19 ms·

You can't tell people anything (2004)

405 points by memexy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Kednicma 6y ago
I suspect that, in addition to the difficulty of communicating anything using words, there is often a situation where people are not actually listening; people can't be told anything.
- 7373737373 6y ago
  I found this lecture pretty informative: The Craft of Writing Effectively - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
- numpad0 6y ago
  I think people aren’t good at understanding statements that are not actionable or offer them no immediate benefits.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    That's a different problem. I believe that Kednicma is talking about people who aren't even trying to understand. Let's say the conversation is about Haskell, and some random HN commenter wanders in who has never used Haskell. (Let's call him AnimalMuppet, just to put a name on.) You can't really explain monads to him; he has to go try them to get what's going on. But there's a difference between AnimalMuppet saying "Tell me why you'd want to program that way", and saying "No, monads are not a burrito, they can only give metaphorical indigestion, not the real thing." One is trying to understand (without the background to be able to do so). The other is just wanting to argue, without even caring whether the basis for doing so has any relevance to the discussion. "It is useless to have a conversation with those who will not listen." - me, but it sounds deep and almost Buddhist, so maybe I stole it from someone.
js8 6y ago
> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. If this isn't the best argument for a survivable UBI, I don't know what is. But, alas, you can't tell people anything.
- danparsonson 6y ago
  Is it? UBI surely relies on taxes, which would evaporate if everyone retired early to live off their UBI.
  - CathedralBorrow 6y ago
    Are you thinking of income tax as the only tax that exist?
    - danparsonson 6y ago
      No... corporation and dividend taxes require companies to be making profit, and companies almost always need working employees to do that, and sales tax only exists when people buy things - that's not happening anywhere near as much when everyone is only earning a basic income. What did I miss? And let's not forget there are still all the other public services to pay for. I can certainly see potential in the idea of UBI, but primarily as a means of support when it's needed, not as a spur to retirement at 35.
evdev 6y ago
In my experience what we have in a lot of places are cultures of anti-competence. In a competence culture, you try to understand your sphere very, very well, including not only the current facts of the matter but how those facts might change under different circumstances. Then you try to understand enough of spheres of people around you that you can bracket what will affect you, and how you will affect them. It's implicitly understood that the functioning of the entire enterprise comes from people doing this. In anti-competence culture, the functioning of the entire enterprise is mysterious and located somewhere else where it's not your problem. You only know as much about what you're doing as you need to barely keep going. You try to know as little about what's going on with others as possible, and if there is any interaction between you, you try to minimize and even resist it, in the hopes that you will have to change as little as possible or changes will be discovered to be unnecessary or deemed to be too expensive. You want to stay in the cultures of competence. What the article is describing is just how much of the other kind is out there.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  It's not the culture of anti-competence (although, yes, that exists). How many times have you tried to communicate a novel idea to competent people just to have them dismiss it with obvious problems that clearly don't apply to your idea? That doesn't happen because they can't evaluate your idea, it happens because they don't understand the idea itself. When the innovation is small you can get away by repeating it again and again. At some point people stop, take your idea into account, and suddenly understand why none of what they said applies. But when it is something too different, you can't do this one either.
  - cuddlybacon 6y ago
    One thing I've noticed is the better an engineer gets, the better they are at shooting down every idea they see. While I have seen many cases where a person did it anyways and failed, I have also seen many cases where they did it anyways and where massively successful.
    - 6y ago
draw_down 6y ago
> People would ask astonishing questions, like “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?” Gee, what a bunch of rubes. Why couldn't they imagine our modern internet from first principles?! Why would they care about silly details like how things get paid for? ("Who's going to pay for all those links" is a big reason why we spend our time on here talking about stuff like "dark patterns", btw.)
jerf 6y ago
I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains know when it's a fake problem.) But a lot of times in math and science I think we'd be much better off leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick. I've mentioned on HN before the git training curriculum I have made for my workplace... it's an interactive tutorial, and rather than just walking you through solutions, it's really more a guided tour of the problems that every git user encounters, then the solutions. We do merge conflicts, detached head (easy for git experts to forget how confusing that state is!), getting confused about why the things I used "git add" on now doesn't show diffs, etc. It seems to work reasonably well.
- SilasX 6y ago
  Yeah, I agree; I've found it's much easier to explain (or learn!) a concept if you start from "why are we doing this? What problem are we solving?"
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  > it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet This is why I think really getting started on an activity is so important. Those imagined problems become real problems. Traditional education tries to take a stab at this with “project based learning”. But the huge problem is actually trying to apply the skills you learned in a class will probably just show you how terrible the class is. So the projects get all twisted up or dropped.
- clairity 6y ago
  > "But a lot of times in math and science I think we'd be much better off leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick." i usually make this point this way: we're all experiential learners. experience is evolutionary pressure at work and is therefore the most reliable teacher. learning other ways relies heaviliy on our ability to simulate, be present in, and empathize with the problem, which is a larger ask of the learner, and why it's less successful (but not unsuccessful, as we have the capability).
throwaway713 6y ago
> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement. This is an excellent explanation that mirrors my own life goals, but I have struggled to put the sentiment into words this well. At the end of the day, I just want to spend (waste?) all of my time doing AI research or working on a cure for cancer, but I want to do it my own way.
- baxtr 6y ago
  I recommend the book or the blog posts of JL Collin. His posts are all about how to achieve financial independence https://jlcollinsnh.com/ https://jlcollinsnh.com/
  - goblin89 6y ago
    Websites that aim to help people become wealthier, and yet are sprinkled with ads, inevitably give an impression that their owners consider ad revenue a viable source of income. If that is so, I’d be reluctant to follow any advice given on such a site, as I do not want to be in a position where I rely on ads for own financial independence.
    - dageshi 6y ago
      Or they feel leaving money on the table by not running ads is pretty stupid?
      - kordlessagain 6y ago
        Or users turn off Javascript on the page and never see the ads to begin with.
        paulryanrogers 6y ago
Strilanc 6y ago
