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Sounds very similar to how academics write with a similar anxiety to the future reviewer, trying hard not to get dismissed and pigeonholed too early on before t

Sounds very similar to how academics write with a similar anxiety to the future reviewer, trying hard not to get dismissed and pigeonholed too early on before they even read and understood the paper. It's one thing to defend your idea against obvious but incorrect angles of criticism, but this is not always enough and you need to order your sentences in the correct way and be mindful of what "buttons you will push" on the reviewer where they will switch off and go off track to some easy dismissal. It really is an art to do this well and it's not just the hard science skill of making the contribution. You must be able to sell and frame it in just the right way.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 3y ago
Academia sounds very similar to writing pull requests on a large project, or working retail, waiting tables, serving on a Church board, going to court, teaching a master class, interacting with strangers, and growing up in a large family.
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  Am I detecting sarcasm here? Is your point that I shouldn't have brough up academia because it's too specific and actually the thing I talk about happens in every facet of our lives and not just academia?
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    I took it more as ‘humans gonna human’!
hinkley 3y ago
I think it’s more than this. I’ve seen several Wikis grow to the point of uselessness from lack of curation combined with lack of “executive summaries”. Before this I thought executive summaries were for Peter principled idiots whose ties were cutting off oxygen flow. It felt infantilizing having to be asked to add them. What I experienced and others complained about was the situation where I know we have a document about X. I can’t remember what it’s called, I thought it was “Y” but I read the whole thing and it’s not there. Now I’m clicking on random things seeing if I can find it. I don’t want to read eight people’s life stories. I’m trying to keep the details of my task in my head. Start every page with “where are you and why should you care” and that problem starts to evaporate. With scientists you have people who go through a lot of papers every year. No one paper stands out that much. So I can see how they’d run into the exact same problem.
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  This is extremely hard though. It's not just some wave your magic wand around, or ask people to not be lazy anymore or something. Distilling knowledge, understanding where readers may be coming, seeing the big picture and keeping track of different moving parts, remembering and documenting their histories, all this is real work, real cognitive effort of the highest sort, on par with developing the newest feature or migrating to a new solution or whatever is seen as the "meat" of the work, as opposed to this type of lower-status "meta" work of just documenting. Often, "writing docs" is seen as junior work, something easy. Some parts are of course more straightforward, but a lot of it is very serious work that is underappreciated. And it's a vicious cycle: as long as documentation and technical writing is undervalued, smart rational actors in the company will just do the bare minimum of it and do something more visible and flashy that people do appreciate. ---- Also, I've seen internal wikis and the issue is that they tend to go stale, and people are afraid of removing information, and some people just don't know how to use a wiki and will start using it as a message board or like a Wikipedia talk page and add stuff like "Note by Joe: I'm not sure the above is still correct since the migration to XYZ. Alice should check this part", things not deleted but crossed out with strikethrough style, because "what if it will still be useful" (they don't understand the page history concept) etc. So it becomes a dump of horrible mixture of outdated and up-to-date info, where an experienced employee will tell you "oh it's in the wiki, just check it", then you go back to them that you can't find it or you found contradictory info and they tell you "ah, of course, you should ignore the page on bla bla, we should remove it soon, for this kind of thing you need to check the other page, and even though it says on top that it's 'outdated', actually this part is still valid". The "curse of knowledge" is also very difficult to get rid of. It's really really hard to know where the reader is coming from. And what may be obvious and over-explained for one reader may feel like not enough detail or confusing to another.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    I use a B tree strategy on wikis: As time progresses, the most relevant topic areas for the project consume the main page, and over time specifics get pushed down to subtopics and sub-subtopics. Anything that hasn't been touched in a long time is prioritized for moving down. If something has been sitting at the bottom of the tree for a long time and looks wrong, it might be time to delete it. But in the meantime you've made it harder to find. Once a page sprouts too many links it's time to halve it and push some of them down one level. Good activity for a Thursday or Friday afternoon when you've fixed a major bug and don't want to start anything new. The guys who need to toot their own horn want to put four links onto the main page. For some reason those scenarios live rent-free in my thoughts on Wikis. Probably because I was formulating this theory while working with one of them.
chasd00 3y ago
All of this applies to writing RFP responses too. I try to communicate the art to content authors during review, the ones who actually get it (or at least care enough to even try) write winning responses and end up with $$$ in their pocket.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jancsika 3y ago

