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You can't tell people anything (2004)

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

#161

Post by circlefavshape »

watwut wrote: post #137
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…

You might like My Little Pony. It is with animals, but it is a lot about how relationships really work. I am with you on superheroes. They do nice power fantasy, but lack actual tension, because main hero is unrealistically over the top strong. Consequently, the mechanics of "how the world works" are also all wrong.

+1 on My Little Pony. Equestria Girls is great - characters can be irrational and selfish and mean, and friends have serious arguments and fallings-out, but their commitment to their mutual friendships works out in the end

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

throw681158 wrote: post #158
dkersten wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're foreign because they're dangerous They’re only dangerous because they’re excluded from the kingdom and are given little chance to survive. The entire narrative of Scar having control over them is based on him providing them with food, because their lands contain none. In the scene where they’re introduced, Scar brings them meat and his entire promise to them is “stick with me and you’ll never go hungry agai…

I don't think this is accurate. The hyenas are fundamentally sadistic and difficult to satiate. That's why they're poor - it's what got them banished. They make them hyenas to reinforce it's not brought on by the situation, they're just like that. You run the risk of a racial analogy whenever you use species to articulate personality but i don't think it's intended, even subconsciously. I think it's actually a very d…

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by eythian »

mopsi wrote: post #58
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 observa…

I agree with this. I was always a bit of a science nerd, even in primary school. But was just never any good at maths, ending up in the bottom stream in intermediate. It wasn't till part way through that that I started self-teaching myself programming (I had a 40 minute wait for the school bus, and a teacher who gave me an Apple II programming manual along with a BASIC disk, so a good start) that all of a sudden this maths had a place in my brain to go, made sense, and all of a sudden I was getting 90%+ in tests.

These days I can read a bunch of docs and make a start at something, but I still really like having a problem to solve in order to synthesise the information into understanding.

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

#164

Post by Melkman »

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.

Neh, the better an engineer gets, the better they are at asking questions which make the person with the idea realize there are some problems with his idea. These problems may be fixable.

Shooting down ideas is not productive. Making sure ideas are realizable is.

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

#165

Post by dkersten »

throw681158 wrote: post #158
dkersten wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're foreign because they're dangerous They’re only dangerous because they’re excluded from the kingdom and are given little chance to survive. The entire narrative of Scar having control over them is based on him providing them with food, because their lands contain none. In the scene where they’re introduced, Scar brings them meat and his entire promise to them is “stick with me and you’ll never go hungry agai…

I don't think this is accurate. The hyenas are fundamentally sadistic and difficult to satiate. That's why they're poor - it's what got them banished. They make them hyenas to reinforce it's not brought on by the situation, they're just like that. You run the risk of a racial analogy whenever you use species to articulate personality but i don't think it's intended, even subconsciously. I think it's actually a very d…

> The hyenas are fundamentally sadistic and difficult to satiate. That's why they're poor - it's what got them banished.

Based on what? I’m only basing what I said on the original movie as I never saw any other content. I see the lions portraying them that way, but I see no obvious reasons to believe it’s true from the content of the movie. Maybe I’m misremembering, it’s been a while, but from what I remember they were a bit extreme but that just seemed like desperation.

> They make them hyenas to reinforce it's not brought on by the situation, they're just like that.

Except real Hyenas aren’t just like that which is why the movie got criticised by hyena conservationists.

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

#166

Post by larsnystrom »

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 was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without a framework/UI library.

I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question. Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious effort planning how to explain such a concept. And that's just a small part of the answer to the question.

My point is that sometimes the answer to the question you're asking is just huge, and requires a lot of context to understand. And providing such answers on the spot is very hard. So I think we should cut people some slack when they can't immediately provide an answer. Sometimes things are just not very obvious.

Just to be clear, I don't want to discuss the merits of React here. My point is just that sometimes things are too complex to explain fully in every situation. Everything cannot be understood from first principles. You need abstractions to be productive. By all means, question the abstractions, but perhaps not always?

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

#167

Post by wildpeaks »

cmonnow wrote: post #153
deanCommie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work.. you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone but to reach Senior, you must head nod a lot when you're junior (and then later research it yourself if interested), because otherwise you'll likely be deemed stupid and won't make it to Senior.

Not only deemed stupid, it can also be perceived as an attack by making the presenter "look bad" and up in retaliations.

People remember how they felt a lot longer than who was factually correct.

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

#168

Post by CathedralBorrow »

qwertygnu wrote: post #124
Mirioron wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So if a kid doesn't watch enough superhero/disney/scifi movies they won't understand racism...? I agree that stoking kids' (and adults') imagination is useful and has benefits. But it sounds like you're claiming they literally won't be able to conceptualize anything outside of reality without them.

> So if a kid doesn't watch enough superhero/disney/scifi movies they won't understand racism...?

There is quite a massive distance between "You can take some lessons about racism from this content" and "If you do not consume this particular content you will not understand racism."

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

#169

Post by danparsonson »

js8 wrote: post #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.

Is it? UBI surely relies on taxes, which would evaporate if everyone retired early to live off their UBI.

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

#170

Post by CathedralBorrow »

watwut wrote: post #140
Mirioron wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just dont think disney or superhero story do anything for understanding of racism or history or human relationships. I mean, they are fun, but seriously.

Nothing wrong with that, I don't think there's a fixed list of "Learnable things" attached to any piece of content. It's mostly about the interpretation.
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