[HN Gopher] You can't tell people anything (2004)
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You can't tell people anything (2004)
Author : xojoc
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-10-06 17:06 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (habitatchronicles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (habitatchronicles.com)
| jfax wrote:
| I was just thinking about this earlier today with respect to
| Mastodon and federated social networks. As someone who has been
| very actively using Mastodon for years, it is frustrating --
| painfully frustrating -- when people criticise it in the
| abstract. "It will never work" then why is it working? "People
| won't know how to sign up" it is easier to sign up than any the
| average email service - blah, blah, blah - actually it's not
| worth anyone's time answering these questions. Just use it. _use
| it_ for goodness sake.
| eigengrau5150 wrote:
| My issue with Mastodon is that it imitates Twitter a little
| _too_ well. I keep finding people to block when looking for
| people to follow. The local _and_ federated feeds are infested
| with spammers, self-righteous ideologues of all kinds, 4chan
| rejects, and bots. It just isn 't worth the effort.
| TheJoYo wrote:
| I suggest you find a smaller instance to join to have a more
| cultivated feed.
|
| I'm the only user on my instance so everything I see is there
| because I subscribed to it.
| buildsjets wrote:
| That sounds like entirely too much effort. No one will
| bother.
| Alekhine wrote:
| My issue with mastodon is that exploring servers means creating
| a bunch of accounts. That's kind of annoying. I still like and
| use Mastodon, but there it is.
| TheJoYo wrote:
| I don't even have a Mastodon account and I can explore
| servers remotely just fine.
|
| https://mastodon.social/explore
|
| I might misunderstand what you mean by explore.
| Gunax wrote:
| This is required if the concept is abstract.
|
| No one needs to be told what a flying car does and why it moght
| be useful. But things like PDF or REST are too abstract to
| understand just by the definition.
|
| Really we don't know what we want. Even the people who designed
| home computers probably couldn't imagine most of their
| applications--they just figured it would be useful _somehow_.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > No one needs to be told what a flying car does and why it
| moght be useful
|
| ...actually, I've long been skeptical of this one's utility, so
| you may need to enlighten me! I guess it lets you skip traffic
| in some cases? Doesn't seem worth the enormous cost of gas.
|
| Am I being like those people in the article?
| Gunax wrote:
| Maybe? All I can say is that there are a lot of things i
| didnt think I wanted until I tried them, and now I cannot
| live without.
|
| "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
| meany wrote:
| At least in some of these examples, the problem seems to be
| rooted in a lack of understanding of the audience/customer.
| Implicit in this essay is an expectation that the
| audience/customer will do the work for you. Saying :"We'll be
| able to put avatars on web pages. Start thinking about what you
| might do with that." Doesn't explain the value proposition or the
| problem solved. Why should they care? You'll always be
| disappointed if you expect the audience to figure this out for
| you. They've got 101 problems they're working on and your asking
| them to invest in your idea. You need to do this leg work for
| them.
|
| As for the statement "why would people put documents on the web?"
| That seems a very valid question. If you can't nail that answer,
| you haven't invested enough in understanding the
| customers/audience for who you're trying to solve problems.
|
| Pitching a new idea is hard. You need to iterate on it
| obsessively, cutting it down to the core value prop in easy to
| digest words for the specific audience you're talking to.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I think someone can certainly explain an idea if both people
| take enough time and have enough motivation.
|
| The thing that stands out for me is people who have different
| ideas concerning where the obligation is in communicating
| concepts. Is it the speaker's job to put things so the listener
| can understand? Or is it the listener's job to spend time
| parsing an objectively correct explanation? In society,
| overall, this involves a process of negotiation. Notably, I
| think some people who's job involves manipulating abstract
| ideas don't think it's their job to put spend time putting
| concepts into a form appropriate for a given person - the
| concepts being expressed in an abstractly correct fashion is
| sufficient.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Notably, I think some people who 's job involves
| manipulating abstract ideas don't think it's their job to put
| spend time putting concepts into a form appropriate for a
| given person - the concepts being expressed in an abstractly
| correct fashion is sufficient._
|
| If your job involves manipulating abstract ideas, then
| _surely_ you should know that different people have different
| abstract representations of those abstract ideas! The more
| abstract the concept, the more "and this is this" "yes, I
| follow" handshakes you have to do before you get into the
| details.
| 6510 wrote:
| > Pitching a new idea is hard. You need to iterate on it
| obsessively, cutting it down to the core value prop in easy to
| digest words for the specific audience you're talking to.
|
| Then, after failing to explain it 1000 times, you find a
| combination of working simplifications and it finally can be
| explained in a few sentences.... Then people say: If it was
| that simple someone else would have thought of it.
|
| > As for the statement "why would people put documents on the
| web?" That seems a very valid question. If you can't nail that
| answer, you haven't invested enough in understanding the
| customers/audience for who you're trying to solve problems.
