
You can't tell people anything (2004) - rocky1138
http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/
======
nojvek
> I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can
> afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things
> without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be
> the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement.

I believe this is true for almost every ambitious (maker/engineer). It’s
really hard to convince Management about something new because they don’t
experience the pain. Sometimes their Job depends on not understanding it.

Probably a reason why Startups outperform big companies in certain niches.

The big dilemma right now is there’s little funding available that can compete
with the salaries of big companies. Rents have shot up so high that it’s not
easy to take 6 months of to build something so you don’t have to explain.
Failure has become expensive.

My theory is that even though people are getting paid more, we’re in this
weird paradox of having less innovation.

~~~
redwood
It is sad that we're at this point where people can't just live in a relaxed
manner tinkering on new ideas. I remember Silicon Valley in the early 90s you
really had a more hippie mentality and not everyone had a high paying salary
and some people were just hanging out and talking and try new things. Austin
has a little bit of this Vibe now.

~~~
oculusthrift
don’t get why everyone’s pretending you need to live in silicon valley or a
major metro area to tinker for 6 months. i saved enough from a year in silicon
valley to support myself multiple years in other parts of the country.

~~~
mmt
The parent mentioned "hanging out and talking" (i.e. network effects) in
addition to "try new things" (tinker).

Could the same effect be accomplished remotely? Perhaps, but TFA essentially
claims otherwise.

~~~
swiley
IRC is kind of nice for that. As someone who grew up in the middle of the
woods that was my substitute for hanging out in person and talking.

------
scottmsul
I was a physics TA in grad school. I was very good at explaining solutions to
problems, so of course during exam reviews I would get big crowds to watch the
explanations. I was also somewhat aware of this principle, so during a review
I was trying to get students to come up with approaches or ideas while solving
a problem, and they demanded "why don't you just tell us!" It was pretty
frustrating.

Watching someone explain solutions well can be dangerous, since it gives you
the very real feeling of understanding, without actual understanding. To
actually understand, you have to try a problem from scratch. Then you will
understand why the solution/approach is what it is, and why other approaches
fail, which will give you intuition about which approaches work on future
problems. But counter-intuitively, you will get lost in the weeds during the
process, which makes you feel like you don't understand!

~~~
imjk
Yeah, I'm kinda on the other end of this. I often didn't do as well as I
should have in school because I always "understood" what was going on in the
classroom. It was confusing for me when those who struggled to understand what
was being taught in class did better on exams. From a cursory glance I always
seemed to understand what was being taught, so I never did the deep work where
you really learn the subject. I figured out better ways to really learn the
subject matters later in academia. It was almost never about reading more on
the subject, but rather doing more problems (ideally exams that were use in
previous semesters) on the subject.

------
PakG1
_Eventually people can be educated, but what you have to do is find a way give
them the experience, to put them in the situation. Sometimes this can only
happen by making real the thing you are describing, but sometimes by dint of
clever artifice you can simulate it.

With luck, eventually there will be an “Aha!”. If you’re really good, the
“Aha!” will followed by “Oh, so that’s what you meant”. But don’t be too
surprised or upset if the “Aha!” is instead followed by “Why didn’t you tell
me that?”._

This jives with how children learn. Perhaps adults are actually the same in
many respects. Kids don't learn how to pronounce words by listening to someone
explain how to form the lips and place the tongue and vibrate the velum to
form a z sound. They just learn by observing it and then trying to attempt it.
Ironically, foreign language pronunciation may be one of the examples where
you do need to teach adults how to do it before they try to do it because
their brains have already defined what's normal and find it difficult to make
foreign sounds.

But various other topics? Learn by doing. Light bulb moments by doing.

~~~
mettamage
I don't know how to make this point clear and concise, my apologies.

As a Dutchie when I tried to learn Italian I just did it mostly. I did it
exxagerated and in stereotypical fashion because I found it fun. Doing it in
exxagerated manner also gave me the feeling I could have fun with the
language, was allowed to fail and had an understanding where the exxageration
came from and soon got to understand how to do it in a more normal fashion.

This approach worked so well that my teacher at one point said to a couple of
Russians in class "just pronounce it like Mettamage." They were dumbfounded,
"really? Do we have to? It is so over the top." They did it anyway, their
Italian accents improved immediately. Before they were really monotone and had
a heavy voice, and now their tone was all over the place and their voice was
less heavy.

