You can't tell people anything (2004)

It's almost like people categorically reject the possibility of greater levels of nuance existing. If they didn't they'd be looking for it carefully, because that is always where deeper insight comes in, right?

If you look at, for example, popular news and political discourse- it is lacking nuance to the point where it's meaningless nonsense, which also lacking any humility, insight, or open-ness to the possibility that more nuance may be possible.

It's not funny because it's absurd, it's funny because it's almost plausible.

Smart people are often wrong; this has little to do with intelligence. The problem is that most people lack vision and can’t see beyond their narrow reality tunnels. It takes extraordinary minds (not necessarily smart ones) to be able to see beyond tomorrow and take what might seem like stupid risks to get there. Very smart people will often be risk averse and stay the course.

Humanity only ever works, only becomes human, when we are allowed the agency of the experimenter. When we can find out.

This has slowly lead me towards detesting applications. The idea of interface is almost always a curtain, a veil, that obfuscates & hides some pretty graspable real truths. Interface & apps often take something real & make it virtual, impervious, symbic, in a decoupled lying way. We are complicit all too often in raising a worse, in-natural science helpless version of humanity. We say it helps users to get tasks done. But it's all fractured narrow experiences, something small distilled out where few lessons port. It masks, without any chance to begin to improve beyond, to see like a human ought to be able to.

You absolutely can tell people things! But to tell someone something, you need to do three things:

  - Establish enough shared context that they can understand you
  - Speak about something they actually care about (or convince them to care)
  - Use a format that works for what you're trying to communicate

The article is frustrating because it puts the blame onto the listener. But that's not how communication works! You don't have the right to just "tell people things" - you have to put in the work to be understood and to show people it's worth their time to pay attention. Communicating well is part of the job.

The author does this even in this piece. He says: "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 web pages. Start thinking about what you might do with that.”

Well yeah - if someone stood up in a management meeting and told me to think about what I might do with an avatar, my first thought would be "What's an avatar" and my second thought would be "I'm already busy with other things". He hasn't said what an avatar is or why anyone should care about them. So people pay no attention.

Then the demo shows what an avatar is and lets people see immediately how it might be useful, in a format that works regardless of the skill of the communicator. And so of course now they understand!

And maybe the thing you're trying to communicate is so novel that you can't establish context or convince people to care without showing them a demo. But at least take the time to understand why you can't tell people about it.