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You can't tell people anything (2004)

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Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#41

Post by toohotatopic »

jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

This comes with the assumption that everything worthwhile to learn is interesting.

Having boring stuff to learn has its own merits. If everything is fun to learn, how do people learn to learn? Or rather: How do they learn to find the interesting angle in a boring problem?

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#42

Post by js8 »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #40
marcosdumay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the culture of anti-competence (although, yes, that exists). How many times have you tried to communicate a novel idea to competent people just to have them dismiss it with obvious problems that clearly don't apply to your idea? That doesn't happen because they can't evaluate your idea, it happens because they don't understand the idea itself. When the innovation is small you can get away by repeating it aga…

One thing I've noticed is the better an engineer gets, the better they are at shooting down every idea they see. While I have seen many cases where a person did it anyways and failed, I have also seen many cases where they did it anyways and where massively successful.

Indeed, I suspect there is a curse of expertise. If you're an expert, you begin seeing everything as so nuanced, as so fragile, that you will dismiss lots of radical innovation as too simplistic. (And I think especially it affects motivation to actually try something new.)

But if somebody somewhat naive comes along, and just pushes through with sheer effort, they might succeed where many experts have predicted a failure.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#43

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #7

I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains…

[deleted]

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#45

Post by dqpb »

This is true for education as well. You can hear or read something and think you understand it, but you really don't unless you can reproduce the explanation, compare it to a ground truth, and verify that you got it.

The percentage of time you are doing that exercise is the percentage effectiveness of your education.

The nice thing about programming is your program is its own ground truth (programs are proofs). It either does what you expect it to or it doesn't (for the most part).

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#46

Post by thibran »

johnfn wrote: post #26

I completely agree and love the sentiment here, but I'd modify it slightly. What the author is saying is that you can't get a person to go from 0% to 100% understanding just by telling someone. The avatar example is great - you're not going to convince people 100% that avatars are game-changing by telling them once. On the other hand, incremental nudges are possible. e.g. when you tell someone "hey, we're going to ha…

It seems it's all about context. Nobody talks about context. Communicating context is difficult, you have to really understand it before you can talk about it. Therefore context is left out most of the time.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#47

Post by 013a »

johnfn wrote: post #26

I completely agree and love the sentiment here, but I'd modify it slightly. What the author is saying is that you can't get a person to go from 0% to 100% understanding just by telling someone. The avatar example is great - you're not going to convince people 100% that avatars are game-changing by telling them once. On the other hand, incremental nudges are possible. e.g. when you tell someone "hey, we're going to ha…

I've felt similarly about why traditional university education tends to have value, and why coding bootcamps cannot generally convey the same value within six or twelve weeks.

I coded a lot in university, but realistically, probably less during coursework than a very intensive bootcamp would, and certainly on things that I don't even begin to touch anymore (OS, AI, databases (not accessing, writing one), compilers, etc). The value was never in the coursework, really; as the professor says to Peter Gregory in the first episode of Silicon Valley, the true value of a university experience is intangible.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#48

Post by tome »

johnfn wrote: post #26

I completely agree and love the sentiment here, but I'd modify it slightly. What the author is saying is that you can't get a person to go from 0% to 100% understanding just by telling someone. The avatar example is great - you're not going to convince people 100% that avatars are game-changing by telling them once. On the other hand, incremental nudges are possible. e.g. when you tell someone "hey, we're going to ha…

Yes! I've thought the same ever since I saw the following Malcolm Gladwell Ted talk

https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_...

The point of the talk is that when you are developing a product you shouldn't aim to sell one perfect version of your product. You should have a small range of slightly different products that cater to several niches. Instead of one "perfect Pepsi" you have a few: Pepsi, Pepsi Lite, Cherry Pepsi, Pepsi Zero (or whatever).

He repeats versions of the following phrase four times in the same fifteen minute talk:

> They were looking for the perfect X, and they should have been looking for the perfect Xs

It makes the talk extremely memorable and has stayed with me for ten or so years since I saw it.

Re: You can't tell people anything (2004)

#50

Post by efitz »

js8 wrote: post #42
cuddlybacon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've noticed is the better an engineer gets, the better they are at shooting down every idea they see. While I have seen many cases where a person did it anyways and failed, I have also seen many cases where they did it anyways and where massively successful.

Indeed, I suspect there is a curse of expertise. If you're an expert, you begin seeing everything as so nuanced, as so fragile, that you will dismiss lots of radical innovation as too simplistic. (And I think especially it affects motivation to actually try something new.) But if somebody somewhat naive comes along, and just pushes through with sheer effort, they might succeed where many experts have predicted a fail…

Or more likely, the newbies will solve the “unsolvable” problem by removing some of the constraints that the old guard was holding inviolable. The newbies crow about their success for a few years while everyone struggles to work around the constraint violations.

NoSQL is the biggest example of this. Ignore everything we learned about ACID and just use key-value stores with no transactions or relations. People can build their own if they need them, right? And duplicating data to work around missing relationships is not a problem because storage is cheap? Then we get an explosion of new databases, each of which solve a subset of the missing functionally problems, with varying degrees of success.

I suspect this came across as more snide than I meant it. Sometimes holding a treasured constraint is the wrong thing and the old guard of experts failed to understand that not every business problem needed the full solution. But it annoys me for some reason the attitude of “we just solved this problem that experts could not solve for decades” when the nuance is that only a subset of the problem was solved, with potentially extraordinary effort required to re-introduce those missing constraints.

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