Related (a proposed mechanism for this effect): Expecting Short Inferential Distances [1] 1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-...
teddyh 6y ago
The Dao that can be told is not the true Dao.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Is the true DAO the one before the fork, or after it? https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-the-soft-fork-and-the-hard-fork/ https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-...
  - firethief 6y ago
    No
renewiltord 6y ago
For me this has happened with business advice. I was a teenager when people told me variants of: * Validate quickly * Know your customer and eventually that became * Fail fast * Test your idea And I didn't even realize what it _meant_. I didn't grok it. The first time I encountered the concept of a Painted Door in product design in practice I suddenly understood pieces of these. And the first time I failed to really understand the customer, and failed to fail fast, and so on, I understood those things. But I had to experience it to know it. It did help to have the vocabulary so I could spot where I failed, though.
dang 6y ago
You couldn't in 2018 either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 Nor could you in 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353731
- dfee 6y ago
  I hope you’re enjoying yourself over there dang. I enjoy that you keep it light.
- memexy 6y ago
  HN needs transclusions and comment notifications. The folks that commented on the previous articles would have worthwhile things to add if they could be pinged.
csours 6y ago
This reminds me of "Genchi Genbutsu" or "Go and See". Very basically it means there's incredible value in direct observation. Telemetry can help, but sometimes you have to schlep your actual human body to a place where another person is to see what they are seeing. Obviously this is much harder these days. I think of the inverse as taking someone on a journey. You can't tell people anything, but you can give them context and show them things and maybe they will learn part of it.
- drivers99 6y ago
  Sounds like one of the principles in Nat Greene's book "Stop Guessing". It has 9 principles of problem solving and one of them is called "Smell the problem." He has an example in the book of a machine which was wrapping packages of toilet paper and they could never run it above a certain speed and that was limiting the output of their factory. Eventually they had to look in the machine while it was running faster than it normally could to see a screw would extend out into the path of the plastic sheet only when it was running above a certain speed. So they were able to fix it for free, when the alternative workarounds were to buy a whole new machine. I use that a lot at work and often it involves packet captures and other low level tools to observe hard problems at the lowest available level to see what's happening, instead of guessing and coming up with possibly expensive workarounds based on guessing.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    A thousand times this. The better I get at debugging, the less inclined I am to guess and check. It’s almost always worthwhile to learn or write a tool that will show you what is actually happening. This can feel like getting sidetracked, but it isn’t. The answer almost always becomes clear. I have seen a case where so many people wanted to go and see part of a company’s operation that it started putting on a traveling stage production of itself, setting up in an HQ conference room every few months. I joined early enough to see it in situ and found that the touring version was nothing like the real thing.
johnfn 6y ago
I completely agree and love the sentiment here, but I'd modify it slightly. What the author is saying is that you can't get a person to go from 0% to 100% understanding just by telling someone. The avatar example is great - you're not going to convince people 100% that avatars are game-changing by telling them once. On the other hand, incremental nudges are possible. e.g. when you tell someone "hey, we're going to have avatars," you might nudge from from 0% to 1% conviction that avatars will be interesting. Maybe that seems pretty useless... But there's a way to harness it! One way to tell someone something and have them actually understand it is to have them engage in long-form content. Have you ever wondered why books need to be so long to explain topics which you could summarize in a sentence? It always perplexed me why authors like Malcolm Gladwell could write for 50k words what could be distilled into a couple of sentences, or why talks spend 60 minutes going over a couple of points that someone would summarize in a few bullet points on a YouTube comment. But eventually I realized that the extreme verbosity is crucial. You can't bring anyone from 0 to 100% understanding in a single sentence, but if you string enough sentences together, and attack your point from enough unique directions, then you really can start to move the dial. The problem is that when you talk to someone and you say "avatars are coming!", you've got this big picture in your head of what that could possibly mean, you've thought deeply about all the possible ramifications and associations that avatars bring, and your sentence has so much implicit meaning to you. But since no one else you're telling has that knowledge, that sentence only carries a small sliver of the full context and meaning that you understand. To really get it across, you need to convey your entire context. Which takes a really long time. And that's why you can't tell anyone. Well, not easily. P.S. This comment got so long that it came dangerously close to wading into meta territory, but I managed to successfully avoid it. Oh wait.
- thibran 6y ago
  It seems it's all about context. Nobody talks about context. Communicating context is difficult, you have to really understand it before you can talk about it. Therefore context is left out most of the time.
- 013a 6y ago
  I've felt similarly about why traditional university education tends to have value, and why coding bootcamps cannot generally convey the same value within six or twelve weeks. I coded a lot in university, but realistically, probably less during coursework than a very intensive bootcamp would, and certainly on things that I don't even begin to touch anymore (OS, AI, databases (not accessing, writing one), compilers, etc). The value was never in the coursework, really; as the professor says to Peter Gregory in the first episode of Silicon Valley, the true value of a university experience is intangible.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bsenftner 6y ago
Anything truly new is met with everything but understanding. Back in 2006 I had the seeds of an idea that you probably know today as a "deep fake", but I was calling it "personalized media". By 2008 I had a fully operating feature film quality automated actor replacement pipeline (my background is visual effects.) However, even with a working system nobody could understand the ramifications this could have on education, entertainment and advertising. Even today, I'd be surprised if you, dear reader, understand the ramifications of being able to replace actors in filmed media. The shortsightedness of, well everyone, is obvious. People think of creating porn when they think of a deep fake, yet that is the dumbest implementation of the technology one could waste their time doing. Why not create an advertising system where consumers, and their friends appear in video advertising using the products being advertised? Add celebrities and you have virtual celebrity experiences. Add political candidates and you have virtual meet your candidate experiences. Educational media where you and your classmates are on location in historical events. This is just the smallest example of how far media with the viewer embedded in it could go. I pursued the idea until I went bankrupt.
- wrnr 6y ago
  Its a shame of your bankrupcy, but I do wonder what all the other ideas really are, Tupac on Coachella, Carrie Fisher in star wars, Trump's face on a baby, and maybe like in the old movie Simone true virtual stars (sim one, get it), what the real ramifications are. Maybe I don't get it but it is not anything different than those Elvis lookalikes on Times Square.
