141–150 of 279 posts
Au contraire, academia has worked out how to reliably communicate at scale: publishing peer-reviewed articles in journals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
imagine times where you replied to emails partially It will be hard for someone that always replies to the first thing only to empathize with this but: This has literally never happened to me. As in, I have never replied partially to something in an email. You will get an answer to each of your items. Granted, you may not get the answer you were looking for but I will answer each and every one, even if it's just a "I…
I don't think this is practically much different then answering one thing. If you give one answer and 3 "I'll get back to you on that"'s-- this creates a promise of a future asynchronous answer, which is only as good as your word. People often have too many tasks, so to get those remaining items on your queue, they'll have to ask you again. As the recipient, it's more challenging to receive the future promise of an a…
I agree that if there's no explicitly stated SLA and no implicit SLA given the relationship history between the two of us (e.g. I might know you're usually going to get back to me within 24 hours on such items), then this is practically the same.
I do not operate under such circumstances though. If I tell you that I will get back to you, then I will get back to you within a reasonable time frame and you will know from our previous interactions that I'm good for it in most cases and that it's totally OK for you to ask again after a day because I might have forgotten. I'm not perfect.
Since this was an example answer only, it is also possible that for one of your 7 questions the answer will simply be that I cannot get that answer to you within any reasonable amount of time at this point because of other priorities I have and that you should find someone else or I might point you towards someone else. In any case, you will have all of your 7 points answered. I won't just ignore them.
This is an observation that goes back to at least Cicero.[1] Cicero on the primary goal of oratory: "As, therefore, the two principal qualities required in an Orator, are to be neat and clear in stating the nature of his subject, and warm and forcible in moving the passions; and as he who fires and inflames his audience, will always effect more than he who can barely inform and amuse them..." Cicero describes the pro…
“Nuanced communication usually doesn’t work at scale” proceeds to write a lengthy nuanced post about it
Bruh
Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance communications can be the following. * Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey. * Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graph…
When this happens it screams corporate communication / fluff piece to me, and I generally skip it entirely.
What would help more is if we didn’t get so much pointless information in our mailbox.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
imagine times where you replied to emails partially It will be hard for someone that always replies to the first thing only to empathize with this but: This has literally never happened to me. As in, I have never replied partially to something in an email. You will get an answer to each of your items. Granted, you may not get the answer you were looking for but I will answer each and every one, even if it's just a "I…
What’s the opportunity cost of your thoroughness?
I also never said that I will answer your questions right away. Just that I will answer all 7 of them once I do reply. The opportunity cost of looking at my email inbox might be way too high at a particular moment and so I might not even see your message for a full day to begin with. Same w/ a slack message. I might not see your particular message for some time or I might see it and decide that it's not a message I can deal with on the side while in a meeting and mark it for later consumption e.g. for when the meeting ends early etc.
FWIW I've so far never seen anyone try to 'use' my thoroughness to create a denial of service attack against me. If that ever did happen, I would definitely change my stance. But it won't be to answer the first question each time. It would be to stop talking to them. Like I ignore any "Hi, can I ask you a question?" messages. Even some directors have tried that and just gotten ignored (first time someone does it, I will let them know they can just ask away. Second time they get ignored until they learn).
This is an observation that goes back to at least Cicero.[1] Cicero on the primary goal of oratory: "As, therefore, the two principal qualities required in an Orator, are to be neat and clear in stating the nature of his subject, and warm and forcible in moving the passions; and as he who fires and inflames his audience, will always effect more than he who can barely inform and amuse them..." Cicero describes the pro…
That's an interesting quotation, but it doesn't sound like the problem with Curio's was too much nuance. If anything, very plain (albeit clear) speech has a lack of nuance.
Au contraire, academia has worked out how to reliably communicate at scale: publishing peer-reviewed articles in journals.
Are you talking about the academia where everybody complains that people only read the abstracts?
If Dan is right (and I think he is), have a stiff drink nearby and then think about how his point applies to something complicated that is life and death, such as conveying information to the public about a rampant virus.
To me it was eye-opening to see just how bad people were at understanding what they were told in the clear, simplified language of public statements regarding COVID. I don't just mean "lay people", I mean the relatively well-educated HN crowd and even some medical professionals misunderstood what was said. Across the entire group, literally every part of what was publicly said by government agencies was misinterprete…
Anthony Fauci literally said that "there's no reason for the general public to be walking around with a mask". On television. I'll link to this version, since hilariously, facebook has "fact checked" it:
https://www.facebook.com/DeannaForCongress/videos/3682499312...
(note that I have no idea who "Deanna for Congress" is. This is the first version of the video I could find -- linked from a reuters article also claiming to "fact check" it [1] -- because google has gone out of its way to bury the video.)
It's pretty darned ironic that this is your preferred example of people "not understanding" messaging. If you search for this, you will find hundreds of other articles "fact-checking" this, even though he said it, it's not debatable, and the various walk-backs and fact-checks and whatnot simply make the issue look ridiculously farcical.
Just to underscore the point here, the Reuters "fact check" admits he said it (since, to be fair, he said it), and the only "fact checking" involved is that the official government position has changed. It wasn't taken out of context. It wasn't a misquote. It wasn't "misinterpreted". He said masks don't work other than blocking "the occasional droplet", and that there's no reason for the public to wear them. This was March 2020.
While it's true (and obvious to anyone) that the government position has changed, it doesn't change the "fact" of what was said in the past. And yet, people persist in trying to do this absurd stuff.
Let's be honest with ourselves: if this leads to doubt amongst the public, is this the fault of a dense public not understanding sophisticated, super-nuanced messaging, or simply that the messaging was muddled and has wavered over time, and that some parties are engaged in blatant attempts to re-write the factual record?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-...