Dutch and Italian are closer in pronounciation than I initially thought. So
you have a point. But not quite:

The point of this whole post is this: when I got back home to The Netherlands,
I wanted to continue my studies. I suddenly lost interest in Italian. I
realized that learning Italian words on paper is not the same thing as
learning Italian words in Rome. The biggest reason: when I learned Italian
words in Rome I saw people speak. Not only did I learn a word, I apparently
remember how their lips moved to such an extent that the movement was encoded
in my lips. This didn't happen straight away but if you forget a particular
word a couple of times and you see the word being said all the time, you start
to remember how people say the word with their lips. I could clearly remember
a distinct feeling of not feeling any muscle memory in my newly learned
Italian words that I learned in The Netherlands.

~~~
undershirt
re: learning how to pronounce foreign words via exaggeration—a friend told me
that pronouncing Japanese words in the most racist way possible actually
earned him nods from his teacher.

~~~
farnsworth
When I was taking Chinese classes, our teacher would always demand that talk
loud, exaggerate the pronunciation, and be as over-the-top as possible.
Apparently there's a popular english learning method in China called Crazy
English that takes this approach.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_English)

------
glial
Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics):

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them,
e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so
too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts,
brave by doing brave acts.

This is confirmed by what happens in states; for legislators make the citizens
good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and
those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good
constitution differs from a bad one.

------
bartread
This harmonises well with my career experience, and I could cite multiple
examples from just the last few months without even thinking about it. (I'm
not going to because the project is ongoing.)

We waste so much time explaining and justifying things to people that they're
just never going to get when we'd be much better off building even a minimal
experience for them so they _can_ get it. Of course, if you try to explain
this to the people concerned they still look at you like you're from Mars and
complain that we "can't" work like that. It's deeply frustrating.

I absolutely loved the line about becoming independently wealthy so he has
time to get some work done.

~~~
andor
To be fair, "the people concerned" might themselves not have the authority to
just diverge from the process.

The lesson to learn is that rigid processes don't work too well in creative
fields such as software development. Every company wants to be innovative,
i.e. come up with better ways to do things. The innovation will most likely
not come from management, because they are busy doing management stuff to keep
the company running smoothly. The good ideas will come from the employees that
spend most of their time actually working on the subject. If a process
prevents these employees from taking what they think is the best decision,
then there needs to be a conversation about that process.

Rather than specify how to work, companies should focus on goals and have
those goals shared across the organization: "We want to build the best
possible product." The goals should inform everything else, because how can
anything be more important than building the best product? If it's clear that
a process is in the way, people should be empowered to change it.

Which is the point of agile: setting up your organization as a system that
allows teams to do the right thing.

------
chrisbennet
I have an insulated drink “cozy” that has this written on the side:

“I can explain it to you but I can’t _understand_ if for you.”

~~~
thedancollins
Funny! Some smart guy was quoted as saying that the biggest barrier to
communication is the assumption that it has taken place. If you ask somebody
if they understand you will rarely hear, "I have no idea what you are talking
about."

------
slx26
It's very difficult to communicate something when in most cases, in order to
do it right, you need to understand the mental model of the other person, or
explain a new —usually simplied— model from the ground. And as the article
mentions even then it's hard to succeed, and you can't ever achieve perfect
understanding anyway. You would need to be capable of mind control to have
others always understand you, and then that's kinda paradoxical. But we will
always have that drive, to try to explain no matter who's on the other side.
Good work brain.

------
lkbm
This reminds me of Feynman saying "Yeah, I took the door" and people later
thinking he'd lied and denied it:
[http://home.agh.edu.pl/~szymon/humor/feynman.html](http://home.agh.edu.pl/~szymon/humor/feynman.html)

We usually don't memorize things we see or hear (or say) word for word. We
translate them into the meanings and reconstruct them from that. And if we
don't correctly understand the meaning, it makes sense that we don't remember
it accurately.

------
hevi_jos
I am good explaining things to people.

I just realize what people take for granted and make it easy to understand.

Everybody in Swizzerland-Austria knows how to sky. Kids learn so soon they do
not remember when they learned like most people do with learning to walk
memories.

