
You can't tell people anything (2004) - memexy
http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/
======
jerf
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 know when it's a fake problem.) But a lot of times in math and science
I think we'd be much better off leading off with the _problems_ , and giving
the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because
_then_ the answers would stick.

I've mentioned on HN before the git training curriculum I have made for my
workplace... it's an interactive tutorial, and rather than just walking you
through solutions, it's really more a guided tour of the problems that every
git user encounters, _then_ the solutions. We do merge conflicts, detached
head (easy for git experts to forget how confusing that state is!), getting
confused about why the things I used "git add" on now doesn't show diffs, etc.
It seems to work reasonably well.

~~~
memco
> 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.

This may be way off in another field, but this is actually frustrating to me
as a father in another way: when we watch shows or read books with our child
so many of the stories are so far detached from reality as to make me ask,
"Why are we asking kids to care about this?" I have particular ire for
Disney's penchant to make kids think they need to be groomed for life in royal
society when they have effectively a 0% chance of ever needing to learn those
life skills in that context. I much more appreciate shows that explore how
people need to learn to interact with their peers at home, in public, at
school etc. I know it's tempting to also want to kind of detach the concept
from actual people with animals and such, but my daughter is not an elephant
or a car, she doesn't possess a magical amulet or the ability to fly or to
submerge the whole state in sub-zero arctic winter. I know it's fun to dream
and imagine, but I wonder sometimes if we're communicating: "the world around
is impossibly complex and you need superhuman ability to solve it. You don't
have those and so you're ill-equipped to do anything about it." Some days,
that may be true, but I appreciate stories that emphasize we have a reasonable
degree of power within our own human faculties and learning to leverage and
use those faculties is far more effective than showing kids flashy superpowers
or magical worlds they won't have or see. All this, from a guy who spent
numerous of his childhood days imagining himself as Mega Man absorbing
everyone else's superpowers, engrossed in Star Wars and TMNT. _Shrug_

~~~
jrussino
Have you found any good counterexamples? We let our three-year-old watch
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and I love it because it is exactly this: short
(~10 minute) stories about situations and conflicts that a young child will
encounter in everyday life. I’d be really interested to hear of other good
shows & books like this.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Daniel_Tiger%27s_Nei...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Daniel_Tiger%27s_Neighborhood_episodes)

~~~
war1025
I don't know how "real life" it is, but Sarah and Duck [1] is about the best
young kids show we've come across. It used to be on Netflix, but they took it
off. We've bought all 9? seasons on Amazon by now though. It's a great show of
just of just completely mundane things with a bit of imagination tossed in.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_%26_Duck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_%26_Duck)

~~~
madhadron
Agreed, and as a parent I can watch it with my kids over and over and I still
enjoy it. Not quite as good, but close: Puffin Rock.

------
d23
I also call this the head nod effect. It's particularly a problem in technical
discussions. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of the time 90% of people
don't understand what 90% of what's being said. You essentially have to start
from a point of already understanding entirely what the person is saying to be
able to keep up, unless they're just saying something completely trivial.

The glue that keeps the illusion that communication is happening alive is that
pernicious little head nod. No one wants to be the person that stops the
speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon and
ill-explained thing that comes out of their mouths. So the slight
misunderstandings snowball until you're really getting a fraction of whatever
the speaker is trying to communicate.

At this point, unless the head nod is aggressively positive, I have come to
assume it actually means they have stopped following fully. I then have the
decision as the speaker whether to ask for questions or just slow down a bit
or stop altogether and see if they naturally show their curiosity.

> What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a
> touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their
> minds to put the things you are telling them.