  - bsenftner 6y ago
    It is actually significantly different. Imagine being a typically American White Christian and seeing a compelling narrative where you are borne Black, you see yourself as a Black version of yourself in the media mirrors, and you experience a powerful story about the harshness of life as a Black American child. That is significantly more powerful than a Times Square Elvis.
    - wrnr 6y ago
phkahler 6y ago
>> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. OMG Yes.
dqpb 6y ago
This is true for education as well. You can hear or read something and think you understand it, but you really don't unless you can reproduce the explanation, compare it to a ground truth, and verify that you got it. The percentage of time you are doing that exercise is the percentage effectiveness of your education. The nice thing about programming is your program is its own ground truth (programs are proofs). It either does what you expect it to or it doesn't (for the most part).
- memexy 6y ago
  I've found interleaving (https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving) and spiral approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach) helps. First came across the spiral approach when reading the pickaxe book to learn ruby (https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/index.html https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/index.html) and the idea stuck so now I try to approach new subjects using the same technique by gradually making the "spiral" smaller as I focus in on a given topic.
solotronics 6y ago
I gave up trying to explain and started answering questions with the same thing back. What will having a CICD system accomplish? We will get a complete CICD pipeline.
d23 6y ago
I also call this the head nod effect. It's particularly a problem in technical discussions. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of the time 90% of people don't understand what 90% of what's being said. You essentially have to start from a point of already understanding entirely what the person is saying to be able to keep up, unless they're just saying something completely trivial. The glue that keeps the illusion that communication is happening alive is that pernicious little head nod. No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon and ill-explained thing that comes out of their mouths. So the slight misunderstandings snowball until you're really getting a fraction of whatever the speaker is trying to communicate. At this point, unless the head nod is aggressively positive, I have come to assume it actually means they have stopped following fully. I then have the decision as the speaker whether to ask for questions or just slow down a bit or stop altogether and see if they naturally show their curiosity. > What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't.
- teej 6y ago
  > The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't. You might already know about this but you should ready about the "Memory Palace" technique used for remembering lots of things. Using a physical space in your mind to "store" information. Personally, I need a place for things to live for me to remember it. That either needs to be a physical space - I write something down to help me remember it, in a way because the memory is on the paper in my mind, or at the end of a linked list of memories, so that I can remember it by the things it's associated with.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Training is hard. I've been training remarkably difficult-to-train people for decades, with really spotty success. Part of it was that I have never been "trained to train," so I cleared the minefield by dancing through it. I have learned to take Responsibility for communication. In my experience, if "they" don't "get it," it's my fault. The biggest problem that I have, is starting at too high a baseline (sounds like what happened here). In many cases, I need to back up, and do a "preflight" of "the basics."
- throw681158 6y ago
  This reads like sales speak. My experience is the opposite. Some people take to concepts like a duck to water, some people are dopey and forget things you told them an hour ago, some people (most people) want you to hold their hand every step of the way and will actively try to avoid figuring things out independently. I want to say it's enthusiasm that matters, but a lazy smart person takes less time to train than an enthusiastic moron, in my experience. If you're paid to train people it's healthy to take responsibility for that but IMO it's not realistic or true. Training someone with poor aptitude is like swimming through tar. It's palpably different.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    > This reads like sales speak. I am not a sales person. I have been training people as a volunteer for decades. I have never made a dime (in fact, I am usually out-of-pocket by a fair amount). I am not a professional trainer or orator (or even a particularly good one), but I am an experienced one. The people I have trained have faced enormous challenges in life, and are trying to get back up, after having been knocked down. I have not had the luxury of an eager, high-functioning audience. In fact, the audience has sometimes been actively hostile, and my training has not been effective (more often than I’d like). Their enthusiasm is often unlike anything many folks will ever encounter; born of desperation, but so are the challenges. Many are folks with “knee-jerk” reactions to authority figures, which means I have needed to approach them carefully, and my personal demeanor and attitude could have a huge impact on my effectiveness. The stakes have often been quite high (life and death). It’s been important for me to ensure that people get the help; not that I feel proud. I simply wrote about my personal experience. This was not a typical “Internet armchair expert” post. Please note that I made a point of stating this was my experience. "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." –Attributed to Nasrudin, but made famous by Will Rogers. I understand that your experience is different. I appreciate and honor that. I only ask that you provide me the same courtesy. Please have some compassion. The world needs as much of that as possible, and I feel that social media has been highly corrosive to empathy.
Jenz 6y ago
> One final point: I expect none of you to really get what I’m talking about here, because this principle also applies to itself. This is a bit discontenting... as the author himself notes: > without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling then. Generalizing from mine and friends’ experience, all who have ever tried explaining anything in depth have been exposed to this, thereby we–I expect the HN crowd have all been there–should understand this, we should “get it”. As an ending note, both OPs post and my comment are grossly simplified; for example, even with “a touchstone” people won’t understand with mere exposure confronted with anything of slight complexity, they probably won’t get it until knowing the stone inside out; I remember after half a year with programming in high school, many people that genuinely tried to learn, still didn’t get why they should bother with getting the syntax exact...
gfody 6y ago
relevant Ted talk, "don't tell people what you're doing tell them why you're doing it" - https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I don't like to be dismissive, but that video is pure fluff. > whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright Brothers, they all think, act, and communicate, in the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it. I very nearly stopped watching right there. Does this kind of nonsense really appeal to anyone? It strikes me as bordering on insulting. Wikipedia describes this guy as an 'author and motivational speaker'. He makes a living claiming to have cracked the one weird secret to success, but is not a visionary, a pioneer, or a leader. It's like someone selling you an investment strategy. If it really worked, they wouldn't be selling it, they'd be busy making millions.
  - gfody 6y ago
