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Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

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Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#161

Post by viksit »

Animats wrote: post #124

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…

This comment is truly on point and very meta — it takes a nuanced twitter thread and distills it down via the force of an authoritative source in a way that people immediately get the point.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#162

Post by yesenadam »

lazide wrote: post #101
jodrellblank wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so often said, and so bloody ridiculous a state of affairs for the information technology industry . How hard would it be to have a shared todo list where the team can put every blocking question which needs answering, and everyone who needs to answer can either do that or delegate the decision or approve skipping it? (And I don't mean a sluggish Jira / Electron / Teams / helpdesk which needs 50,000 fields en…

You can’t solve a lack of executive function/decision making capacity (which is what we’re referring to) by making more work/queuing up bullshit work. It will result in everyone just ignoring anything that smells like coming from such a system. Since (almost) no one wants to admit they don’t have enough decision making capacity or can’t prioritize using it for whatever you’re asking (at least now a days it seems, sin…

I'd read every comment on the page, but when I got down to your bullet points, don't know why but my eyes glazed over and I stopped reading anything, and just started scrolling quickly down the page. Then I realized the irony of this happening in a thread about ignoring bullet points!

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#163

Post by bentcorner »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #130
mcguire wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you want to bet most people will read your first bullet point, ignore the rest, and drop all the nuance? Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an email. The first one is the only one to get answered.

Yes, it's very strange. I had this recently with something I wanted to order online. I asked two questions, the second was answered, the first was ignored. So I had to send a second email to ask the first question again. I'm really curious if it's a symptom of limited modern attention spans, or if you'd find the same issue in vintage hand-written letters.

IMO, there's two things that make this harder than it should be:

1. People tend to skim and a question could be lost even in a two-sentence paragraph.

2. Email's structure means people tend to reply "at the tip" and branching conversations are difficult to understand.

Contributing to this latter problem are:

a. SMTP (to/cc are too flexible, each message is it's own "thing")

b. POP (deep conversations are just a stack of messages some people may not have the "original" and can't easily reply higher up the tree without breaking client threading)

c. Email client visualization of message threads are generally bad. I haven't seen a single client do this well. Outlook can, but out of the box has a very "flat" view.

---

So, people tend to read at the bottom and if someone missed something early in a thread you have no chance of getting it addressed a few messages in.

IMO something more akin to newsgroups or even reddit/HN tree-view threads could be a better fit for business discussions, but I haven't seen anybody try it.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#164

Post by timr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #152
loteck wrote: post #117

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.

I agree with your point, but it's got me thinking about how the early mask guidance was so wrong. Early in the pandemic, virtually all the major health orgs spread the message "masks for the public don't work". Of course, the real issue was that there was a valid fear that there would be a run on masks and not enough for healthcare workers. There was never any significant evidence masks for the public don't work, on…

> There was never any significant evidence masks for the public don't work, on the contrary there was at least some flu-based evidenced that they were beneficial, but at best you could say "we don't know"

We aren't supposed to make decisions on medical interventions based on "evidence that X doesn't work". Otherwise, we'd default to just doing stuff until we had evidence that it was worse than doing nothing at all. Literally every failed drug ever tested had a biologically plausible reason for starting the test, and yet we know that most drugs don't work when you take them out of the lab!

Saying that there were some papers out there recommending masks is beside the point, because you can find papers recommending lots of things that don't work. Pretty much anything, in fact. We can see the double-standard at play directly with the Ivermectin debate. Public masks and Ivermectin both have an evidence base of low-quality data, with weak effect sizes and huge error bars overall, and a clear bias of the strongest reported effect toward the lowest-quality evidence. But one is evil and the other is magic, depending on your politics.

To take it back to the subject of the OP, here we have two issues that are fundamentally nuanced (the evidence bases are ambigious, at best), and collapsing the range of allowable communication to "you must do X!" leads to obviously wrong outcomes no matter what you do. So maybe we shouldn't be doing anything at all? Or maybe...maybe...we could try to get answers with experiments, instead of just making things up and asserting that we're right?

