize how much we take for granted the dedicated brain regions we have for social cognition. For most of us, it's completely effortless to know "Oh, I told her ___ so she'll want ___." We do that processing as automatically as we recognize faces or climb stairs with a cup of coffee in our hands. But for people on the spectrum, it's like the wetware is reduced, like having bad balance or no sense of direction. They can do the same task deliberately by focusing all of their attention on it, using the general-purpose calculator part of their brain to do a job most of us rely on dedicated hardware for. Doing that takes a lot out of them. Imagine if every conversation felt like a calculus test. When they don't do that, it manifests itself in all sorts of behaviorally strange ways. There's the classic stuff like unusual affect and eye contact. But the one I notice a lot now that I'm attuned to it is pronouns. They will often use a pronoun to refer to a noun they've never introduced, because they are already thinking of that noun and didn't notice that they never mentioned it explicitly. Brains are weird.
clairity 7y ago
great point. i don't generally buy the argument that coding is drastically different from writing, insofar as it's laying out symbols in a way that can be understood (and followed) by another actor. that's a technical skill that's fairly transferable between the two. but it is drastically different in how it's interpreted by that other actor: computers are (designed to be) fairly rigid in interpretation (the frontier of that not being so is fascinating but in its infancy), so that there's little-to-no variance in the output. people are completely flexible in comparison. inputs can generate a wide range of outputs, and there's little control over that range within the writing itself. that seems to frustrate many coders. even the purpose can vary. coding is generally imperative in nature: do what i tell you to do. writing is generally persuasive (here's what i think, why i think it, and why you should think it too), since it's hard to force the imperative. writing is necessarily harder than coding, because the target has so much greater complexity.
- tra3 7y ago
  > i don't generally buy the argument that coding is drastically different from writing, insofar as it's laying out symbols in a way that can be understood (and followed) by another actor. that's a technical skill that's fairly transferable between the two That's a great observation. A bit of a tangent, but I enjoy writing code with a tight feedback loop. Either with a debugger, a set of unit tests. With writing, the feedback loop is not there. It's not clear whether the message achieves the desired effect. Framing writing this way, explains why it's such a challenging activity. At least in my mind.
  - clairity 7y ago
    yes, another good point. you have to be your own feedback loop, simulating as many other minds in your head as you can, as @munificent laid out. it seems that proofreaders and editors came about to help in that regard.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    If you write code intending it to have good human readability - and you really should - you have the same problem writing code. I spend a lot of time rereading my code imagining I'm someone else who's never seen it before. Not sure everyone does.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> Doing this well requires a lot of theory of mind skill, and that's something that I think a lot of technical people are not very good at So very true. "Theory of mind" is a good term. "Empathy" is another.

munificent 7y ago
It is a good term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind My wife and daughter are on the spectrum and it has been an interesting (and often difficult) experience to spend a lot of time around people whose intuitive theory of mind isn't as strong as a typical person's. It made me realize how much we take for granted the dedicated brain regions we have for social cognition. For most of us, it's completely effortless to know "Oh, I told her ___ so she'll want ___." We do that processing as automatically as we recognize faces or climb stairs with a cup of coffee in our hands. But for people on the spectrum, it's like the wetware is reduced, like having bad balance or no sense of direction. They can do the same task deliberately by focusing all of their attention on it, using the general-purpose calculator part of their brain to do a job most of us rely on dedicated hardware for. Doing that takes a lot out of them. Imagine if every conversation felt like a calculus test. When they don't do that, it manifests itself in all sorts of behaviorally strange ways. There's the classic stuff like unusual affect and eye contact. But the one I notice a lot now that I'm attuned to it is pronouns. They will often use a pronoun to refer to a noun they've never introduced, because they are already thinking of that noun and didn't notice that they never mentioned it explicitly. Brains are weird.

clairity 7y ago

great point. i don't generally buy the argument that coding is drastically different from writing, insofar as it's laying out symbols in a way that can be understood (and followed) by another actor. that's a technical skill that's fairly transferable between the two. but it is drastically different in how it's interpreted by that other actor: computers are (designed to be) fairly rigid in interpretation (the frontier of that not being so is fascinating but in its infancy), so that there's little-to-no variance in the output. people are completely flexible in comparison. inputs can generate a wide range of outputs, and there's little control over that range within the writing itself. that seems to frustrate many coders. even the purpose can vary. coding is generally imperative in nature: do what i tell you to do. writing is generally persuasive (here's what i think, why i think it, and why you should think it too), since it's hard to force the imperative. writing is necessarily harder than coding, because the target has so much greater complexity.

tra3 7y ago
> i don't generally buy the argument that coding is drastically different from writing, insofar as it's laying out symbols in a way that can be understood (and followed) by another actor. that's a technical skill that's fairly transferable between the two That's a great observation. A bit of a tangent, but I enjoy writing code with a tight feedback loop. Either with a debugger, a set of unit tests. With writing, the feedback loop is not there. It's not clear whether the message achieves the desired effect. Framing writing this way, explains why it's such a challenging activity. At least in my mind.
- clairity 7y ago
  yes, another good point. you have to be your own feedback loop, simulating as many other minds in your head as you can, as @munificent laid out. it seems that proofreaders and editors came about to help in that regard.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  If you write code intending it to have good human readability - and you really should - you have the same problem writing code. I spend a lot of time rereading my code imagining I'm someone else who's never seen it before. Not sure everyone does.