The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means
by this _and_ I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not _that_
bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex
shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this
author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they
mean, but maybe I don't.

~~~
deanCommie
> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get
> clarification on every piece of jargon

I have found that one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work (as
an SDE) and the trust associated with it is you don't have to worry about
proving yourself to anyone, and can afford to look stupid.

I actually learned this from Principal engineers who over and over would start
questions with "I'm sorry, I'm an idiot who must be missing something obvious,
but can you explain this it doesn't make sense to me?"

I have found doing this exhilarating and ADDICTIVE, because of how often the
question ends up revealing that the person just glossed over something or
doesn't understand something themselves.

Now instead of trying to understand people, I find myself trying NOT to
understand something and make sure I'm not letting any hand waving or
imprecision trick me into thinking I understand something when it isn't
properly explained.

~~~
larsnystrom
I was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application
using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without
a framework/UI library.

I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't
mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question.
Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious
effort planning how to explain such a concept. And that's just a small part of
the answer to the question.

My point is that sometimes the answer to the question you're asking is just
huge, and requires a lot of context to understand. And providing such answers
on the spot is very hard. So I think we should cut people some slack when they
can't immediately provide an answer. Sometimes things are just not very
obvious.

Just to be clear, I don't want to discuss the merits of React here. My point
is just that sometimes things are too complex to explain fully in every
situation. Everything cannot be understood from first principles. You need
abstractions to be productive. By all means, question the abstractions, but
perhaps not always?

~~~
deanCommie
I'm really struggling to empathize with your point here.

I SUSPECT you are expecting that the questionner is going to hold you to an
incredibly high and rigorous bar and in fact I don't think that's true. If you
say "It will improve our user's perceived client latency" i expect that is
sufficient - IF TRUE.

And this is the key. In software everything is a tradeoff. I don't know what
the tradeoffs with using React are, but tenerally the industry trend right now
is React is worth it. But why? I think it's a fair question to understand
that, otherwise you're just cargo culting an architecture without
understanding it.

BTW blindly following a trend is itself a choice and a tradeoff. You might not
need a deeper answer for using React than "A lot of people use React, so if we
use React it'll be easier to hire people to continue to make changes." That's
a valid technical decision to use something!

I'm not a frontend engineer, BTW. However I just googled Javascript Locality
and React Locality and found basically nothing reasonable except
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-
local...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-locality-
matter-in-javascript)

So I do feel like i'm going to illustrate my point here and ask you "What is
locality in this context? Why is it important? Is React the only way to
achieve it? What are we choosing as a tradeoff?"

~~~
larsnystrom
I think I did a poor job of explaining the situation I was referring to. My
point was I could’ve made a better job explaining a concept, but I just wasn’t
prepared for or had the capacity to do so at the spot. Explaining complex
things in an ad-hoc fashion with no preparation is hard, is what I’m saying.

Locality is about having the code for one feature in one spot. If you can
remove a feature by deleting one piece of code at one place, for example an
entire file, then the feature is local to that file. It allows you to make
changes and remove features without understanding the entire application.
Without it, you have to understand the entire codebase to make any changes,
which goes from hard to impossible as the project grows. This is why globals
are a pain.

Locality is related to code cohesion and loose coupling.

React encourages locality because you’re only supposed to pass data one way,
which gives you a sort of tree structure where you can remove a branch without
affecting other branches.

Of course you can mess this up in React as well, React is no silver bullet and
you can do it without React.

There is so much to talk about here, but none of that is relevant to the point
I’m trying to make, which is:

I should probably have been able to explain all of this to the person asking,
but it’s a lot harder to do so verbally with no preparation than it is to
write it down like this.

~~~
deanCommie
The context here might be that we are in a design review - you are presenting
a design. Maybe it's verbally, but maybe it's a document.

Ideally it's a document, so you can describe it by writing it down.

But if someone asks a hard question that you didn't prepare for, well you
still have to make a best effort to answer it verbally.

You can use "I'll write down my thoughts and get back to you" to SOME things,
but not every time.

~~~
larsnystrom
My original context was rather that of a junior developer asking a more
experienced developer what choices to make, and then questioning them. Which
is good, but sometimes the knowledge gap is just too wide to deal with then
and there.

