You can't tell people anything (2004) • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by kortex » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

mrslave wrote: post #101

gowld wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stick with PBS Kids and Sesame Street and Mister Rogers reruns.

If I remember correctly, babies learn to distinguish vowels from consonants from near birth when adults speak to them in that annoying high pitched "coochy coochy coo" dialect. After 6-12 months of life this starts to hold them back as they need to transition to hearing normal sounds and seeing the people mouthing them. The puppets with hinge-flap mouths, exaggerated and insanely high pitched accents in Sesame Street…

I haven't been a kid in...too long, but I have a decent recollection of Sesame Street, and I don't recall an excess of high pitched voices.

Elmo and several of the girl muppets are pretty shrill, but Oscar, Grover, Big Bird, and all the humans are normal. Kermit, Bert and Ernie have that rounded "muppet voice" which is kinda in between.

Screen time isn't great but Sesame Street is hands-down among the best childrens' television in existence.

Man, I kinda wanna watch Sesame Street now...

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

#112

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

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 this is very insightful. I hated higher level mathematics specifically because I couldn't see any use for it. Due to a variety of circumstances I ended up taking my math classes out of sequence with the physics and EE classes in my EE degree and as a result I'd get a concept introduced in math that had no apparent use, only to find out the next semester or year what you would use it for. Very frustrating at the time.

As I developed my 'self learning' style it became clear that I was way more successful (retained more knowledge with a better understanding) if I could "make up" some problems and then work them out with the thing I was trying to learn.

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

#113

Post by deanCommie » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 2:38 AM UTC

mrslave wrote: post #101

gowld wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stick with PBS Kids and Sesame Street and Mister Rogers reruns.

If I remember correctly, babies learn to distinguish vowels from consonants from near birth when adults speak to them in that annoying high pitched "coochy coochy coo" dialect. After 6-12 months of life this starts to hold them back as they need to transition to hearing normal sounds and seeing the people mouthing them. The puppets with hinge-flap mouths, exaggerated and insanely high pitched accents in Sesame Street…

> The rest of the world doesn't live like this.

How so?

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

#114

Post by deanCommie » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

d23 wrote: post #61

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 t…

> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon

I have found that one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work (as an SDE) and the trust associated with it is you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone, and can afford to look stupid.

I actually learned this from Principal engineers who over and over would start questions with "I'm sorry, I'm an idiot who must be missing something obvious, but can you explain this it doesn't make sense to me?"

I have found doing this exhilarating and ADDICTIVE, because of how often the question ends up revealing that the person just glossed over something or doesn't understand something themselves.

Now instead of trying to understand people, I find myself trying NOT to understand something and make sure I'm not letting any hand waving or imprecision trick me into thinking I understand something when it isn't properly explained.

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

#115

Post by throwawaynot » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 2:55 AM UTC

throwaway713 wrote: post #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 s…

Same. Over the years I've become obsessed with becoming financially independent, so that I can work on what I think is important and don't have to explain it to others. In the process, I've completely lost interests in achieving any success in the day job, which is the polar opposite of myself 10 years ago. Everything at work just feels so pointless now. I feel really bad but just can't help it.

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

#116

Post by myth2018 » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 2:56 AM UTC

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.

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

#117

Post by jon_elbrook » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 3:08 AM UTC

Mirioron wrote: post #100

memco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I disagree. I think stories like this are important. They teach you to take a hypothetical scenario seriously. It teaches people to ask "what if X were true?" and to seriously consider the ramifications. This is a springboard into abstract thinking. Without people taking the hypothetical seriously they will want to deal with concrete things and will have trouble with abstract reasoning. Imagine you were trying to hav…

>You would tell them "How would you feel if one day you woke up black and people were biased against you due to your skin color?"

They are not biased against you because of your skin color. Skin color is just a proxy for higher violent crime rate and lower IQ.

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

#118

Post by Rexxar » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 3:14 AM UTC

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.

  > the better an engineer gets, the better they are at shooting down every idea

Are they really better or just more confident with time ?

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

#119

Post by 1123581321 » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 3:34 AM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #114

d23 wrote: post #61

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 t…

> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon I have found that one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work (as an SDE) and the trust associated with it is you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone, and can afford to look stupid. I actually learned this from Principal engineers who over and over would start questions wi…

I also ask these simple questions and it’s funny to watch the head-nodders rush to prevent the question from being answered by the presenter by jumping in with what is often incorrect information. There is a powerful desire to maintain the illusion that the whole room understands what is being said, to the point defending it can be instinctual.

Over time this behavior changes as it becomes known I’ll follow up to a cover-up with even simpler questions. :) Some of them have started asking their own!

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

#120

Post by alexashka » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 3:34 AM UTC

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 all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet

I think this applies more so to adults who've had their childhood curiosity crushed.

Children are naturally curious. The problem with the educational system is that we want to apply the same lowest common denominator formula to most kids in most schools.

If you let kids do a little bit of what they actually want, you'd have chaos with a ratio of 20-30 kids to a single adult. That's what makes school suck - the only way to make school work is to crush children's natural urges and make them sit and be quiet.

This works well for producing obedient workers to send off to spend their life in factories.

Yuck, we don't even need that many factory workers anymore, so now we're sending everyone to do more schooling, to work in paper-pushing factories called corporate America. It's all quite unfortunate.