    well it appealed to me or I wouldn't've shared it, and I think his advice is eminently useful to anyone frustrated that you can't tell people anything - ie: rather than specific details you think might interest them, try sharing your motivations, beliefs, vision and once they get that (and if they're still interested) let them ask for specific details. iow: you can't guess the details that will interest them, and if they're not interested then they're not listening to whatever details you're sharing, so get them interested first (by explaining why they should be interested, or why you're interested, your motivations, etc.)
Animats 6y ago
I'm still amazed those guys were able to cram the Habitat client into a Commodore 64. I can why Fujitsu didn't take the risk of trying to cram a somewhat more ambitious client into the tiny user side machines of the era. If it doesn't fit, the whole project fails. Here's a video of the gameplay, running on a Commodore 64 emulator.[1] Remember, this is 64KB (not MB, not GB) over a 300 baud connection. The trouble with Xanadu was the business model. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. It's all about micropayments. Really micro micropayments. Edit something by someone else, as with Wikipedia, and you get a tiny fraction of the revenue. Ted Nelson wanted to track the history of every snippet. Also, the design was all built around centralized servers. Not open at all. [1] https://youtu.be/VmpAnhp31C0 https://youtu.be/VmpAnhp31C0
munificent 6y ago
People interpret your words in context of an existing framework of understanding. If I tell you "we're adding a button to the help page", you understand that "button" means "software GUI element" and "help page" means "hypetext page on the world wide web". You do not immediately get out needle and thread and start poking holes in paper. The challenge, then, is telling people that the framework itself is wrong. In order to understand what you're saying, your words have already gone through and been filtered by the very framework you are trying to change. VR really suffers from this. How do you get someone excited about VR by showing them flat images of it on a typical display? You can't. If you could translate the experience to a flat display then, by definition, VR wouldn't really be adding anything. By letting a person experience the thing itself directly, you sidestep a lot of that framework and context. You don't need to get the point across in metaphor, analogies, or simulation. You don't need a persuasive map when you can literally drop them into the territory and let them both draw their own map and directly see for themselves in what ways the map is lacking.
- memexy 6y ago
  Speaking of VR, do you have a favorite headset? Or have you used one that you thought was good?
  - vl 6y ago
    Discussed in detail here today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23620374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23620374 Short answer: Oculus Quest
    - memexy 6y ago
      Thanks.
  - munificent 6y ago
    I don't. I've never actually tried VR. :)
jes5199 6y ago
this is a lot like Wiio’s Laws “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws also, I can’t remember the source but someone wrote that if a person says “I understand” then they probably don’t, but if they say “I don’t understand you but I just thought of something myself” then you probably had a successful transmission
myth2018 6y ago
I think I got what he tells because that summarizes pretty well the challenge I face to sell my core product. It's a "private youtube". Obviously not pioneer nor innovative, but we don't follow those many gurus who advocates for building fast growing startups and not getting yourself into the not-scalable consultingware trap (things operate a little different in developing economies with risk-averse investors, but that's another story). Anyway, it's been a bit tough to get into the market since the clients who take the value of such product as obvious already have their providers; and the other ones who have similar scenarios but never considered such solution often ask why in the hell they'd pay for a private youtube when google already gives them a full featured one, for free.
carapace 6y ago
This happened to me the other day with something called Lab Streaming Layer. A friend of mine explained it to me and I nodded and said, "Yeah, that's cool." Then I saw this video and the penny dropped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1at7yrcFW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1at7yrcFW0 Introduction to Modern Brain-Computer Interface Design - Christian A. Kothe ; Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego I go back to my friend, all excited, and tell him what I saw, and as I'm describing it I realizing that I'm just repeating back to him just what he told be the other day! I stopped and apologized. I like to think I'm on the ball but sometimes things just go over your head even when you think you know what's going on.
redis_mlc 6y ago
No mention of an architecture diagram - to, you know, tell people something. Sure explains the mess at Fujitsu.
totetsu 6y ago
> "What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted" I was just thinking about this today when reading about "Petrodollars", Gaddafi, and all the wars and hostilities started with countries that try to sell oil for anything but US dollars. There is a lot of complexities to geo-politics that are far outside the confines of the simple versions that are transmitted over and over again in news and popular culture. When we come across these big complex issues, it's hard to synthesis this new information into understanding, or an extended worldview, because there is nowhere to stick it in the first place. It takes a lot of mental energy to build the scaffold to hold new information. I think the aversion to expending mental energy is one thing that leads to just ignoring these things, or seeking the easy path of conspiracism. It is the graphic and emotionally compelling part of these stories that my mind tends to be able to hang onto. In the case of Libya, video of the young Tuareg men in now ungoverned southern regions driving their beat up car from one town to the next and being shot at by snipers. Think about the HK or BLM demonstrations. It is often these tactical scenes that are transmitted to us, more than the cultural or political side. I guess the manipulation of these emotional images is just propaganda and is as old as conflict. ("the other side are baby eaters") Maturation as a critical thinker is a long hard process that can't be done alone. I worry that it is not something that we as societies are generally not well set up to do. With the shift to a tribal, partisan world, where there are more informations comes from privately employed Public relationships specialist, than Journalist working in the public interest, what will be the state of scaffolds in many peoples minds, and will they be able to support being told anything new..
andrewstuart 6y ago
You really can't tell people anything when they are starting their first business. You may be able to offer them hard won wisdoms about revenue, cashflow, the nature of what a startup is, why they shouldn't be wasting time on making a logo and why not to hurry to trademark their business name etc etc, but the lights are off. They'll only come to understand the importance of your advice as they make the mistakes and pay the price - i.e. blowing 3 months of their financial runway getting a logo, website, business cards and trademark, only to go out of business 3 months later because they've run out of cash.
chauhankiran 6y ago
It is hard to explain something which is in your mind and haven't implemented. But, for my day-to-day talk with something who don't know my situation, I explain by jumping in her situation and give the feel by comparison. For example, if I have to explain her about how I feel today at work when I was assigned with front-end task that I don't know as I'm back-end developer and just spent complete day to solve that small problem. I usually use her context like, you're tailor and you know how to make shirt but now you assigned to do some alter work on pant because you know tailoring.