For whatever it's worth, I recommend this paper as a balanced, comprehensive review of mask literature (not just cloth, though that is the title). You will not find a more complete treatment of the data for public masking:

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-11/working-pa...

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#165

Post by spookthesunset »

lazide wrote: post #101
jodrellblank wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so often said, and so bloody ridiculous a state of affairs for the information technology industry . How hard would it be to have a shared todo list where the team can put every blocking question which needs answering, and everyone who needs to answer can either do that or delegate the decision or approve skipping it? (And I don't mean a sluggish Jira / Electron / Teams / helpdesk which needs 50,000 fields en…

You can’t solve a lack of executive function/decision making capacity (which is what we’re referring to) by making more work/queuing up bullshit work. It will result in everyone just ignoring anything that smells like coming from such a system. Since (almost) no one wants to admit they don’t have enough decision making capacity or can’t prioritize using it for whatever you’re asking (at least now a days it seems, sin…

Oh man those bullet points hit home. I think I’ve done all of them at some point!

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#166

Post by spookthesunset »

jiggawatts wrote: post #138
loteck wrote: post #117

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…

The problem with the communications over the last two years is they have been values statements masquerading as science. If not everybody agrees with those values, you will have conflict.

Science doesn’t tell anybody what to do. People can completely understand the science if something but still feel a given course of action is inappropriate. And that is just fine.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#167

Post by Cederfjard »

evouga wrote: post #126
mcguire wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you want to bet most people will read your first bullet point, ignore the rest, and drop all the nuance? Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an email. The first one is the only one to get answered.

I’m rapidly approaching the “email singularity” where it would take me more time to answer one email than the average time between incoming emails. If I receive an email and it’s something I can quickly answer on my phone while waiting for the bus etc., I’ll do so and you’ll get a quick answer. If the email requires me to sit down and compose a long response (or worse, read a paper, or find and run some code) the ema…

When doing the latter, do you at least explicitly acknowledge that there are other questions you have ignored and may or may not come back to?

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#169

Post by tharkun__ »

gkop wrote: post #156
tharkun__ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will depend on circumstances obviously ;) 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 migh…

Have you ever faced a volume of questions that you could not reasonably answer to the degree of thoroughness you prefer? How did you deal with it? I mean, you mention at least one tactic in the sibling thread, but what I don’t understand is your apparent unwillingness to attenuate your thoroughness based on circumstances. Probably I am taking you too literally, but am curious, is your position absolute? (I too apprec…

Yes I have had that problem and still have it from time to time. Like you said, I mentioned one way to deal with it in the sibling thread. What has also happened in some cases is that I had to de-prioritize other things that I had on my plate because the questions were more important at that time.

Maybe it's not entirely clear what I mean with thoroughness here. I am talking about not just ignoring someone's questions. It doesn't mean that if you "ask" me to answer 7 questions that will each take a day of work to answer that I will be "thorough and do those 7 things immediately to get you your answer". I will simply ensure that I read all your 7 questions and tell you that each will take me about a day to answer as it would require certain checks and that I do not have the time for that at the moment. However, if your questions are so urgent vs. the other things I have on my plate, you are welcome to talk to my boss/my product owner/etc on getting your items prioritized higher. I have a finite amount of time per day that I do work and while the exact amount can vary from time to time I will not start working 80 hour weeks or start ignoring your questions.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#170

Post by theshrike79 »

Whenever articles like this about communication crop up, I like to remind people of Wiio's Laws[0] - from 1978:

    1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.
    2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.
    3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message.
    4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
    5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
    6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
    7. The more important the situation is, the more probable you had forgotten an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.
Just to reiterate, these laws are over 40 years old, predating any kind of social media or internet-based communication - and they're still 100% valid.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws

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