Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can't tell people anything (2004)

habitatchronicles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 201 posts

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#51

Post by devalgo »

oh_sigh wrote: post #38
goblin89 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's like writing a book on how to become wealthy, and the advice it gives you is to write a book on how to become wealthy.

Of course they never admit the truth, that the only way they got rich/famous was by writing self help books and have never done anything real outside that.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#52

Post by wrnr »

bsenftner wrote: post #35

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 educati…

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.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#53

Post by ssivark »

hackerfake wrote: post #31
jerf wrote: post #7

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…

> leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers Sounds good, but how do you get them to grapple? You only turned "tell people the solution to a problem they don't have" to "tell people of a problem they don't have". I don't see how this (alone) will make a difference.

To flip that around, if you cannot make them grapple with the problem, you’re not actually teaching them. You could coerce/persuade them to follow the process and hope they get it soon enough, but you might likely be flushing all that effort down the toilet, from a long term perspective (if they don’t grapple with the problem soon enough before they forget about the process). For the really important few processes, you could try to encode them into rituals.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#54

Post by paulryanrogers »

kordlessagain wrote: post #28
dageshi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they feel leaving money on the table by not running ads is pretty stupid?

Or users turn off Javascript on the page and never see the ads to begin with.

The content degrades into becoming ads for their books, seminars, shovels for gold miners, etc.

By the time get-rich advice becomes even moderately popular it's either applicable only to saturated markets, selling the dream, has hard requirements outside the reach of most (birth, luck, credit, liquid assets, etc), or some combination of those.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#55

Post by kiba »

jerf wrote: post #7

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…

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.

This is known in educational psychology as 'generation' and is considered an effective strategy for learning.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#56

Post by drivers99 »

csours wrote: post #24

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 con…

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.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#58

Post by mopsi »

jerf wrote: post #7

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…

> "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have"

It's my main complaint with how maths and physics were taught in school. I didn't understand electricity, trigonometry, integrals etc until long after school when I started tinkering with microcontrollers and robots, and had to solve real-world problems. Then, suddenly all those concepts sprung into life and got real meaning with clear and observable effects.

The only standout was my biology teacher, a former agronomist at a major food producer (rare to encounter someone with real experience), who made us do all sorts of practical things. I particularly remember a display of sugar in drinks that we put together: each of us had to bring a bottle, and he gave us glasses and made us fill them with sugar to match the content written on the food label. That was the day I stopped drinking juice.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#59

Post by memexy »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #36
memexy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you do that now?

It generally leads to being fired for not completing milestones, which leads to not having income to support yourself.

How much monthly income would a person need to support themselves and work on what they want to work on?

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#60

Post by memexy »

dang wrote: post #23

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

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.
Post reply on HN