405 points by memexy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

I suspect that, in addition to the difficulty of communicating anything using words, there is often a situation where people are not actually listening; people can't be told anything.

7373737373 6y ago
I found this lecture pretty informative: The Craft of Writing Effectively - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
numpad0 6y ago
I think people aren’t good at understanding statements that are not actionable or offer them no immediate benefits.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  That's a different problem. I believe that Kednicma is talking about people who aren't even trying to understand. Let's say the conversation is about Haskell, and some random HN commenter wanders in who has never used Haskell. (Let's call him AnimalMuppet, just to put a name on.) You can't really explain monads to him; he has to go try them to get what's going on. But there's a difference between AnimalMuppet saying "Tell me why you'd want to program that way", and saying "No, monads are not a burrito, they can only give metaphorical indigestion, not the real thing." One is trying to understand (without the background to be able to do so). The other is just wanting to argue, without even caring whether the basis for doing so has any relevance to the discussion. "It is useless to have a conversation with those who will not listen." - me, but it sounds deep and almost Buddhist, so maybe I stole it from someone.

js8 6y ago

> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. If this isn't the best argument for a survivable UBI, I don't know what is. But, alas, you can't tell people anything.

danparsonson 6y ago
Is it? UBI surely relies on taxes, which would evaporate if everyone retired early to live off their UBI.
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago
  Are you thinking of income tax as the only tax that exist?
  - danparsonson 6y ago
    No... corporation and dividend taxes require companies to be making profit, and companies almost always need working employees to do that, and sales tax only exists when people buy things - that's not happening anywhere near as much when everyone is only earning a basic income. What did I miss? And let's not forget there are still all the other public services to pay for. I can certainly see potential in the idea of UBI, but primarily as a means of support when it's needed, not as a spur to retirement at 35.

evdev 6y ago

In my experience what we have in a lot of places are cultures of anti-competence. In a competence culture, you try to understand your sphere very, very well, including not only the current facts of the matter but how those facts might change under different circumstances. Then you try to understand enough of spheres of people around you that you can bracket what will affect you, and how you will affect them. It's implicitly understood that the functioning of the entire enterprise comes from people doing this. In anti-competence culture, the functioning of the entire enterprise is mysterious and located somewhere else where it's not your problem. You only know as much about what you're doing as you need to barely keep going. You try to know as little about what's going on with others as possible, and if there is any interaction between you, you try to minimize and even resist it, in the hopes that you will have to change as little as possible or changes will be discovered to be unnecessary or deemed to be too expensive. You want to stay in the cultures of competence. What the article is describing is just how much of the other kind is out there.

marcosdumay 6y ago
It's not the culture of anti-competence (although, yes, that exists). How many times have you tried to communicate a novel idea to competent people just to have them dismiss it with obvious problems that clearly don't apply to your idea? That doesn't happen because they can't evaluate your idea, it happens because they don't understand the idea itself. When the innovation is small you can get away by repeating it again and again. At some point people stop, take your idea into account, and suddenly understand why none of what they said applies. But when it is something too different, you can't do this one either.
- cuddlybacon 6y ago
  One thing I've noticed is the better an engineer gets, the better they are at shooting down every idea they see. While I have seen many cases where a person did it anyways and failed, I have also seen many cases where they did it anyways and where massively successful.
  - 6y ago

draw_down 6y ago

> People would ask astonishing questions, like “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?” Gee, what a bunch of rubes. Why couldn't they imagine our modern internet from first principles?! Why would they care about silly details like how things get paid for? ("Who's going to pay for all those links" is a big reason why we spend our time on here talking about stuff like "dark patterns", btw.)

jerf 6y ago

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains know when it's a fake problem.) But a lot of times in math and science I think we'd be much better off leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick. I've mentioned on HN before the git training curriculum I have made for my workplace... it's an interactive tutorial, and rather than just walking you through solutions, it's really more a guided tour of the problems that every git user encounters, then the solutions. We do merge conflicts, detached head (easy for git experts to forget how confusing that state is!), getting confused about why the things I used "git add" on now doesn't show diffs, etc. It seems to work reasonably well.

SilasX 6y ago
Yeah, I agree; I've found it's much easier to explain (or learn!) a concept if you start from "why are we doing this? What problem are we solving?"
travisjungroth 6y ago
> it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet This is why I think really getting started on an activity is so important. Those imagined problems become real problems. Traditional education tries to take a stab at this with “project based learning”. But the huge problem is actually trying to apply the skills you learned in a class will probably just show you how terrible the class is. So the projects get all twisted up or dropped.
clairity 6y ago
> "But a lot of times in math and science I think we'd be much better off leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick." i usually make this point this way: we're all experiential learners. experience is evolutionary pressure at work and is therefore the most reliable teacher. learning other ways relies heaviliy on our ability to simulate, be present in, and empathize with the problem, which is a larger ask of the learner, and why it's less successful (but not unsuccessful, as we have the capability).

throwaway713 6y ago

> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement. This is an excellent explanation that mirrors my own life goals, but I have struggled to put the sentiment into words this well. At the end of the day, I just want to spend (waste?) all of my time doing AI research or working on a cure for cancer, but I want to do it my own way.

baxtr 6y ago
I recommend the book or the blog posts of JL Collin. His posts are all about how to achieve financial independence https://jlcollinsnh.com/ https://jlcollinsnh.com/
- goblin89 6y ago
  Websites that aim to help people become wealthier, and yet are sprinkled with ads, inevitably give an impression that their owners consider ad revenue a viable source of income. If that is so, I’d be reluctant to follow any advice given on such a site, as I do not want to be in a position where I rely on ads for own financial independence.
  - dageshi 6y ago
    Or they feel leaving money on the table by not running ads is pretty stupid?
    - kordlessagain 6y ago
      Or users turn off Javascript on the page and never see the ads to begin with.
      - paulryanrogers 6y ago

Strilanc 6y ago

Related (a proposed mechanism for this effect): Expecting Short Inferential Distances [1] 1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-...