In some Pacific islands they learn to dive. In New Zealand they learn to sail.
In Japan or Spain people eat fish by tradition, in most Argentina it is a
strange thing to do, you eat meat.

People on HN are mostly hackers, programmers, using a command line, what is a
parser is or how to program is obvious for them, but is very strange to
general population.

What is normal to us, is very strange to other people raised under other
circumstances.

Learn about your audience. Use parables like Jesus to explain what they don't
know with things they know very well.

~~~
fragmede
(s/sky/ski/, for those that had problems parsing it like me)

------
Vinnl
Although it's good to realise "you can't tell people anything", it's also good
to be aware that "people can't tell you anything". As in: you're (and I'm)
probably not exceptionally special, so we should take into account that we're
probably not able to grasp the full picture when someone describes us
something, and thus might do well toning down some of our inherent reflexive
scepticism sometimes.

Somewhat related: [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-
minutes](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes)

~~~
blfr
It's right in the OP

 _For example, their server ran on five (not four, not six, five) Fujitsu A60
minicomputers, and became hopelessly bogged down after about 80 concurrent
users. We were never able to get a clear picture of why. We asked lots of
questions and they’d try to answer them, but none of the explanations made any
sense that we could puzzle out. They were trying to tell us, you see, but you
can’t tell people anything._

~~~
Vinnl
Yes, I liked that part, but thought it got de-emphasised a bit when it
continued on to say that they didn't really understand the architecture
themselves. In this case, I'm sure that played a large role in the Japanese
not being able to tell them.

~~~
axilmar
It's not that the Japanese couldn't communicate in English.

It's the fact the Japanese felt, like Asians generally do, they shouldn't
disrespect their partner by saying what the partner said seemed liked
gobledycook to them.

So the Japanese internalized the failure to understand and eventually did
things the way the knew...

------
oooooof
This is deeply true.

I reflect on the times in my life in which I’ve tried to tell people things, I
wish I hadn’t. It would have been better for the relationships.

~~~
emersonrsantos
This applies so much for relationships.

------
woodandsteel
The author says you can't explain anything really new, and people have to
experience it for themselves. I had an experience like the author talks about
when I first "got" the web.

I had read lots of stories about it, and a lot of people were excited by it,
but I didn't really see its value. Then I went to a web demo day the local NPR
station held in hall with a bunch of computers.

I wandered around looking techy things I didn't understand, and then a public
demo started. The guy typed in a url and hit return, and in a bit we were
looking at the home page for an art museum in Moscow. "That's nice." I
thought.

Then he clicked on a link on the page, and we were looking at a painting at
the museum. "That's nice," I thought, but I still was not very excited.

But then he clicked on a link underneath the painting, and suddenly we were at
a museum in Paris that had paintings by the same painter.

"Oh my god," I thought, "the potentials for that are just limitless," and
thought of a long list of amazing things you could use this for. And now I
understood the web.

------
thedancollins
Learning is about context and we tend to assume others have the same frame of
reference. This is why it is so lonely being an expert in any given topic. It
is also why certain very commercially successful musicians kill themselves.
The better you are at something, the harder it is to find someone to relate
to.

------
ravenstine
Years ago, I was developing a desktop aquaponics unit that I was planning on
selling and turning into a business. I know it doesn't sound innovative, but
at the time most prebuilt aquaponics systems for sale were large and
unsophisticated. My idea was to build a 5-gallon aquaponics system that
someone could have on their desk or windowsill that was extremely energy
efficient. In fact, it'd be so efficient that only a moderate amount of
sunlight would be required to keep it running. I developed a unique pumping
system that was intended to require little power and few moving parts.

I told people what I was doing and I was told either "Yeah, I guess that's
cool." or "Nobody's going to pay for that! You're crazy."

Eventually, I believed them, and so I quit what I was doing.

A year and a half later, this thing appeared in stores across the country:

[https://backtotheroots.com/products/watergarden](https://backtotheroots.com/products/watergarden)

It's nearly identical to what I was developing, although its less
sophisticated and required more electricity(not that most people buying it
would actually care). I was pissed off like no other time in my life. I'm not
a violent person, but that one time I went out into the woods and beat shrubs
with a stick to release my anger. :)

Looking back, I should have picked up where I left off even after learning
that I'd been beaten to the finish line. Still , I felt very defeated. It was
heartbreaking to see someone take what I thought was an original idea and make
money after I'd spent countless hours building the electronics and testing
various water pump/lifter designs.

More importantly, I shouldn't have listened to anyone. The average person
doesn't know what they're talking about, which is why they're not coming up
with their own ideas, why they elect slick-tongued buffoons into office, and
why they're miserable working their lives away for other miserable know-
nothings.

If you have an idea that you are passionate about, you're better off trying
something and legitimately failing than to have watch someone else live the
future you could have had because your family and friends think you should
play it safe. Regret is tragic, but simple failure can be recovered from and
forgotten once you've learned from it.

I recently quit my job to pursue an idea. We'll see what happens! I did decide
to tell people what I was doing, but my previous experience taught me to
disregard anything they say, including encouragement. I've been told "go for
it" by some and "the gap will look bad on your resume" by others. It might
have been a mistake to tell them anything at all because I do believe that
exposing yourself to negative ideas can be damaging to your motivation, and
same with positive ideas if you become worried about living up to them, but at
least I've discovered that I've become a master of _not giving a shit_ about
what others think.