|
| The answer would have to be a lie. Neither of us would
| understand it when told it is all to watch cat pictures and to
| document and manipulate peoples personality and behavior to
| sell products and nudge their political ideas while they
| exchange cooking updates with their mum.
|
| If someone told me or you the honest factual truth that it was
| a sound plan for world domination we would have laughed so
| hard. Why would anyone use google or facebook if it's _that_
| expensive to use?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Then people say: If it was that simple someone else would
| have thought of it._
|
| That's when you go into the prior art. Give a summary (long
| list of things other people have done - five or six will do),
| then start drilling down into them, touching on what they
| address, _genuine_ pros and cons wrt your approach (when
| relevant), and then go back to how yours is different. ("But
| none of these XYZ, which is useful for foo and bar.")
|
| Or, you know, whatever else feels right to say at the time.
| If you're well-calibrated, your gut instinct will be a result
| of "reading the room". That comes with practice.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yep.
|
| I've been there and done that at the "two people and a crazy
| idea" level and seen how hard it is.
| gedy wrote:
| This is why I moved into frontend development about 8 years ago.
| People thought I was nuts to do so, but I got tired of trying to
| explain architecture and ideas for projects, where people claim
| to understand, but then so clearly not.
|
| Making the visible part of software really helped to cut through
| the blah blah blah and get real understanding and feedback on
| what was meant.
| getpost wrote:
| There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't
| tell 'em. -- Yogi Berra
| jbuhbjlnjbn wrote:
| I firmly believe this is almost exclusively a didactic issue, ie.
| the person explaining does not or cannot reflect what is common
| knowledge and what needs to be explained in addition to the new
| ideas.
|
| This comment resonated with me so much
|
| "I've been on the receiving side of this before. What typically
| happens is the Dunning-Krueger Effect. This is typically
| understood as incompetent people are too incompetent to determine
| that they are incompetent, but its lesser-known corollary is that
| competent people assume everyone else is competent too, and thus
| they don't have to explain themselves.
|
| Once you understand this, the reason for poor communication
| becomes clear. The team doesn't bother to explain their
| presumptions, falsely assuming that everyone is on the same page.
| They feel free to use original concepts they developed, internal
| team slang, unexplained acronyms, etc. Then they're baffled why
| people are so stupid and can't understand their outstanding
| presentation that obviously went over all the details. "
|
| I, too, have been on the receiving end of such treatment multiple
| times. I wouldn't call exclusive or inside knowledge
| "competence". What shocks and baffles me is exactly this
| phenomenon: Companies have inside knowledge, which an outsider
| starting fresh could not possibly know. An outsider also has a
| really hard time grasping and sorting the new inside information.
| Yet, it is common of engineers to not reflect at all about "what
| can this person know and understand without working here 5+
| years", and prematurely jump to conclusions that outsiders are
| slow, and they are lazy to not aquire this information on their
| own. This behavior is not competent, or smart if you ask me.
|
| When you try to communicate the issue at hand, it might also fall
| on deaf ears, because reflecting about such meta levels of
| knowledge is a skill not everyone posesses and could easily
| understand. In the end, either side, the insider and the
| outsider, can experience a lot of frustration, because their
| viewpoint is so incompatible with the other.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| My favorite word for really, REALLY understanding something - do
| you grok it?
|
| It takes time to really grok something.
|
| Most people don't have time anymore I guess, too busy keeping up
| with social media posts
| hairofadog wrote:
| I think about this from the opposite perspective all the time
| when I'm trying to learn a new skill or when I'm doing something
| out of my realm of experience, anything from server configuration
| to hanging a door: _someone already knows the best way to do
| this_.
|
| Over and over again people will configure their servers wrong and
| hang their doors askew because of the concept described here,
| even though the correct way is well known. On the flip side,
| there are some benefits: each person figuring things out for
| themselves undoubtedly leads to innovation, especially in realms
| like the arts.
|
| Still, I can't stop myself from daydreaming about some way to
| transfer door-hanging knowledge into my head matrix-like (my eyes
| pop open and I say: "I know how to hang a door!") similar to the
| useless way I sometimes find myself thinking _someone should do
| something about that sun_ when I find myself driving west at
| sunset.
| jbrot wrote:
| From the title I was expecting something about Op Sec, but the
| article is actually about "show, don't tell" i.e. that it's
| really hard to have people "get it" without letting them
| experience "it" for themselves
| xojoc wrote:
| Previous discussions:
| https://discussions.xojoc.pw/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhabitatchroni...
| Loughla wrote:
| What is that link?
| agustif wrote:
| What is this? This form finds all the discussions on Hacker
| News, Lobsters, Reddit and Barnacles (other communities will
| be added in the future
| xojoc wrote:
| It's a site I'm building to search for discussions online. I
| thought it would be interesting to people to read some
| previous discussions on this topic. I got downvoted so it
| doesn't seem to be so useful to people as I thought it
| would...