teddyh 6y ago

The Dao that can be told is not the true Dao.

alasdair_ 6y ago
Is the true DAO the one before the fork, or after it? https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-the-soft-fork-and-the-hard-fork/ https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-...
- firethief 6y ago
  No

renewiltord 6y ago

For me this has happened with business advice. I was a teenager when people told me variants of: * Validate quickly * Know your customer and eventually that became * Fail fast * Test your idea And I didn't even realize what it _meant_. I didn't grok it. The first time I encountered the concept of a Painted Door in product design in practice I suddenly understood pieces of these. And the first time I failed to really understand the customer, and failed to fail fast, and so on, I understood those things. But I had to experience it to know it. It did help to have the vocabulary so I could spot where I failed, though.

dang 6y ago

You couldn't in 2018 either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 Nor could you in 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353731

dfee 6y ago
I hope you’re enjoying yourself over there dang. I enjoy that you keep it light.
memexy 6y ago
HN needs transclusions and comment notifications. The folks that commented on the previous articles would have worthwhile things to add if they could be pinged.

csours 6y ago

This reminds me of "Genchi Genbutsu" or "Go and See". Very basically it means there's incredible value in direct observation. Telemetry can help, but sometimes you have to schlep your actual human body to a place where another person is to see what they are seeing. Obviously this is much harder these days. I think of the inverse as taking someone on a journey. You can't tell people anything, but you can give them context and show them things and maybe they will learn part of it.

drivers99 6y ago
Sounds like one of the principles in Nat Greene's book "Stop Guessing". It has 9 principles of problem solving and one of them is called "Smell the problem." He has an example in the book of a machine which was wrapping packages of toilet paper and they could never run it above a certain speed and that was limiting the output of their factory. Eventually they had to look in the machine while it was running faster than it normally could to see a screw would extend out into the path of the plastic sheet only when it was running above a certain speed. So they were able to fix it for free, when the alternative workarounds were to buy a whole new machine. I use that a lot at work and often it involves packet captures and other low level tools to observe hard problems at the lowest available level to see what's happening, instead of guessing and coming up with possibly expensive workarounds based on guessing.
- closeparen 6y ago
  A thousand times this. The better I get at debugging, the less inclined I am to guess and check. It’s almost always worthwhile to learn or write a tool that will show you what is actually happening. This can feel like getting sidetracked, but it isn’t. The answer almost always becomes clear. I have seen a case where so many people wanted to go and see part of a company’s operation that it started putting on a traveling stage production of itself, setting up in an HQ conference room every few months. I joined early enough to see it in situ and found that the touring version was nothing like the real thing.

johnfn 6y ago

I completely agree and love the sentiment here, but I'd modify it slightly. What the author is saying is that you can't get a person to go from 0% to 100% understanding just by telling someone. The avatar example is great - you're not going to convince people 100% that avatars are game-changing by telling them once. On the other hand, incremental nudges are possible. e.g. when you tell someone "hey, we're going to have avatars," you might nudge from from 0% to 1% conviction that avatars will be interesting. Maybe that seems pretty useless... But there's a way to harness it! One way to tell someone something and have them actually understand it is to have them engage in long-form content. Have you ever wondered why books need to be so long to explain topics which you could summarize in a sentence? It always perplexed me why authors like Malcolm Gladwell could write for 50k words what could be distilled into a couple of sentences, or why talks spend 60 minutes going over a couple of points that someone would summarize in a few bullet points on a YouTube comment. But eventually I realized that the extreme verbosity is crucial. You can't bring anyone from 0 to 100% understanding in a single sentence, but if you string enough sentences together, and attack your point from enough unique directions, then you really can start to move the dial. The problem is that when you talk to someone and you say "avatars are coming!", you've got this big picture in your head of what that could possibly mean, you've thought deeply about all the possible ramifications and associations that avatars bring, and your sentence has so much implicit meaning to you. But since no one else you're telling has that knowledge, that sentence only carries a small sliver of the full context and meaning that you understand. To really get it across, you need to convey your entire context. Which takes a really long time. And that's why you can't tell anyone. Well, not easily. P.S. This comment got so long that it came dangerously close to wading into meta territory, but I managed to successfully avoid it. Oh wait.

thibran 6y ago
It seems it's all about context. Nobody talks about context. Communicating context is difficult, you have to really understand it before you can talk about it. Therefore context is left out most of the time.
013a 6y ago
I've felt similarly about why traditional university education tends to have value, and why coding bootcamps cannot generally convey the same value within six or twelve weeks. I coded a lot in university, but realistically, probably less during coursework than a very intensive bootcamp would, and certainly on things that I don't even begin to touch anymore (OS, AI, databases (not accessing, writing one), compilers, etc). The value was never in the coursework, really; as the professor says to Peter Gregory in the first episode of Silicon Valley, the true value of a university experience is intangible.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bsenftner 6y ago

Anything truly new is met with everything but understanding. Back in 2006 I had the seeds of an idea that you probably know today as a "deep fake", but I was calling it "personalized media". By 2008 I had a fully operating feature film quality automated actor replacement pipeline (my background is visual effects.) However, even with a working system nobody could understand the ramifications this could have on education, entertainment and advertising. Even today, I'd be surprised if you, dear reader, understand the ramifications of being able to replace actors in filmed media. The shortsightedness of, well everyone, is obvious. People think of creating porn when they think of a deep fake, yet that is the dumbest implementation of the technology one could waste their time doing. Why not create an advertising system where consumers, and their friends appear in video advertising using the products being advertised? Add celebrities and you have virtual celebrity experiences. Add political candidates and you have virtual meet your candidate experiences. Educational media where you and your classmates are on location in historical events. This is just the smallest example of how far media with the viewer embedded in it could go. I pursued the idea until I went bankrupt.