~~~
mmsimanga
Thanks for sharing your experience. I had a similar experience and what is
uncanny is my idea was related to hydroponics. After I shelved my ideas,
literally a year later I heard radio adverts in my local radio station
advertising similar product to the the one I had developed.

At this point in time I have just started a new job and getting up to speed
with my day job. A part of me feels there is enough space for many players in
the field. We have Dell, HP, Apple. So maybe there is space for your product
in aquaponics.

~~~
ravenstine
No way! :) I think aquaponics gained a lot of popularity around 2011, which is
when I became aware of it and started hammering away at ideas. Maybe it had
something to do with that rapture prediction at the time? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, there's certainly room for more small-scale aquaponics products.
Possibly larger scale, too. I had this foolish mindset that if my idea wasn't
100% original then it wasn't worth doing. The reality is that even the biggest
of companies that exist today weren't the pioneers of their core products, nor
did they necessarily innovate any faster than their competition.

Thanks for the encouragement, and I would say the same for whatever ideas you
shelved. Maybe we'll have to join forces some day. ;)

------
AndrewKemendo
It's even worse for new mediums that you can't experience without new hardware
or interface differences, like Virtual or Augmented Reality.

For example I've spent literally hours trying to explain to potential
customers over the phone what AR is and how it works, but if I got people to
try it, they understand it in about 5 seconds. That was a lot harder to do two
years ago than now.

------
carapace
You _can_ tell people and have them understand but you have to know what
you're doing.

Most of our ideas about human communication are still in the "alchemical"
stage. There are a handful of people who have initiated the rigorous
"chemical" stage but their work is not accepted by mainstream psychology. This
hasn't prevented diffusion of the knowledge at various rates through various
subcultures, but it has grossly interfered with the _scientific_ investigation
of mind and communication. I'm talking about the general body of knowledge and
technique collectively referred to by the moniker "Neuro-Linguistic
Programming" (the _other_ NLP.) Normally I would link to a wikipedia article
here but the one on NLP is shit. (It's one of the rare cases when I've found
an article about something I know well that is highly inaccurate and biased.
It's a bit of an apparent paradox that many people who have trained in NLP
still do a lousy job of communicating in many ways, and, ironically, often
about NLP!)

In a nutshell, it all started around 1974 when some therapists were videotaped
during therapy sessions and the transcripts were studied in light of Chomsky's
Transformational Grammar and regularities were detected. Within a decade
something like the "operating system" of the human mind was mapped out. As a
side-effect, various algorithms and techniques were developed. One example is
the "Five-Minute Phobia Cure" which is a simple algorithm that eliminates
phobic responses. (If you have a phobia and would like to _not_ have that
phobia you should look into this. It's a simple verbal algorithm that any
practitioner should be able to lead you through. It only takes five minutes or
so, works immediately, and is permanent.)

Anyway, it's the real Information Revolution. I have no doubt that when all is
said and done the calendar will be divided into two epochs, before and after
1974, as the discovery of the formal methods by which the brain thinks
supersedes in importance the discoveries of fire or atomic structure.

------
fouc
The last comment on that page suggests we should all have a good knowledge of
pedagogy. Seems like an interesting idea.

------
mettamage
The main point of the article that I got is that people learn by doing.

Procedural rhetoric, pioneered by Ian Bogost, does just that: you simulate a
certain system (or you create a game) and people can act in that simulation
(or game) to experience the point. In his paper [1] he gives an example of a
game called the McDonalds game. The player eventually has to make very
unethical decisions in order to keep their McDonalds restaurant alive. The
rhetorical point of the game is that McDonalds is unethical.

I find it interesting that project Xanadu is mentioned. The thing is: I have
