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Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

ashley.rolfmore.com

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Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#201

Post by grvdrm »

mjburgess wrote: post #129
donatj wrote: post #127

I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems. They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret. When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention. The numbe…

Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI. It might be that with precision, readability is lost. It's a tradeoff: the more compressed your language is, and hence the more precise, the more cognitive effort you require the reader to expend on each word. Reading is a translation from your mental model, as expressed in words, to the readers mental model. Words alone don't perform this translation, t…

> One suspicion I have is that your one-pager was passed through AI because it was too terse to serve the job of aiding the general reader in obtaining an understanding of the topic for themselves.

One idea for you: provide a reference to an explainer with more context, examples, etc. The original one-pager might be instructions. Do A, then B, then C, without context for the purpose of not confusing the consumer with other information.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#202

Post by rayiner »

mjburgess wrote: post #146
balamatom wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI. Note that the manager may or may not have incentive at all to provide useful or even meaningful feedback. I mean, he did pass on an incorrect version of the documentation, didn't he? hi! yes. perhaps he wil write inchoate sentence like point out which word is wrong >One suspicion I have is that your one-pager was passed through AI because it was too ter…

On your last sentence: The very first sentences should clear warnings not to modify the document, and read it entirely. That the contents of the document are short ( And if that still doesnt work, arrange a 15min meeting with relevant stakeholders and go through the document quickly before releasing it. It is my view that we have always been an oral species, and the great tyranny of the written words always a great b…

> Speaking to people in a meeting allows them to emote, express difficulty of understanding, understand the sentiment and priority of what they're hearing -- and most of all, it allows them to listen rather than read. People speak at a much lower information density, and this is a less taxing form of communication.

Is that why everything is a Youtube video these days instead of written articles?

The real danger of Tik Tok and Youtube is that it allowed people who can't communicate using writing onto the Internet.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#203

Post by rayiner »

sersi wrote: post #181
mjburgess wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI. It might be that with precision, readability is lost. It's a tradeoff: the more compressed your language is, and hence the more precise, the more cognitive effort you require the reader to expend on each word. Reading is a translation from your mental model, as expressed in words, to the readers mental model. Words alone don't perform this translation, t…

> It might be that with precision, readability is lost The poster you replied to just wrote a comment on HN that is meant to be read by an audience, is clear, well written and well structured. Given that, why ever would you assume that the documentation that same poster produced would be too terse to serve the job?

Ding ding ding, correct answer! OP's target audience was people who are supposed to be using an API endpoint. It's self-evident OP can write clearly enough to communicate with the target audience.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#204

Post by godelski »

donatj wrote: post #127

I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems. They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret. When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention. The numbe…

  > The number of times I see my words interpreted as though my choice in words had been imprecise
That's because the words you use are imprecise and have multiple valid interpretations. Not because a lack of effort on your part but because that's how natural languages work. Natural languages are extremely fuzzy. Every single word is overloaded.

It's why it's important to speak you your audience. The goal of the listener isn't to interpret the words you say literally but to determine what's in your head. There's 3 parts of communicating: what's in your head, the words you use, how someone else interprets. Each transition is lossy.

Fwiw, this is also why we invented formal languages like math and programming (a subset of the former). Because formal languages are exceptionally precise (although the more "high level" a programming language is the closer it is to natural language, so it becomes less precise). That precision becomes necessary when discussing things that are abstract and complex. The pedantic nature is what makes them difficult to wield but also is the defining feature, not a flaw.

But we should neither treat natural languages as having the precision of formal ones. That would be as grave an error as abdicating interpretation.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#205

Post by neutronicus »

mjburgess wrote: post #129
donatj wrote: post #127

I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems. They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret. When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention. The numbe…

Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI. It might be that with precision, readability is lost. It's a tradeoff: the more compressed your language is, and hence the more precise, the more cognitive effort you require the reader to expend on each word. Reading is a translation from your mental model, as expressed in words, to the readers mental model. Words alone don't perform this translation, t…

It's possible the receiving team may have complained about OP's writing before, too.

I will say, though, that I think the manager would have done better to encourage the recipients to opt-in to using a LLM to expound on specific points of confusion so that they'd have the actual source document in hand.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#206

Post by crispyambulance »

donatj wrote: post #127

I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems. They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret. When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention. The numbe…

  > The documentation was complete, correct, and relatively terse. Less than a page.
No, that's YOUR IMPRESSION of your own writing.

There are many reasons why others might not find what you wrote sufficient to understand it. You boss ran it through AI for a reason and that reason was most likely because it the document was not understandable or perhaps confusing.

Did the document have usage examples? Did it explain context and background? Did it use "precise" jargon that not everyone knows? Did you follow up the documentation writing with a meeting with stakeholders/users to see if they had questions?