Academia sounds very similar to writing pull requests on a large project, or working retail, waiting tables, serving on a Church board, going to court, teaching a master class, interacting with strangers, and growing up in a large family.

bonoboTP 3y ago
Am I detecting sarcasm here? Is your point that I shouldn't have brough up academia because it's too specific and actually the thing I talk about happens in every facet of our lives and not just academia?
- jamiek88 3y ago
  I took it more as ‘humans gonna human’!

hinkley 3y ago

I think it’s more than this. I’ve seen several Wikis grow to the point of uselessness from lack of curation combined with lack of “executive summaries”. Before this I thought executive summaries were for Peter principled idiots whose ties were cutting off oxygen flow. It felt infantilizing having to be asked to add them. What I experienced and others complained about was the situation where I know we have a document about X. I can’t remember what it’s called, I thought it was “Y” but I read the whole thing and it’s not there. Now I’m clicking on random things seeing if I can find it. I don’t want to read eight people’s life stories. I’m trying to keep the details of my task in my head. Start every page with “where are you and why should you care” and that problem starts to evaporate. With scientists you have people who go through a lot of papers every year. No one paper stands out that much. So I can see how they’d run into the exact same problem.

bonoboTP 3y ago
This is extremely hard though. It's not just some wave your magic wand around, or ask people to not be lazy anymore or something. Distilling knowledge, understanding where readers may be coming, seeing the big picture and keeping track of different moving parts, remembering and documenting their histories, all this is real work, real cognitive effort of the highest sort, on par with developing the newest feature or migrating to a new solution or whatever is seen as the "meat" of the work, as opposed to this type of lower-status "meta" work of just documenting. Often, "writing docs" is seen as junior work, something easy. Some parts are of course more straightforward, but a lot of it is very serious work that is underappreciated. And it's a vicious cycle: as long as documentation and technical writing is undervalued, smart rational actors in the company will just do the bare minimum of it and do something more visible and flashy that people do appreciate. ---- Also, I've seen internal wikis and the issue is that they tend to go stale, and people are afraid of removing information, and some people just don't know how to use a wiki and will start using it as a message board or like a Wikipedia talk page and add stuff like "Note by Joe: I'm not sure the above is still correct since the migration to XYZ. Alice should check this part", things not deleted but crossed out with strikethrough style, because "what if it will still be useful" (they don't understand the page history concept) etc. So it becomes a dump of horrible mixture of outdated and up-to-date info, where an experienced employee will tell you "oh it's in the wiki, just check it", then you go back to them that you can't find it or you found contradictory info and they tell you "ah, of course, you should ignore the page on bla bla, we should remove it soon, for this kind of thing you need to check the other page, and even though it says on top that it's 'outdated', actually this part is still valid". The "curse of knowledge" is also very difficult to get rid of. It's really really hard to know where the reader is coming from. And what may be obvious and over-explained for one reader may feel like not enough detail or confusing to another.
- hinkley 3y ago
  I use a B tree strategy on wikis: As time progresses, the most relevant topic areas for the project consume the main page, and over time specifics get pushed down to subtopics and sub-subtopics. Anything that hasn't been touched in a long time is prioritized for moving down. If something has been sitting at the bottom of the tree for a long time and looks wrong, it might be time to delete it. But in the meantime you've made it harder to find. Once a page sprouts too many links it's time to halve it and push some of them down one level. Good activity for a Thursday or Friday afternoon when you've fixed a major bug and don't want to start anything new. The guys who need to toot their own horn want to put four links onto the main page. For some reason those scenarios live rent-free in my thoughts on Wikis. Probably because I was formulating this theory while working with one of them.

chasd00 3y ago

All of this applies to writing RFP responses too. I try to communicate the art to content authors during review, the ones who actually get it (or at least care enough to even try) write winning responses and end up with $$$ in their pocket.