been working on a hypermedia system called XIMPEL. I think hypertext should
still be a thing that should be discussed and improved upon, even if it will
never be in global use -- for academic reasons. XIMPEL is a bit different
though, it is definitely not the best hypermedia system out there. But it is a
hypermedia framework in which you can make the quickest prototypes for
interactive video and (by extension) for making procedural rhetorical
arguments.

I would like to give you guys a demo of it in action, but unfortunately not
many quality applications have been made with it (in my opinion). The best one
is [2], but it does not show anything about procedural rhetoric and it is
partially Dutch. It does give you a baseline application on what hypermedia is
supposed to be (and the simple XML language accompanying it, it is meant for
non-programmers). Experience it all yourself at [2].

Arguably, I did create an example of procedural rhetoric when I created a
Turing Machine program with the language itself [3]. I don't have the money at
the moment to spin up a server for it, but here's a video of it [4].

I do want to gauge interest at my university to see if we could make a XIMPEL
production regarding the user experience design process. Such a process is
messy and different everytime, which requires non-linear storytelling, which
is exactly what XIMPEL is made for. Done right, it will be possible to let
students experience the user experience design process in a short time (and
hopefully get it) before they start to do it. I know one thing: telling how
the user experience design process works does not help. It should be
experienced. What I wonder is whether we can let students experience purely
the process of it.

[1]:
[http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/public_html/ruiz/EGDFall2013/readi...](http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/public_html/ruiz/EGDFall2013/readings/RhetoricVideoGames_Bogost.pdf)

[2]: [http://ub-viz01.uio.no/abelprisen/](http://ub-viz01.uio.no/abelprisen/)

[3]: The Turing Machine is created with 2 counters. The two counters are
represented as stacks through representing the numbers in binary fashion and
simulating push and pop functions by multiplying times 2 (push 0), multiplying
times 2 plus 1 (push 1) and dividing by 2 (pop). More details on it here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine#Two-
counter_ma...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine#Two-
counter_machines_are_Turing_equivalent_\(with_a_caveat\))

[4]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NhRtKY0VzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NhRtKY0VzQ)
(until 5:12) -- Note: I made a small mistake at 3:50 but it did not affect the
output. In most cases it does affect the output and from mistakes you learn.

------
sureaboutthis
I own a restaurant. In the 90s, I actually managed it for six years when I
lost a programming job, though I only planned to do so for a few months. The
restaurant ran like "a well oiled machine" customers and staff would tell me.

Nowadays, I get irritated when I walk into it and find people don't know what
they're doing and inconsistencies are everywhere. I found out our manager was
the type that would show you how to do things but not let you do them
yourself. Later, when a new person needed to do it themselves, she would
complain about their incompetence if they didn't do it right.

My point has always been, until you do it yourself, you don't know how to do
it. "Turn this switch on", I'd say. "This is how you stretch this, now you
stretch the next 10."

I ran three restaurants back then and had no managers at all. Each employee
was better at their job than my current manager is.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Maybe you should show your current manager how to manage

~~~
sureaboutthis
It's .... complicated.

~~~
scandox
Reader, I married them...?

~~~
sureaboutthis
No but close. Got back into IT. Wife quit her job to run business. Hired
managers but takes a hands off approach. Doesn't want to work in restaurants
directly.

~~~
alfredallan1
Curious question: what makes/made more money?

~~~
winrid
Profits are better than wages.

~~~
alfredallan1
Oh yeah… I concur. That holds true even though the former be lesser in
magnitude.

------
amriksohata
Context is everything, however agreed in some cases people are like sheep and
only want to be told what's acceptable from the media

