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You can't tell people anything (2004)

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

#141

Post by bondarchuk »

_yb2s wrote: post #36

This puts to clear words a nagging sensation I've had my whole life, that I (also) tried to tell other people but couldn't. Talking just doesn't work as well as people think it does. It seems so obvious once you start noticing, but almost nobody notices this. People are either just repeating memes each other basically already know, or else are talking past each other. When I overhear people having a conversation, alm…

>When I overhear people having a conversation, almost always, I can see that the two people aren't really understanding each other, and neither of them realize it.

I have noticed exactly the same. But meanwhile, you and me are sitting there understanding what each of the two means, and how each misunderstands the other. So clearly it's possible for someone to understand what is said??

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

#142

Post by simultsop »

at_a_remove wrote: post #29

I was a private tutor for a long time, specializing in kids through young adults with learning disabilities and/or psychiatric disorders. Sort of my Job-2. I had tutored some even as a kid and teen, mostly math. One of the things I came to understand was that communicating many concepts, skills, ideas, whatever required a working model of the recipient's mind. What did they value? How did they understand things? How…

> and even then ... you can't tell people anything

Didn't see this coming xD good luck with engineering...

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

#144

Post by rodolphoarruda »

This text resonates so much with the situation my team and I are experiencing right now. We are working on a Sales Territory management module which sits on basic concepts the typical field sales managers deals with every day. So what sounds totally obvious to our product owner, a former sales manager, is kind of out of this world alien talk to our devs. We are working on prototypes so they can understand things as they use something. The schemas on the PowerPoints didn't help at all.

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

#145

Post by Aeolun »

Ntrails wrote: post #121
smaudet wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classroom experience is so rarely useful, the ONLY time you benefit is when either a) you already studied the subject and the professor is good and mentions something tangential/extra credit, or b) the classroom size is small, so when you don't understand something you can say so without fear of class disruption and the teacher can spend more time tailoring their curriculum to their class. Otherwise yes, you are ofte…

I believe this may be true for you, but it is not true for me. I find classrooms engaging and I actually internalise information in a way that reading is only ever surface level.

I don’t find classrooms particularly engaging, but an open book in front of me is even less so. Classrooms are basically the only way I get any not-immediately-interesting learning done.

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

#147

Post by bsenftner »

hilbert42 wrote: post #126
krisoft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OK, so when people have some talent, skill or knowledge that needs to be conveyed to the world and they can't get their point across effectively then what are they to do? Try, and try again. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What do they know already? What will they think when you say this or that? Is that what you want them to think?

Trying again is often not an option. For instance, comments on HN are often only 'alive' for hours, by the next day the story is usually dead. Whilst I used myself as a example I'm not really concerned about my own communication skills to the extent that I worry about them. I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one. Also I'll often just comment to straighten out my thou…

The quest for an understanding of the need for good communication skills in developers, as well as everyone else, has become my personal vocation. I've been working in tech for four decades, and my vantage sees weak and poor communications as the underlying factor of all this chaos, this absurd reliance on extreme tooling, the overly complicated tech stacks, and the industry failure of resorting to "leet testing" to gain employment.

I'm an example of failed communications: I'm the idiot who went bankrupt trying to create Personalized Advertising, which is now known as Deep Fakes. I had a feature film quality system working in '08! But I could not convince investors how placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase would be a viable business. Granted, the global financial crisis had making new tech investments difficult to impossible to land. However, despite my placing VCs into film clips right in front of their eyes, they still did not get it. And inevitable one of them would have the "ah ha!" moment and declare "we should make porn!" and then that would be all they could conceive. I spent 5 years pitching, I took communications courses, hired marketing firms to critique my message. Still to this day, I cannot get people to realize the advertising value of placing consumers directly into the advertising. It is the ultimate "show them what this is", but I can't get people to grasp the value of that.

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

#148

Post by ozim »

jackpirate wrote: post #11
ozim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me worst part is just like in article that I have to explain to people first and only then I can start.

One of the reasons I've intentionally decided not become independently wealthy is that I want to have to explain to other people why I'm doing things. Part of my work is "charity-ish", and by not being able to do things on my own, I'm forced me to improve my communication skills and involve other people in these charity activities. I think that ultimately improves the final outcome, even if the process is immensely m…

I am referring to technical work specifically. Where most of the time people don’t even know what they want until they see it.

Creating mock-ups and going back and forth costs time and money.

While most of the time what I do is good enough - I am getting tired of people trying to block work until unimportant details are “discussed”.

It would not be frustrating if customers would be willing to pay for mock-up work and then for actual work but what most want is working application right away not mockup but they also want to waste time blabbing about details that would be clear in mock-up or in first version of the app.

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

#149

Post by asimpletune »

koyote wrote: post #63
zsz wrote: post #51

> I’m totally convinced that a new idea or a new plan or a new technique is never really understood when you just explain it. > People will often think they understand, and they’ll say they understand, but then their actions show that it just ain’t so. Isn't this the very reason that homework assignments exist? When I was in college, it took me two years to realize that I could have easily gotten As and Bs (instead o…

> When I was in college, it took me two years to realize that I could have easily gotten As and Bs (instead of Bs and Cs) in my various math classes, physics, chemistry, etc. had I simply bothered to do my homework properly--or, to put it differently, had I only properly applied the knowledge which I passively acquired by reading the associated textbook sections. I took this realisation to the extreme and decided to…

This is a super interesting strategy. Also going to classes can lead one into a false sense of mastery. It almost makes more sense to do homework before class, and attend lecture as a review. It would just become pre-work then and would essentially be considered mandatory. This would also really fix the problem of lectures not being useful, since the lecturer could assume you did the work and then spend more time on things that are a better use of their expertise.

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

#150

Post by krisoft »

hilbert42 wrote: post #126
krisoft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OK, so when people have some talent, skill or knowledge that needs to be conveyed to the world and they can't get their point across effectively then what are they to do? Try, and try again. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What do they know already? What will they think when you say this or that? Is that what you want them to think?

Trying again is often not an option. For instance, comments on HN are often only 'alive' for hours, by the next day the story is usually dead. Whilst I used myself as a example I'm not really concerned about my own communication skills to the extent that I worry about them. I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one. Also I'll often just comment to straighten out my thou…

> Trying again is often not an option.

Life is an iterative game. You fail one day, you pick yourself up and try again the next one. The very act of trying makes you better at it. (For example by having a better internal model of what other people might think of a given text.)

> I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one.

For whatever it is worth I find what you write perfectly clear.

> I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.

Oh i see! Controversial subjects be controversial. I don't think aiming for "non-controversialness" is a worthy goal in itself. Of course one should pick their battles, but I wouldn't take that as a sign that there is anything wrong with how you communicate. You are not going to convince everyone, every time about everything. If you could, we would probably call that geas not communication anyway. :)

> They were so good they would spellbind their audiences.

I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation.

I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example. (and here I intentionally picked ones ideologically far from each other.) Now of course since I don't know your examples I can't judge how they measure up to them.

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