Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can't tell people anything (2004)

habitatchronicles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 193 posts

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

#71

Post by ludston »

simoncion wrote: post #52
wolfram74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first started pair programming, I found the most important part was even if I had a solution that would work, if I couldn't explain it to my partner, it was not a very good solution. Being able to convey an idea often forces it to be closer to the simplest and most comprehensible version of that idea.

> ...if I couldn't explain it to my partner, it was not a very good solution. I've found that in situations like that, I just write out a prototype and that clears up the confusion. Usually, what I'm trying to explain is good, but there's some context that I can't get out of my head and into theirs that's critical to understanding the thing I'm trying to explain.

At an early stage of my career, a product person asked me to walk them through our code to show how a particular algorithm worked so that they could verify it worked according to their initial design.

Since I was using higher-order programming to control dispatch of various business rules, and they were not familiar with higher-order programming at all, there was a bit of a communication barrier/learning barrier that needed traversal.

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

#72

Post by MichaelZuo »

ivanbakel wrote: post #34
MichaelZuo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this. Did you not attempt to verify something that important was actually understood?

That presumes that communication is just about people understanding the thing you are trying to say, rather than the transfer of thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Put another way: the only thing that you can verify when communicating that the sky is on fire is that the other party knows you think the sky is on fire. Whether or not they think the sky is on fire, or whether they think you're blowing hot air, is pretty ins…

Methods such as reviewing their work, observing their actions without them knowing, testing them in some form, literally sitting behind them, etc..., will quickly reveal someone's true disposition towards whether the 'sky is on fire', regardless of what might be said.

At least I've never heard anyone that could convincingly fake such a big difference under focused observation, assuming the verifier is competent.

For example, veteran car mechanics can tell in a minute when someone's never worked on a car in their life, just by asking them to do an oil change, or some other quick task.

And they can easily and reliably differentiate the folks who only occasionally work on cars vs those who regularly do with a half hour of observation in the shop.

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

#73

Post by Jtsummers »

diego_moita wrote: post #7

This reminds me an edition of Byte Magazine from 1990 [1] with interviews of all big shots in the industry making forecasts for the next decade. No one foresaw the internet. At best they did expect things like "we'll have networks with bigger bandwith". But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09

That seems an odd claim that no one foresaw the Internet when the Internet existed at the time of the interviews, so why would they be predicting the existence of something which already existed?

Unless you mean the Web? Reading through the forecasts I'm not seeing any that call out something quite exactly like became the Web, but there are a number of network-based predictions, and certainly better than "bigger bandwidth".

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

#74

Post by nikola_virtual »

“知行合一” a concept in Yangmingism, a philosophy developed by the Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming. It refers to the unity of inner knowledge and action, and is explained as "Nobody can separate the knowledge and the action apart. If one knows, one will act"

fits the article very well

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

#76

Post by diego_moita »

Jtsummers wrote: post #73
diego_moita wrote: post #7

This reminds me an edition of Byte Magazine from 1990 [1] with interviews of all big shots in the industry making forecasts for the next decade. No one foresaw the internet. At best they did expect things like "we'll have networks with bigger bandwith". But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09

That seems an odd claim that no one foresaw the Internet when the Internet existed at the time of the interviews, so why would they be predicting the existence of something which already existed? Unless you mean the Web? Reading through the forecasts I'm not seeing any that call out something quite exactly like became the Web, but there are a number of network-based predictions, and certainly better than "bigger band…

As I wrote above, no one mentions the economic and cultural impact.

And yes, that was driven mostly by the Web.

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

#77

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #50
nerpderp82 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xanadu is basically the web.

It is nothing like the web. The web is unstructured, Xanadu isn't. The web supports all kinds of content, Xanadu is stricly textual. Xanadu documents are immutable. Xanadu is integrated with a payment system and everything is pay-per-view. Xanadu has been worked on for more than 50 years and there's still no useful demo. I know HN has this weird custom to assume without evidence that all old failed technologies were…

I just checked out their website and it looks really cool. Just needs blockchain integration

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

#78

Post by libraryatnight »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #44

The article axiom is an extension of the famous John Watson[1] quote : "Be Kind; Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle" Which naturally extends to "You don't know", and I believe, the equivalent of this 2004 article. Now, as the article suggests, this is best shown - instead of explained. A Neuroscientist was interviewed in a podcast [2] and illustrated this point with a story. He tells of a time when he dated…

Someone posted a Jan Morris interview here some time ago, and in it she said "Everything good in the world is kindness."

Anyway, I've been humbled a few times where I thought someone wasn't understanding me, but really I didn't understand them or some piece of the problem outside my experience. On HN I learned about Chesterton's Fence, between that and the thought on kindness, I try to just be nice and assume I'm missing something when reasonable people disagree with me and if I'm not the one missing something, my questions will only help me help them understand my perspective.

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

#79

Post by diego_moita »

jeremyjh wrote: post #48
diego_moita wrote: post #7

This reminds me an edition of Byte Magazine from 1990 [1] with interviews of all big shots in the industry making forecasts for the next decade. No one foresaw the internet. At best they did expect things like "we'll have networks with bigger bandwith". But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09

> But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead. Quite a lot of science fiction authors did indeed see this coming.

You know, it is all about the false negatives and false positives.

A lot of science fiction authors foresee a lot. And a lot of what they foresee ends up not happening.

They're much like the soothsayer that predicts 100 things but only remembers the one that happened and forgets all the others.

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

#80

Post by zuj »

This hit home hard. Wondering if this is the case with giving advice as well ? In case of giving advice you are not selling a product but definitely selling an alternative path of action you would like there other person to take. And they will only take it if they understand you in the first place.
Post reply on HN