wrnr 6y ago
Its a shame of your bankrupcy, but I do wonder what all the other ideas really are, Tupac on Coachella, Carrie Fisher in star wars, Trump's face on a baby, and maybe like in the old movie Simone true virtual stars (sim one, get it), what the real ramifications are. Maybe I don't get it but it is not anything different than those Elvis lookalikes on Times Square.
- bsenftner 6y ago
  It is actually significantly different. Imagine being a typically American White Christian and seeing a compelling narrative where you are borne Black, you see yourself as a Black version of yourself in the media mirrors, and you experience a powerful story about the harshness of life as a Black American child. That is significantly more powerful than a Times Square Elvis.
  - wrnr 6y ago

phkahler 6y ago

>> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. OMG Yes.

dqpb 6y ago

This is true for education as well. You can hear or read something and think you understand it, but you really don't unless you can reproduce the explanation, compare it to a ground truth, and verify that you got it. The percentage of time you are doing that exercise is the percentage effectiveness of your education. The nice thing about programming is your program is its own ground truth (programs are proofs). It either does what you expect it to or it doesn't (for the most part).

memexy 6y ago
I've found interleaving (https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving) and spiral approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach) helps. First came across the spiral approach when reading the pickaxe book to learn ruby (https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/index.html https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/index.html) and the idea stuck so now I try to approach new subjects using the same technique by gradually making the "spiral" smaller as I focus in on a given topic.

solotronics 6y ago

I gave up trying to explain and started answering questions with the same thing back. What will having a CICD system accomplish? We will get a complete CICD pipeline.

d23 6y ago

I also call this the head nod effect. It's particularly a problem in technical discussions. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of the time 90% of people don't understand what 90% of what's being said. You essentially have to start from a point of already understanding entirely what the person is saying to be able to keep up, unless they're just saying something completely trivial. The glue that keeps the illusion that communication is happening alive is that pernicious little head nod. No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon and ill-explained thing that comes out of their mouths. So the slight misunderstandings snowball until you're really getting a fraction of whatever the speaker is trying to communicate. At this point, unless the head nod is aggressively positive, I have come to assume it actually means they have stopped following fully. I then have the decision as the speaker whether to ask for questions or just slow down a bit or stop altogether and see if they naturally show their curiosity. > What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't.

teej 6y ago
> The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't. You might already know about this but you should ready about the "Memory Palace" technique used for remembering lots of things. Using a physical space in your mind to "store" information. Personally, I need a place for things to live for me to remember it. That either needs to be a physical space - I write something down to help me remember it, in a way because the memory is on the paper in my mind, or at the end of a linked list of memories, so that I can remember it by the things it's associated with.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Training is hard. I've been training remarkably difficult-to-train people for decades, with really spotty success. Part of it was that I have never been "trained to train," so I cleared the minefield by dancing through it. I have learned to take Responsibility for communication. In my experience, if "they" don't "get it," it's my fault. The biggest problem that I have, is starting at too high a baseline (sounds like what happened here). In many cases, I need to back up, and do a "preflight" of "the basics."

throw681158 6y ago
This reads like sales speak. My experience is the opposite. Some people take to concepts like a duck to water, some people are dopey and forget things you told them an hour ago, some people (most people) want you to hold their hand every step of the way and will actively try to avoid figuring things out independently. I want to say it's enthusiasm that matters, but a lazy smart person takes less time to train than an enthusiastic moron, in my experience. If you're paid to train people it's healthy to take responsibility for that but IMO it's not realistic or true. Training someone with poor aptitude is like swimming through tar. It's palpably different.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > This reads like sales speak. I am not a sales person. I have been training people as a volunteer for decades. I have never made a dime (in fact, I am usually out-of-pocket by a fair amount). I am not a professional trainer or orator (or even a particularly good one), but I am an experienced one. The people I have trained have faced enormous challenges in life, and are trying to get back up, after having been knocked down. I have not had the luxury of an eager, high-functioning audience. In fact, the audience has sometimes been actively hostile, and my training has not been effective (more often than I’d like). Their enthusiasm is often unlike anything many folks will ever encounter; born of desperation, but so are the challenges. Many are folks with “knee-jerk” reactions to authority figures, which means I have needed to approach them carefully, and my personal demeanor and attitude could have a huge impact on my effectiveness. The stakes have often been quite high (life and death). It’s been important for me to ensure that people get the help; not that I feel proud. I simply wrote about my personal experience. This was not a typical “Internet armchair expert” post. Please note that I made a point of stating this was my experience. "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." –Attributed to Nasrudin, but made famous by Will Rogers. I understand that your experience is different. I appreciate and honor that. I only ask that you provide me the same courtesy. Please have some compassion. The world needs as much of that as possible, and I feel that social media has been highly corrosive to empathy.

Jenz 6y ago

> One final point: I expect none of you to really get what I’m talking about here, because this principle also applies to itself. This is a bit discontenting... as the author himself notes: > without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling then. Generalizing from mine and friends’ experience, all who have ever tried explaining anything in depth have been exposed to this, thereby we–I expect the HN crowd have all been there–should understand this, we should “get it”. As an ending note, both OPs post and my comment are grossly simplified; for example, even with “a touchstone” people won’t understand with mere exposure confronted with anything of slight complexity, they probably won’t get it until knowing the stone inside out; I remember after half a year with programming in high school, many people that genuinely tried to learn, still didn’t get why they should bother with getting the syntax exact...

gfody 6y ago

relevant Ted talk, "don't tell people what you're doing tell them why you're doing it" - https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I don't like to be dismissive, but that video is pure fluff. > whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright Brothers, they all think, act, and communicate, in the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it. I very nearly stopped watching right there. Does this kind of nonsense really appeal to anyone? It strikes me as bordering on insulting. Wikipedia describes this guy as an 'author and motivational speaker'. He makes a living claiming to have cracked the one weird secret to success, but is not a visionary, a pioneer, or a leader. It's like someone selling you an investment strategy. If it really worked, they wouldn't be selling it, they'd be busy making millions.
- gfody 6y ago
  well it appealed to me or I wouldn't've shared it, and I think his advice is eminently useful to anyone frustrated that you can't tell people anything - ie: rather than specific details you think might interest them, try sharing your motivations, beliefs, vision and once they get that (and if they're still interested) let them ask for specific details. iow: you can't guess the details that will interest them, and if they're not interested then they're not listening to whatever details you're sharing, so get them interested first (by explaining why they should be interested, or why you're interested, your motivations, etc.)