It sounds like you just "threw it over the wall" like you were done with it and left your boss to figure out how to get others to use it. If you find that you have "near constant" struggle to communicate, there is a strong possibility that the problem is yours and not everyone else.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#207

Post by plumbees »

cthor wrote: post #145
mjburgess wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI. It might be that with precision, readability is lost. It's a tradeoff: the more compressed your language is, and hence the more precise, the more cognitive effort you require the reader to expend on each word. Reading is a translation from your mental model, as expressed in words, to the readers mental model. Words alone don't perform this translation, t…

This is an insane response to someone having their carefully written work casually bastardized by an LLM that rewrote the entire design spec without even being informed. The amount of institutional noise generated by such carelessness far exceeds whatever improvement in readability you could possibly imagine. Any criticism you could aim at the original text that you don't even have on hand (i.e. are completely specul…

I thought the reply was generally helpful. Something to consider about in my equally exacting wording as I share the same frustration as the original comment and this give me a framework to view possible issues with my own writing. I.E. You can't change what others will do, you can only change what you yourself do. In this case: Carefully crafted exacting documentation is being ignored = frustrating to me = can't change if others don't want to read it =;;; sorry I have a more elegant way to do this: My meaning is thus: While it is sometimes easier and apt to blame others for their actions, blaming others doesn't actually contribute to any meaningful growth or change. If you take on the blame yourself, even if 100% of the blame falls on the somebody else, then it leads to open ended questions on how that process can be better. Given that you have no control over other people, blaming yourself shifts the issue back onto you for a solution. This can reveal a treasure trove of oppurtunities not before explored. It can be as simple as understanding that there are different levels of technical documentation: How-tos, vs explanitory, vs laymen, etc. Or it could lead to a different exploration as to: How did I end up in this situation, what is the mistake that *I* made? Which could be an easy fix or it can be a philosophical or temporal fix. I made the mistake of:

+ Assuming people cared about this as much as I do

+ Allow another person to control then narrative: (I could have sent it out to stake holders myself; and bare whatever consequences from my hiearchy)

+ Not written any documentation and given the endpoints to an AI to communicate to laymens (because I may or may not have communication skills)

+ Take a course in communication The list goes on and on, but the beauty is that sometimes it's truely and deeply philosophical such as, because I trusted somebody who wasn't to be trusted; because I'm in the wrong place and *know* I know I should be here.

Shifting the blame to the self is less about accepting blame and more about introspection and it is the most valuable lesson I learned from my wife when we first started dating. (It help me identify that as a person I tend to blame others first before blaming myself, and to spend 10 years practicing the muscle to reverse that order)

TLDR: You have willpower, use it by taking ownership over yourself. This is a learned skill and is not enate and requires breaking preconceptions and stepping out of yourself to find.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#208

Post by godelski »

nicoburns wrote: post #167
mjburgess wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming malign motivations, I'm assuming misplaced ones. It seems more likely to me the manager tried to read it and struggled, then generated something of equivalent size or larger. I'm taking it the generated document passed around was actually at least as large as the one-pager, and hence entirely pointless to rephrase even with the malign motivations you're assuming. Since the poster here wears his person…

> It seems more likely to me the manager tried to read it and struggled, then generated something of equivalent size or larger. Either way, it's poor management to interpose oneself between employees. As a manager you should be connecting groups of people to talk to each other directly, not injecting oneself as a go between. If they have issues understanding the material they're much better off asking the OP directly…

  > it's poor management to interpose oneself between employees.
I didn't interpret mjburgess as defending the manager or even condoning the action. In fact, I read their comments as recognizing that action as a failure.

The difference is that mj was trying to give advice to donatj, and donatj can't control what their manager does. So the advice is crafted such that it gives actionable suggestions to donatj.

Yet, that might not be the correct interpretation. I don't know, I'm some third party, like you. Personally I agree that this is poor management but I don't think just blaming the problem on the manager solves anything, it just leaves the problem broken. So the things to do are either fix the problem or figure out how to work with the broken thing.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#209

Post by mjburgess »

rayiner wrote: post #202
mjburgess wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your last sentence: The very first sentences should clear warnings not to modify the document, and read it entirely. That the contents of the document are short ( And if that still doesnt work, arrange a 15min meeting with relevant stakeholders and go through the document quickly before releasing it. It is my view that we have always been an oral species, and the great tyranny of the written words always a great b…

> Speaking to people in a meeting allows them to emote, express difficulty of understanding, understand the sentiment and priority of what they're hearing -- and most of all, it allows them to listen rather than read. People speak at a much lower information density, and this is a less taxing form of communication. Is that why everything is a Youtube video these days instead of written articles? The real danger of Ti…

Yes, see my comment below. Memo -> meeting, book -> podcast / audiobook, newspaper article -> 10min youtube video, even, meme -> yt-short/tiktok

People are naturally motivated to watch, listen, and interact with other people. There's less a need to explain why cognitive effort is required, lower risk to bounce-off the format because it's to difficult/boring/frustrating/etc. We're already primed to expend effort interacting with others.

I think there's also something more naturally-fit to our attention spans in oral media. Whilst people frequently claim our attention spans are dropping -- I think this is false (and some research agrees). Instead, media is being adapted to fit what our attention spans always were.

It is just in reading, and engaging with long-format content, our minds frequently drifted. We frequently stoped paying attention and returned, over and over.

Instead, with shorter oral media we largely pay more attention but over shorter intervals.

A conversation also proceeds to manage attention/interest/etc. well, in somewhat dynamically adapting itself to the level of cognitive effort its participants are willing to spend.

Certainly I find myself naturally adapting my phrasing, humor, and so on according to the people i'm talking to -- based on whether they are showing interest, listening, understanding and so on. This is how attention should always have been managed.

Writing always was, in my view, a necessary evil for the vast majority of purposes to which it was put. Now, not all, of course -- we still need checklists, scripts, technical notes, accounting books, and the like.

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