| themacguffinman wrote:
| IMO it looks a bit like a spam link, the domain kind of
| looks like a random string. The *.pw also raised my
| eyebrows because I rarely see that TLD (I realize you may
| be from that country but that doesn't change my first
| impression). Can't say I know for sure why you were
| downvoted but I was a little hesitant to click on that
| link.
| Izkata wrote:
| People do, usually with direct links to the HN pages or to
| a search on hn.algolia.com - most likely it's suspicion
| about this new domain that's obviously linked to the
| account that posted it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting strategy. Submit a popular article and use it
| to advertise your "previous discussion" tool by using the
| usual HN convention but with your link instead.
|
| Very growth hacky. I quite enjoy the trick, including
| generating the controversy with this seemingly naive
| response.
|
| I love it, actually. Definitely a good marketing hack.
| eCa wrote:
| What one considers a growth hack, another considers
| never-going-to-visit-that-domain.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Oh, I'm not so silly as to say it's a good idea. I just
| find it entertaining.
|
| I think I would have posted the usual "previous
| discussions" and then also posted "By the way, I'm
| building this discussion aggregator blah blah" and
| linked.
|
| Submitting a popular post to introduce the need for the
| discussion aggregator will work. His execution was just a
| bit ham fisted.
| xojoc wrote:
| Thank you all for the honest feedback. Yes, the idea was
| to show the usefulness of the tool "by example" using it
| for popular stories. I should have put more effort into
| it (and I'll write to dang to ask for permission).
|
| I'll also buy a custom, less spammy looking, domain. The
| .pw extension is what I use for my main website which I
| have chosen at the time because it was cheap.
| uuddlrlr wrote:
| I think they're just trying to be helpful.
| cjaybo wrote:
| Usually the "previous discussions" comment is posted with
| links directly to the previous thread(s). It would probably
| be received better if you mentioned that this is your site
| in the original comment.
|
| Whether or not the site is useful, the comment feels
| misleading in this context.
| theonething wrote:
| Might have been better if you said that upfront.
| asiachick wrote:
| reminds me of PDAs before iPhone. No one but a few geeks got why
| carrying a computer in your pocket was useful. Palm Pilot, Sony
| Clie, Dell Axim, Compaq iPaq, were geek only devices until Apple
| made their PDA with a better UI and non geeks finally got it.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I've been working on infrastructure to support a certain class of
| applications (medical imaging devices) that have a lot of complex
| functional and nonfunctional requirements. I initially developed
| much of the system I own alongside the first product team which
| made use of my systems, and together we ran into a lot of painful
| issues and added functionality to support these use-cases.
|
| Working with a new team who haven't yet shipped such a system to
| production has been supremely frustrating, because they haven't
| gotten far enough in the process to understand the classes of
| problems that my system solves. I've gotten a lot of pushback
| simply because they simply didn't have enough context to
| understand why you'd even care about this stuff - "Why are you
| bothering us with these problems? I'm sure we can figure this
| stuff out eventually."
|
| But now, after working with folks for a year and a half, they're
| starting to come to me with questions about how to resolve
| certain things - and that's when I say "remember that stuff you
| didn't care about at all last year? fortunately my system already
| knows how to do that for you!"
|
| Glad to know this is a systemic problem with humans and not a
| personal failing on my part!
| ZeroBugBounce wrote:
| I'm curious if you can be more specific about the kinds of
| problems they eventually came around on that they did not care
| about/understand at first?
|
| I like this kind of "meta-problem" and would be interested in
| known how to get people more interested in ideas that I
| intuitively know are useful.
| arksingrad wrote:
| While I was in grad school, I had to teach some math-heavy
| engineering courses. This lesson came through very clearly there,
| and learning it early made my teaching much more effective.
|
| You can't tell students anything, you have to show them, and you
| have to know where to start when you show them. Sometimes this
| meant starting back in the prerequisites to the course (a brief
| refresher on ODEs) and sometimes it meant arguing by anology
| before returning to the topic at hand.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Counterpoint: Some people are really good at telling people
| things. To the point where the eventual reality often is a
| disappointment by comparison.
| winternett wrote:
| Even family members trust social media, google search, and news
| outlets more than their own family members now.
|
| This is why disinformation has taken a firm hold on our society.
| Many people don't understand the concept that anyone can generate
| fake buzz and information, and publish or delete it on a web site
| and even edit that content any way they see fit without any sort
| of paper trail... Including "trusted" corporations.
|
| Some books can and have been proven over time to be wrong too,
| but people had to confiscate, shred, or burn them to hide trails
| of lies. Maybe that's why this is a fairly new trend.