Animats 6y ago

I'm still amazed those guys were able to cram the Habitat client into a Commodore 64. I can why Fujitsu didn't take the risk of trying to cram a somewhat more ambitious client into the tiny user side machines of the era. If it doesn't fit, the whole project fails. Here's a video of the gameplay, running on a Commodore 64 emulator.[1] Remember, this is 64KB (not MB, not GB) over a 300 baud connection. The trouble with Xanadu was the business model. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. It's all about micropayments. Really micro micropayments. Edit something by someone else, as with Wikipedia, and you get a tiny fraction of the revenue. Ted Nelson wanted to track the history of every snippet. Also, the design was all built around centralized servers. Not open at all. [1] https://youtu.be/VmpAnhp31C0 https://youtu.be/VmpAnhp31C0

munificent 6y ago

People interpret your words in context of an existing framework of understanding. If I tell you "we're adding a button to the help page", you understand that "button" means "software GUI element" and "help page" means "hypetext page on the world wide web". You do not immediately get out needle and thread and start poking holes in paper. The challenge, then, is telling people that the framework itself is wrong. In order to understand what you're saying, your words have already gone through and been filtered by the very framework you are trying to change. VR really suffers from this. How do you get someone excited about VR by showing them flat images of it on a typical display? You can't. If you could translate the experience to a flat display then, by definition, VR wouldn't really be adding anything. By letting a person experience the thing itself directly, you sidestep a lot of that framework and context. You don't need to get the point across in metaphor, analogies, or simulation. You don't need a persuasive map when you can literally drop them into the territory and let them both draw their own map and directly see for themselves in what ways the map is lacking.

memexy 6y ago
Speaking of VR, do you have a favorite headset? Or have you used one that you thought was good?
- vl 6y ago
  Discussed in detail here today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23620374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23620374 Short answer: Oculus Quest
  - memexy 6y ago
    Thanks.
- munificent 6y ago
  I don't. I've never actually tried VR. :)

jes5199 6y ago

this is a lot like Wiio’s Laws “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws also, I can’t remember the source but someone wrote that if a person says “I understand” then they probably don’t, but if they say “I don’t understand you but I just thought of something myself” then you probably had a successful transmission

myth2018 6y ago

I think I got what he tells because that summarizes pretty well the challenge I face to sell my core product. It's a "private youtube". Obviously not pioneer nor innovative, but we don't follow those many gurus who advocates for building fast growing startups and not getting yourself into the not-scalable consultingware trap (things operate a little different in developing economies with risk-averse investors, but that's another story). Anyway, it's been a bit tough to get into the market since the clients who take the value of such product as obvious already have their providers; and the other ones who have similar scenarios but never considered such solution often ask why in the hell they'd pay for a private youtube when google already gives them a full featured one, for free.

carapace 6y ago

This happened to me the other day with something called Lab Streaming Layer. A friend of mine explained it to me and I nodded and said, "Yeah, that's cool." Then I saw this video and the penny dropped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1at7yrcFW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1at7yrcFW0 Introduction to Modern Brain-Computer Interface Design - Christian A. Kothe ; Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San Diego I go back to my friend, all excited, and tell him what I saw, and as I'm describing it I realizing that I'm just repeating back to him just what he told be the other day! I stopped and apologized. I like to think I'm on the ball but sometimes things just go over your head even when you think you know what's going on.

redis_mlc 6y ago

No mention of an architecture diagram - to, you know, tell people something. Sure explains the mess at Fujitsu.

totetsu 6y ago

> "What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted" I was just thinking about this today when reading about "Petrodollars", Gaddafi, and all the wars and hostilities started with countries that try to sell oil for anything but US dollars. There is a lot of complexities to geo-politics that are far outside the confines of the simple versions that are transmitted over and over again in news and popular culture. When we come across these big complex issues, it's hard to synthesis this new information into understanding, or an extended worldview, because there is nowhere to stick it in the first place. It takes a lot of mental energy to build the scaffold to hold new information. I think the aversion to expending mental energy is one thing that leads to just ignoring these things, or seeking the easy path of conspiracism. It is the graphic and emotionally compelling part of these stories that my mind tends to be able to hang onto. In the case of Libya, video of the young Tuareg men in now ungoverned southern regions driving their beat up car from one town to the next and being shot at by snipers. Think about the HK or BLM demonstrations. It is often these tactical scenes that are transmitted to us, more than the cultural or political side. I guess the manipulation of these emotional images is just propaganda and is as old as conflict. ("the other side are baby eaters") Maturation as a critical thinker is a long hard process that can't be done alone. I worry that it is not something that we as societies are generally not well set up to do. With the shift to a tribal, partisan world, where there are more informations comes from privately employed Public relationships specialist, than Journalist working in the public interest, what will be the state of scaffolds in many peoples minds, and will they be able to support being told anything new..

andrewstuart 6y ago

You really can't tell people anything when they are starting their first business. You may be able to offer them hard won wisdoms about revenue, cashflow, the nature of what a startup is, why they shouldn't be wasting time on making a logo and why not to hurry to trademark their business name etc etc, but the lights are off. They'll only come to understand the importance of your advice as they make the mistakes and pay the price - i.e. blowing 3 months of their financial runway getting a logo, website, business cards and trademark, only to go out of business 3 months later because they've run out of cash.

chauhankiran 6y ago

It is hard to explain something which is in your mind and haven't implemented. But, for my day-to-day talk with something who don't know my situation, I explain by jumping in her situation and give the feel by comparison. For example, if I have to explain her about how I feel today at work when I was assigned with front-end task that I don't know as I'm back-end developer and just spent complete day to solve that small problem. I usually use her context like, you're tailor and you know how to make shirt but now you assigned to do some alter work on pant because you know tailoring.