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

Red Light Green Light

jamessevedge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 169 posts

Re: Red Light Green Light

#101

Post by mihaic »

I often realize that I'm caught in a conversation where we don't use the same terms/concepts.

The hard part becomes getting the other person to slow down and actually explain their basic premise.

People can get defensive no matter how you ask them "What do you mean by X?", and worst of all they sometimes have a fixed route they want to take and are just giving some pretext to justify their actions.

I do my best, but I've never seen any framework that consistently works here (has anyone?), so I honestly think we need to work on this on a socio-cultural level. It might help with couples as well.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#102

Post by arketyp »

Rather than a lesson about perspective, my take away is about the resilience of the self-supervised signal, i.e. the child relying on sense data, even when the strongest of supervised signals is contradicting it, i.e. the mother/teacher.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#103

Post by eXpl0it3r »

mihaic wrote: post #101

I often realize that I'm caught in a conversation where we don't use the same terms/concepts. The hard part becomes getting the other person to slow down and actually explain their basic premise. People can get defensive no matter how you ask them "What do you mean by X?", and worst of all they sometimes have a fixed route they want to take and are just giving some pretext to justify their actions. I do my best, but…

What often helps is if you frame it in a way that shows you as the less knowledgeable person, that way people tend to feel less "attacked".

For example: "I didn't understand X, could you explain (again) what you mean by that?"

But in the end, I guess the more important thing is to build up enough trust between the teams, that one isn't constantly driving the attack/defense line, but can openly talk about ideas and see questions as clarifying, rather than attacking.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#104

Post by sharperguy »

aeternum wrote: post #15

Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon. Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the wo…

People should do this with the word "decentralized".

Re: Red Light Green Light

#105

Post by jyrkesh »

Buttons840 wrote: post #44
aeternum wrote: post #15

Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon. Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the wo…

I wish it was a common practice to ban certain words from difficult conversations. But whenever I suggest it people just talk past me as though I've said some weird thing. There's facts and opinions, but also definitions, and too often disagreements boil down to a different definition of a single word. Ban that word and say what you mean and the disagreement may suddenly be gone. Edit: I wrote this before reading the…

I didn't know this was a thing that had a term either! I don't talk politics anymore except with folks that I explicitly know want to talk politics, but I frequently suggest that people shouldn't use a whole litany of terms in those discussions: right/left-wing, capitalist, socialist, liberal, conservative, communist, libertarian, fascist...so many people use these terms as short-hand for "stuff I really/don't like", and then project values and policies onto them.

Throw them out, talk about the issues, talk about your shared values, etc, and you'll quickly find that you agree with people a lot more than you realized.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#106

Post by mcv »

I'm glad I'm having these traffic light discussions with my kids on foot or on a bike. That way I can be sure about what they can see. Or when we have it in the car, it's when they're in the front seat at least, but I'm a poor enough driver that I'd rather focus on traffic than try to teach my kid while driving.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#107

Post by eurekin »

mulmen wrote: post #59

Great story but what's with the fixation on fault? It's nobody's fault if a genetic trait is inherited, there's no control over that.

It was the first thing I noticed as well, the blame. It was like "blame the husband" was the terminal state of sorts, solving the issue somehow.

Of course the anecdote is about changing the perspective, but I think there's an obvious elephant in this room as well

Re: Red Light Green Light

#108

Post by mcv »

aeternum wrote: post #15

Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon. Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the wo…

This is a great idea. Not just for tech discussions; I think some political discussions would also be much improved if we could taboo certain words. Some people get too hung up on certain -isms without explaining what specific policies they're talking about.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#109

Post by martin_a »

bricemo wrote: post #62

I’m more impressed that James was able to just write up an excerpt from someone else’s podcast and make it to the top of hacker news

Yes, this seems like a really "low-effort" post for an otherwise very technical and demanding audience.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#110

Post by matsemann »

My take after reading this is a bit different than the others.

I think it's absolutely insane that a three year old has to learn traffic rules to not be mauled to death by passing cars. What a fail of society.

Post reply on HN