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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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I first started pair programming, I found the most important part was even if I had a solution that would work, if I couldn't explain it to my partner, it was not a very good solution. Being able to convey an idea often forces it to be closer to the simplest and most comprehensible version of that idea.
Can you give an example of a solution that you came up with that you decided couldn't be very good based on it being hard to explain?
This reminds me an edition of Byte Magazine from 1990 [1] with interviews of all big shots in the industry making forecasts for the next decade. No one foresaw the internet. At best they did expect things like "we'll have networks with bigger bandwith". But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09
That’s because it was Byte magazine. If you were reading High Frontiers (1984), which became Reality Hackers (1988) and finally Mondo 2000 (1989), you would have thought otherwise. I used to buy them at Tower Records throughout California primarily to read about what the internet was to become. By 1990, Mondo 2000 foresaw and had a fairly complete vision of the nascent internet. A lot of the artists involved went on to produce independent works that promoted these ideas. Around 1992-93, I saw a theatrical production in SF that simulated and modeled the entirety of what life was going to be like and how it would work in a connected world. These are very old ideas (E.M Forster, 1909; Vannevar Bush, 1945; Marshall McLuhan, 1964) and many people were aware of and working towards manifesting them in reality.
That's why it's important (especially for those in leadership positions) to assume that the people around you are smarter than you (at least for some time). If you assume that someone is dumber than you, you will miss any nuance and signs of deep domain expertise hidden within.
I find that very clever ideas from very clever people don't provide an instant 'Aha' moment; it takes a bit longer to see the brilliance. It's not obvious at all, that's why it's brilliant.
There's some pretty astonishing theory out there as to who you can tell things to, in a way that they'll understand immediately. It's pretty interesting and unfortunately very subjective. But one thing I learned from it is that if you can identify specific people who get you, generally speaking, you should then see if you can mold newly-discovered communication problems around this already-functional communications r…
There's some pretty astonishing theory out there as to who you can tell things to, in a way that they'll understand immediately. It's pretty interesting and unfortunately very subjective. But one thing I learned from it is that if you can identify specific people who get you, generally speaking, you should then see if you can mold newly-discovered communication problems around this already-functional communications r…
What body of work / what field are you talking about?
Also related to tutoring: quite a lot of people fake "getting it." They'll nod, they'll say "yeah yeah," maybe even parrot back some phrases ... but they don't get it. This is its own unique impediment and it requires, for want of a better term, quizzing. Test the success of the communication. By the time the kids found their way to me, they had already developed a raft of coping mechanisms, mostly counter-productive in the long run, and faked comprehension signals were a large part of it.
These are impediments to just communicating new ideas to a blank slate. Much worse is an audience who already has some other idea in their head, and even in the rare case of some kind of objective measure of validity, you're swimming upstream. Many is the time I had heard the dreaded phrase, "I know you're very smart but ..." The objection was their idea, of course, and only after repeated and crumbling failure would it be discarded. Maybe there was now room for my thing, or maybe not, but I had often lost much passion by that point.
Sometimes I despair of being understood. I soon have to face the music in which I must explain to higher-ups that one of our data source providers will need to supply unique and stable identifiers on their data if we would like to accomplish Project X. I know the questions I will get: what if we just did it without it? If you can't, why shouldn't we get a consultant who will tell us what we want to hear? Have you asked $ThisParty? What if we make up our own identifiers? I will probably have to engineer an exercise to explain the pitfalls, and even then ... you can't tell people anything.
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...
You cannot build an ideal society in theory as it will not be realisitic in practice, and you cannot explain reason and feel with words alone, but others need to walk the same experiential path as you did. But since you already figured it out you can help them walk it faster. Thats why we now learn in primary school what originally took a long time until some greek matematician worked it out.