|
| The saying "actions speak louder than words" always holds true
| despite all the deception and manipulation we are being inundated
| with. We need to hold people individually accountable for their
| actions just as much as to their words.
|
| I don't need people to understand me so much these days as much
| as I just want them to not stand in my way as I work towards my
| own personal success, and I'm sure as hell not posting my best
| ideas and thoughts on social media for anyone to pick apart or
| mimic.
| kirillcool wrote:
| Dear whoever worked on Xanadu ever ever ever. You keep on saying
| that you went around the world, talked to anybody who would
| listen, and nobody got it. Maybe, just maybe, the problem was the
| message, not the listeners.
|
| I just re-read Wired profile of Xanadu from 1995, and it's the
| same thing over and over again. It's not the world. It's the
| message. I mean, once anything is published online, it can never
| be edited because you link to "start character"-"end character"
| integer positions as the supposedly immutable snippet? What kind
| of a universe does that online world live in???
| Animats wrote:
| Having known that crowd back then, the message was the problem.
| Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. Wrong business model.
| They were mostly libertarians, of the "meter everything and let
| the free market sort it out" persuasion.
|
| Also, they were way too text oriented.
|
| _I mean, once anything is published online, it can never be
| edited because you link to "start character"-"end character"
| integer positions as the supposedly immutable snippet? What
| kind of a universe does that online world live in???_
|
| The part of the world that has Github, shared Google Docs, and
| wikis. You can edit, and it's all trackable. It's a poor mass
| distribution system, but a reasonable approach to
| collaboration.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > What kind of a universe does that online world live in?
|
| One that you're misrepresenting. It's like complaining that
| nothing in a git repo can be edited because commits are
| identified by long hex-encoded hashes.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| The other issue is that people are constantly telling others
| crap. People are constantly giving bad advice, making wrong
| predictions, etc. Sometimes these people are very accredited,
| very smart, and well-intentioned, they just happen to be wrong.
|
| So when people receive advice, predictions, etc. they won't just
| accept, they use their own judgement. Which is also often wrong.
| But either way can be wrong, and people almost always trust
| themselves more than others.
|
| The best thing you can do to convince a skeptic is show them very
| clearly or move on. The best thing a manager/lead can do to
| convince a skeptical employee of their business/design plan is
| show them very clearly or fire them if they don't follow the
| plan.
| winternett wrote:
| I've found that working and expressing my ideas more locally is
| far better than posting ideas to the world. It is also contrary
| to how social media, radio, and TV are modeled.
|
| By starting locally, you build a following and don't need to
| worry as much about being ostracized and cancelled before a
| well-known credibility among people who will support and defend
| you is established. (Don't break the law or support negative
| means in the process of course).
|
| So many people get burnt out and cancelled right when they
| become famous now because social media catapults people from
| obscurity directly into popularity, when they don't have proven
| and tested experience, no prior following, and no prior
| reputation.
|
| Pop life is a meat grinder.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to
| evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got
| it. Nobody._ [1]
|
| The thing about the "you can't tell people anything" statement
| is, it's a good shorthand for a certain kind of situation. In
| this article, it's shorthand for people not understand a
| situation even if they're given what to you may seem a complete
| logical explanation. The simplest explanation, somewhat alluded
| to in the text, is that the people you're explaining the thing
| lack the context to understand even if they understand the terms
| used in the abstract. It's easy to see how people wouldn't "get"
| hypertext in a pre-Internet era. It's easy to say how people
| wouldn't "get" a client-server application if they'd never been
| exposed to the client-server architecture previously at all.
|
| Which is to say, I think it's quite possible to tell people
| things - in the context of a big, difficult abstract - if you go
| step-by-step, verify understanding at each step, break up the
| explanation process if it's not working, ask questions etc.
|
| And often, when a person fall back on "you can't tell people
| anything", it's because they fail to do the laborious explanation
| process. The bureaucratic standards don't allow it, there's no
| time or whatever. And some people just fall on this by reflex,
| they're reconciled to the situation. It's very annoying when a
| certain type of person gives a single explanation and then
| responds "you just don't get it" when questioned, etc. But it's
| worth being clear that, in the abstract, "you can tell people
| things".
|
| [1] Worth nothing that in the reality is no one at all "got"
| hypertext or the Internet when to "get" involves a good grasp of
| the implications, in ways, we still don't get everything here. No
| one had the full context in 1980. The full context is still being
| created.
| raunak wrote:
| It's funny, because I've been meaning to write something up like
| this for a while. Now when I want to explain this concept to my
| friends, I'll show them this post, but again, I wouldn't be
| surprised if they don't get it until they experience the
| emotion/feeling for themselves.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's just a giant ipod touch?
| https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/334152/early_ipad_rea...
| serverholic wrote:
| Controversial opinion: this is happening with cryptocurrency
| right now.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Shorter version: "the concepts of paradigm, and paradigm shift,
| are real."
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