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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 relaxing »

bsenftner wrote: post #147
hilbert42 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah that's an astonishingly terrible idea.

"Placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase" would have made intriguing dystopian fiction 40 years ago. Today it sounds like a bad parody.

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

#162

Post by Mezzie »

smaudet wrote: post #109
koyote wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

It's wildly dependent on the topic.

I never went to my physics classes in college - there was no attendance requirement outside of lab and I saw no reason to since math and science were easy for me to grok on my own.

On the other hand, I also studied languages and classroom and face to face time is almost essential for in-depth language study. Language study isn't usually lecture based, though. Not going to my Chinese or Arabic classes would have been a bad time.

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

#163

Post by relaxing »

xyzelement wrote: post #90
invalidator wrote: post #8

Now realize that this applies to everything, not just computers. Unless you've walked a mile in their shoes, you don't really understand the struggles of LGBTQ folks, the homeless, CEOs, assembly line workers... They will try to tell you, but you can't tell people anything, unless you're telling someone with good imagination and empathy.

I deeply appreciate your point that lack of understanding goes both downward (homeless) and upward (CEOs.) I think that's true. But - unrelated to your point - I think there's more empathy (or understanding, at least) - unexpectedly - downwards. A CEO knows how to become homeless (quit job, give away house and money) if they chose to for some reason. A homeless person has no path to CEO.

> quit job, give away house and money

Is not how people become homeless. There's no path to empathy there.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by didgetmaster »

gregw134 wrote: post #93
didgetmaster wrote: post #92

>Alas, many things really must be experienced to be understood. We didn’t have much of an experience to deliver to them though — after all, the whole point of all this evangelizing was to get people to give us money to pay for developing the software in the first place! But someone who’s spent even 10 minutes using the Web would never think to ask some of the questions we got asked. THIS! I think most people can rela…

Can you add a link?

I usually include a link when I refer to my project in a comment, but I have tried not to be 'over-promotional' lately. But since you asked... https://didgets.com/

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

#167

Post by slfnflctd »

_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…

> I am drawing out the explanation way more than they expected to be necessary. The social norm is to think or at least act like you understand immediately when you really don't.

I have wrestled with this since I was a child. For a long time I felt I was frequently missing information everyone else was picking up on (which was surely true in some cases, but not all)-- it even led to a brief delusion where I became paranoid about a large subpopulation of telepaths living alongside us, with access to their own hidden world containing significantly richer detail and depth, who pitied disadvantaged individuals like me.

Turns out a whole lot of people have simply felt forced into faking deeper understanding due to pressures of social competition, and gotten really good at it. Like an arms race of bullshitting. A facade of wisdom and knowledge.

Like you, I've often been accused of 'over-explaining' - which many do in fact find annoying - but we only do it because we've found it's necessary to avoid miscommunication.

So, thanks for writing your comment, I feel slightly better about the situation now.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

hinkley wrote: post #42
eat_veggies wrote: post #14

This is the anarchist theory of the unity of means and ends: you can't tell people anything, including what a better society looks like (nor can you impose it on anyone). You have to try to build and live that society in the present in order to even "get it" yourself. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchopac-means-and...

I have some opinions about therapy being the art of asking people questions in order to trick them into telling themselves things that nobody else can tell them. I've had more than a couple coworkers over the years who pull me into random decisions because they think I ask good questions. Part of me would rather be known for having good answers, but it's better than being discounted, and practically it may end up bei…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by anyfoo »

foul wrote: post #124
anyfoo wrote: post #2

Towards the end it says: > At Communities.com we developed a system called Passport (I’ll save the astonishing trademark story for a later posting) that let us do some pretty amazing things with web browsers. For example, with just a few magic HTML tags we could stick avatars on a web page — pretty much any web page. For months Randy kept getting up at management meetings and saying, “We’ll be able to put avatars on…

Gravatar, "Login with X", Oauth, OpenID, W3c Solid, Metamask. The idea started with having an identity source-of-truth across websites but it's used to pass personal data around webapps, for e-commerce too.

“avatars walking around on top of our company home page”?

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

#170

Post by wizzwizz4 »

andai wrote: post #117
jrumbut wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a great way to put it in words, but the intuition is that you are putting enormous mental energy into something that doesn't give anything back. Being able to solve heat equations doesn't make you warm. Other subjects are the same, obviously, but when writing a history essay you can BS and not think too hard and skate by with a C. With a math problem, if it's difficult for you, you need to really put you…

I was studying calculus not too long ago and arrived at the conclusion that drawing is actually way harder than math. In math, you learn how something works, and then you can do it. In drawing, you can literally see the "solution" right in front of you (e.g. your own hand that you are drawing) and still get it wrong for years (and even then, only asymptotically approach perfection). That discrepancy between the goal…

Don't try for photorealism straight away. Pick a more abstract style, and work on that: change things around until you find it fun. When you learn to follow your whims, that's when you'll start getting better (perhaps even quite rapidly).

This isn't to say give up on photorealistic drawing: but don't bludgeon yourself with it. If you don't find it fun, you're probably not at a point where practice will make perfect.

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