You can't tell people anything (2004)
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You can't tell people anything (2004)
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Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#2I 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.
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#3> 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.
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#4I 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.
I found this lecture pretty informative: The Craft of Writing Effectively - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#5In 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.
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#6> 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.)
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#7I 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.
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#8> 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.
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#9In 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 imp…
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.
Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)
#10I 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…
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?"