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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

#231

Post by bajook »

sa46 wrote: post #65
wrs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is that non-scaled comms suffer from “telephone game”. If you do it like you’re saying, then go down 3-4 levels in the hierarchy and check what people are hearing, it will have mutated away from anything you originally said. Sometimes to get everyone aligned (as best you can) you have to give everyone the same message at the same time — but it has to be a simple message.

Mission command [1] might be useful here. The main idea is you state the mission and your expanded intent and each subordinate command does the same thing all the way down the chain. There’s several “checksums” commonly employed in the US Army. The subordinate command’s orders will contain the verbatim mission statement (typically one sentence with the five whys) from the both their commanding unit and the next level…

This is how OKRs and Salesforce's V2MOM are supposed to work... the CEO does his, then the EVPs do theirs showing how they will contribute to the CEOs, etc.

In practice this is almost never done at scale because having them sequentially ordered means that they must be done pretty quickly and there are too many political turf battles to let them be done quicklty.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#233

Post by edanm »

Patrick Lencioni said this in The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.

Two of his principles are: 1. Create Clarity. 2. Overcommunicate Clarity.

Executives always think they are overcommunicating (they hear themselves speak many times on the same subject so it gets super repetitive for them), but teams rarely have clarity.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#234

Post by ayewo »

lanstin wrote: post #187
mistermann wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them. I agree, but I think it's more nuanced than this: smart people can regularly be observed being unable to think critically during conversations (particularly on certain topics), yet the same people can think critically writing code. Assuming this is true (it's certainly quite true), it seems to me that differenc…

Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college, and while they lack the clarifying reality of equations and axiom systems, the practitioners of such fields are quite good at dissecting statements and pulling out the subtleties of human language bas…

It was several years after I left university before I gained a real appreciation for a course that was made mandatory at the time: History of Science.

At the time I was forced to take the course, it felt pointless to me, but after reading Thomas Kuhn’s book (SoSR) several years later, I can look back and connect the dots.

Learning about the history of science was meant to punctuate a widely held myth, that our civilization has been progressing linearly and cumulatively. Kuhn found that the way textbooks are written create the illusion in the mind of the student that scientific advances have been linear and cumulative, rather than being interrupted by paradigm shifts, as old approaches are abandoned in favor of new ones.

Nuance comes down to being able to view an issue from multiple perspectives, that in a lot of situations, there is often more than one (correct) answer.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#235

Post by astrobe_ »

viksit wrote: post #161
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.

Yes, and it is amusing to see the word "forum" in the quote.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#236

Post by comp_throw7 »

timr wrote: post #172
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that health care orgs should have recommended masks early in the pandemic. What I am saying is their adamant declarations of "masks don't work for the public", which note is an affirmative declaration, were false, and never had any supporting evidence. My question is about whether this "simpler, un-nuanced" explanation in fact complicated things in the longer run.

Yes, I know. We're basically in agreement on the broader points, but I don't agree with your second sentence, and you seem to have the opposite bias in terms of how to act under uncertainty: > What I am saying is their adamant declarations of "masks don't work for the public", which note is an affirmative declaration, were false, and never had any supporting evidence. There's no such thing as an affirmative declarati…

> If you do not have evidence that X works, or the evidence is ambiguous, your conclusion is the null hypothesis (that X doesn't work)

No??? This is what having a prior is for. In this case, the prior was the mechanistic model which told you with reasonable confidence that masks would work in the slices of worlds where the primary mode of transmission was one mitigated by mask-wearing. We do not in fact live in a state of helplessness absent a double-blind peer-reviewed RCT; you will actively come to incorrect conclusions if you refuse to use your existing models & knowledge of the world to draw conclusions about the likelihoods of various outcomes.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#237

Post by rleigh »

jiggawatts wrote: post #226
mandmandam wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act like those were the only two options and outcomes. That's a failure of imagination at best, and a false dichotomy. Some countries were able to issue effective mask wearing guidance - without lying to people, or causing mass mask hoarding. So let's not pretend that wasn't achievable. Let's also not act like we tried other outcomes first; incentives to mask production, disincentives to mask hoarding, etc. Multi…

> Multiple trusted organisations lied to Americans What choice did they have? They were talking to Americans!

Lying to elicit a certain desired response is not acceptable, no matter the justification for it. It ultimately erodes trust in our institutions, and that trust is the fundamental basis for the functioning of our society.

Our institutions need to be both truthful, and also accountable. This means being able to freely debate the facts without censorship. And for the decisions and communications of our organisations and leaders to be examined, debated, and judged. We cannot have a society where people are knowingly and deliberately misinformed, and debate of the matters is suppressed. That's 1930s Germany levels of gaslighting and suppression. The West is supposed to be Free, and this is not free or democratic.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#238

Post by neilparikh »

mettamage wrote: post #202
Vetch wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet this objectively can't be helped. Nuance requires representing uncertainty and is higher complexity from accounting for multiple special cases. Placing more cognitive load and attentional demands on receiver. Human communication is lossy and decoding can be non-trivial inference. Given that everyone comes with differing priors, the more finer grained and complex details are required in reconstructing message in…

You made quite a nuanced and elaborate point. I guess it scales on text with a specific crowd (HN).

It works here because their point about having differing priors. On HN, people largely have similar priors (at least on some axes).

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#239

Post by rg111 »

I have seen this extensively covered in "Made to Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath. I got this recommendation from HN itself. It was a great read.

If your organization is large, you create one actionable, concrete, clear message, and you stick to it, and you communicate it downwards.

Seeing it in action is Microsoft is not shocking.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#240

Post by chrischapman »

logicalmonster wrote: post #18

Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance communications can be the following. * Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey. * Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graph…

I really like that quote. It seems like it would work just as well for programmers too: "I didn't have time to write a 100 SLOC, so I wrote 1000."
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