------
throwaway713
> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, 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.

This is an excellent explanation that mirrors my own life goals, but I have
struggled to put the sentiment into words this well. At the end of the day, I
just want to spend (waste?) all of my time doing AI research or working on a
cure for cancer, but I want to do it my own way.

~~~
memexy
How is your way different from the current way it's done and what benefits
would there be to your way?

~~~
throwaway713
My way involves a lot more risk that nothing useful will be produced.

I basically want a higher risk / reward than what working in this field as an
employee would provide. I wouldn’t be able to try far out ideas if I wanted to
keep my job, because it may be the case that one avenue of research never goes
anywhere for years.

Peter Higgs has some interesting thoughts on how he would probably not have
produced anything valuable if his work had occurred in the current academic
environment that prioritizes frequent publications in high impact factor
journals ([https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
higgs-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-
academic-system))

~~~
TeMPOraL
I share your goals.

I'd put it this way: your way involves a lot more risk of dead ends, but also
offers a lot more of focused, productive deep work.

In general sense, companies are set up to derisk work. It's a trade-off - we
get consistency, but also mediocrity.

------
evdev
In my experience what we have in a lot of places are cultures of anti-
competence.

In a competence culture, you try to understand your sphere very, very well,
including not only the current facts of the matter but how those facts might
change under different circumstances. Then you try to understand enough of
spheres of people around you that you can bracket what will affect you, and
how you will affect them. It's implicitly understood that the functioning of
the entire enterprise comes from people doing this.

In anti-competence culture, the functioning of the entire enterprise is
mysterious and located somewhere else where it's not your problem. You only
know as much about what you're doing as you need to barely keep going. You try
to know as little about what's going on with others as possible, and if there
is any interaction between you, you try to minimize and even resist it, in the
hopes that you will have to change as little as possible or changes will be
discovered to be unnecessary or deemed to be too expensive.

You want to stay in the cultures of competence. What the article is describing
is just how much of the other kind is out there.

~~~
marcosdumay
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 again and again.
At some point people stop, take your idea into account, and suddenly
understand why none of what they said applies. But when it is something too
different, you can't do this one either.

~~~
cuddlybacon
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.

~~~
js8
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.

~~~
efitz
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.

~~~
js8
I can't quite buy your example, because NoSQL is pretty much a reinvention of
VSAM and IMS DB (not IMS DC).

Regardless, I don't think it's necessarily that the expert would not want to
drop some design constraint. It's more likely that it is genuinely hard to
decide, which of them to drop and which of them to keep, because there are so
many and problems are complex.

But if you're somewhat new (not a beginner either), you don't see all these,
and you can benefit from the ignorance. Unfortunately, I think it cuts both
ways, it's far more likely that ignorance will actually hurt you. But for a
small number of people, ignorance can lead to lucky innovation.

------
johnfn
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 have avatars," you might nudge from from 0% to 1%
conviction that avatars will be interesting. Maybe that seems pretty
useless...

But there's a way to harness it! One way to tell someone something and have
them actually understand it is to have them engage in long-form content. Have
you ever wondered why books need to be so long to explain topics which you
could summarize in a sentence? It always perplexed me why authors like Malcolm
Gladwell could write for 50k words what could be distilled into a couple of
sentences, or why talks spend 60 minutes going over a couple of points that
someone would summarize in a few bullet points on a YouTube comment. But
eventually I realized that the extreme verbosity is crucial. You can't bring
anyone from 0 to 100% understanding in a single sentence, but if you string
enough sentences together, and attack your point from enough unique
directions, then you really can start to move the dial.

The problem is that when you talk to someone and you say "avatars are
coming!", you've got this big picture in your head of what that could possibly
mean, you've thought deeply about all the possible ramifications and
associations that avatars bring, and your sentence has so much implicit
meaning to you. But since no one else you're telling has that knowledge, that
sentence only carries a small sliver of the full context and meaning that you
understand. To really get it across, you need to convey your entire context.
Which takes a really long time.

