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

61–70 of 201 posts

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

#61

Post by d23 »

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.

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

#62

Post by memexy »

dqpb wrote: post #45

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 ei…

I've found interleaving (https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving) and 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) 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.

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

#63

Post by msla »

efitz wrote: post #50
js8 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I suspect there is a curse of expertise. If you're an expert, you begin seeing everything as so nuanced, as so fragile, that you will dismiss lots of radical innovation as too simplistic. (And I think especially it affects motivation to actually try something new.) But if somebody somewhat naive comes along, and just pushes through with sheer effort, they might succeed where many experts have predicted a fail…

Or more likely, the newbies will solve the “unsolvable” problem by removing some of the constraints that the old guard was holding inviolable. The newbies crow about their success for a few years while everyone struggles to work around the constraint violations. NoSQL is the biggest example of this. Ignore everything we learned about ACID and just use key-value stores with no transactions or relations. People can bui…

I call that the Procrustean Bed: Simplify the solution by cutting pieces off the problem.

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

#64

Post by closeparen »

drivers99 wrote: post #56
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 tha…

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.

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

#65

Post by techopoly »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #40
marcosdumay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aga…

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.

One obvious example of that is when Dropbox was presented here as a startup and was shot down in glorious fashion.

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

#66

Post by memco »

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 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.

This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask, "Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire for Disney's penchant to make kids think they need to be groomed for life in royal society when they have effectively a 0% chance of ever needing to learn those life skills in that context. I much more appreciate shows that explore how people need to learn to interact with their peers at home, in public, at school etc. I know it's tempting to also want to kind of detach the concept from actual people with animals and such, but my daughter is not an elephant or a car, she doesn't possess a magical amulet or the ability to fly or to submerge the whole state in sub-zero arctic winter. I know it's fun to dream and imagine, but I wonder sometimes if we're communicating: "the world around is impossibly complex and you need superhuman ability to solve it. You don't have those and so you're ill-equipped to do anything about it." Some days, that may be true, but I appreciate stories that emphasize we have a reasonable degree of power within our own human faculties and learning to leverage and use those faculties is far more effective than showing kids flashy superpowers or magical worlds they won't have or see. All this, from a guy who spent numerous of his childhood days imagining himself as Mega Man absorbing everyone else's superpowers, engrossed in Star Wars and TMNT. Shrug

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

#67

Post by dbcurtis »

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'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have

An old office mate once quipped that: "Ham radio is just a conspiracy on the part of the world's geography teachers to make their subject interesting."

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

#68

Post by _jal »

memco wrote: post #66
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 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. This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask, "Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire fo…

> Disney's penchant to make kids think they need to be groomed for life in royal society

That's not about teaching your kids to live in royal society - that's grooming your children to know they are not part of it.

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

#69

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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.

I know someone who did exactly that. They can't quit their day job yet.

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

#70

Post by ninjanomnom »

memexy wrote: post #59
xboxnolifes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends on the location but living without a job is not really feasible without government assistance of some sort which is usually tied to stress and extra work proving you need the money. For example in many US states you have to prove that you are constantly looking for a new job and are willing to accept any kind of job offered in order to receive unemployment assistance. This is a far cry from being relaxed enough to work on projects in peace.
Post reply on HN