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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

#261

Post by mistermann »

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…

> 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....

Or the most potent disciplines: epistemology and logic. I believe epistemology and logic when combined with decomposition (something programmers usually have excellent capabilities in) make it fairly easy to determine where the weakest links in any given argument lie. A big problem though (in addition to the fact that we don't teach this sort of thinking): the human mind seems to have evolved to have an extremely strong aversion to exercising these skills on certain topics (something barely taught at all in western curriculum of any kind, the closest being psychology, which doesn't get a lot of respect from most people).

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#262

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #223

>when I joined Azure, I asked people what the biggest risk to Azure was and the dominant answer was that if we had more global outages, major customers would lose trust in us and we'd lose them forever, permanently crippling the business That's a pretty good question to ask, at any job interview. I will use this tip! (won't ask it on the first interview, but it's pretty usefull for a second or third interview)

[deleted]

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#263

Post by qznc »

smarx007 wrote: post #148
qznc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the academia where everybody complains that people only read the abstracts?

Which scientific journal are those complaints published in? (:

Spent a few minutes searching. Didn't find complaints but there are publications around this topic:

> When conducting a systematic literature review, researchers usually determine the relevance of primary studies on the basis of the title and abstract. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-008-9075-7

> Results showed that abstract readability is significantly related to the online attention RAs receive https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-021-04112-9

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#264

Post by qznc »

caffeine wrote: post #232

This is why memes are so powerful .. you can communicate a 2- or 3- part thought with a well designed meme so that eg 50 % will get it rather than just 5%

I call it "theorem-proof" style: https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/theorem_proof_slides.html

Sounds more serious than "meme pics" style. :)

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#265

Post by BeFlatXIII »

mcguire wrote: post #52
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…

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've definitely been that person to ask four bulleted questions in an e-mail and then send a reply asking where the answers for the other three are after I get a response that only addresses one of them.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#266

Post by mistermann »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #153
mistermann wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I get the point he's making. But still, if he didn't like the lack of nuance why not find somewhere to work other than Microsoft? > You just picked a single item and acted as though it were the only consideration in the universe . Did he anywhere say that this interesting phenomenon he observed was the worst thing in the world and made MS intolerable ? Did he anywhere say that this was a uniquely MS problem ? This…

I'm charging that he didn't in fact "get the point he's making". He didn't make a nuanced reaction that recognizes two different truths, he stated one thing and then stated the opposite. "I'm a generous person but I just want everything for myself." is not an example of nuance. It's an example of one or the other statement simply being untrue.

Fair enough, but you didn't just miss nuance, you inserted novel events.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#267

Post by oehpr »

CyanBird wrote: post #245
Macha wrote: post #88

One of the comments for the thread. > I see this for every post, e.g., when I talked about how latency hadn't improved, one of the most common responses I got was about how I don't understand the good reasons for complexity. > I literally said there are good reasons for complexity in the post It feels like this kind of half baked point scoring reply is just a risk of posting on the internet. I'm sure I've been guilty…

Above in the thread there's a quote on Cicero which covers your issue > "But let us return to Calvus whom we have just mentioned,—an Orator who had received more literary improvements than Curio, and had a more accurate and delicate manner of speaking, which he conducted with great taste and elegance; but, (by being too minute and nice a critic upon himself,) while he was labouring to correct and refine his language,…

I'm not sure Cicero had to deal with the pedant making their tedious rebuttal directly under where he placed his message, undermining the credibility of said message.

Wait am I the pedant in this situation? Ah well.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#268

Post by smarx007 »

qznc wrote: post #263
smarx007 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which scientific journal are those complaints published in? (:

Spent a few minutes searching. Didn't find complaints but there are publications around this topic: > When conducting a systematic literature review, researchers usually determine the relevance of primary studies on the basis of the title and abstract. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-008-9075-7 > Results showed that abstract readability is significantly related to the online attention RAs receive htt…

Thank you! However, this research does not seem to imply that researchers ONLY read the abstracts. When I do a search on Google Scholar, I may download 30 PDFs, for example. Then I would go through the abstracts and sort away those that: did not claim any empirical evaluation of their results, who did something way outside of the topic I am looking for, or did something I already know about well. But once I do that, I will read the remaining ones from start to finish. The papers you linked indeed seem to confirm that a lousy abstract increases the chances of your paper hitting the bin early but I would never allow myself to derive conclusions about the relevant papers just from the abstract. Related guide: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape...

Edit: On top of that, the second study you linked talks about "Altmetric attention scores of the RAs were used to measure the online attention they received". This indicates to me that they studied public interest from the non-academics and not among the academics. Of course, articles submitted to the scientific journal are primarily aimed at the academics in that field. This abstract is an example of how I would bin the article without reading it because it seems to study something I am not interested in. But again, I would not dare comment on its results because I have not read it.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#269

Post by pg_1234 »

Vetch wrote: post #174
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…

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…

Much of Shakespeare's genius was to pitch his work simultaneously for multiple levels of sophistication ... social commentary, poetry and fart humour, all at the same time.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#270

Post by Brian_K_White »

mistermann wrote: post #266
Brian_K_White wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm charging that he didn't in fact "get the point he's making". He didn't make a nuanced reaction that recognizes two different truths, he stated one thing and then stated the opposite. "I'm a generous person but I just want everything for myself." is not an example of nuance. It's an example of one or the other statement simply being untrue.

Fair enough, but you didn't just miss nuance, you inserted novel events.

I did not.
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