And that's why you can't tell anyone. Well, not easily.

P.S. This comment got so long that it came dangerously close to wading into
meta territory, but I managed to successfully avoid it. Oh wait.

~~~
tome
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_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_and_spaghetti_sauce/transcript)

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.

------
js8
> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is
> to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done.

If this isn't the best argument for a survivable UBI, I don't know what is.
But, alas, you can't tell people anything.

~~~
danparsonson
Is it? UBI surely relies on taxes, which would evaporate if everyone retired
early to live off their UBI.

~~~
CathedralBorrow
Are you thinking of income tax as the only tax that exist?

~~~
danparsonson
No... corporation and dividend taxes require companies to be making profit,
and companies almost always need working employees to do that, and sales tax
only exists when people buy things - that's not happening anywhere near as
much when everyone is only earning a _basic_ income. What did I miss? And
let's not forget there are still all the other public services to pay for.

I can certainly see potential in the idea of UBI, but primarily as a means of
support when it's needed, not as a spur to retirement at 35.

------
dang
You couldn't in 2018 either:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703)

Nor could you in 2008:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353731)

~~~
dfee
I hope you’re enjoying yourself over there dang. I enjoy that you keep it
light.

------
munificent
People interpret your words in context of an existing framework of
understanding.

If I tell you "we're adding a button to the help page", you understand that
"button" means "software GUI element" and "help page" means "hypetext page on
the world wide web". You do not immediately get out needle and thread and
start poking holes in paper.

The challenge, then, is telling people that the framework itself is wrong. In
order to understand what you're saying, your words have already gone through
and been filtered by the very framework you are trying to change.

VR really suffers from this. How do you get someone excited about VR by
showing them flat images of it on a typical display? You can't. If you could
translate the experience to a flat display then, by definition, VR wouldn't
really be adding anything.

By letting a person experience the thing itself directly, you sidestep a lot
of that framework and context. You don't need to get the point across in
metaphor, analogies, or simulation. You don't need a persuasive map when you
can literally drop them into the territory and let them both draw their own
map _and directly see for themselves in what ways the map is lacking_.

~~~
memexy
Speaking of VR, do you have a favorite headset? Or have you used one that you
thought was good?

~~~
vl
Discussed in detail here today:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23620374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23620374)

Short answer: Oculus Quest

~~~
memexy
Thanks.

------
renewiltord
For me this has happened with business advice. I was a teenager when people
told me variants of:

* Validate quickly

* Know your customer

and eventually that became

* Fail fast

* Test your idea

And I didn't even realize what it _meant_. I didn't _grok_ it. The first time
I encountered the concept of a Painted Door in product design in practice I
suddenly understood pieces of these. And the first time I failed to really
understand the customer, and failed to fail fast, and so on, I understood
those things. But I had to experience it to know it.

It did help to have the vocabulary so I could spot where I failed, though.

------
phkahler
>> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, 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.

OMG Yes.

------
csours
This reminds me of "Genchi Genbutsu" or "Go and See". Very basically it means
there's incredible value in direct observation. Telemetry can help, but
sometimes you have to schlep your actual human body to a place where another
person is to see what they are seeing. Obviously this is much harder these
days.

I think of the inverse as taking someone on a journey. You can't tell people
anything, but you can give them context and show them things and maybe they
will learn part of it.

~~~
drivers99
Sounds like one of the principles in Nat Greene's book "Stop Guessing". It has
9 principles of problem solving and one of them is called "Smell the problem."
He has an example in the book of a machine which was wrapping packages of
toilet paper and they could never run it above a certain speed and that was
limiting the output of their factory. Eventually they had to look in the
machine while it was running faster than it normally could to see a screw
would extend out into the path of the plastic sheet only when it was running
above a certain speed. So they were able to fix it for free, when the
alternative workarounds were to buy a whole new machine.

I use that a lot at work and often it involves packet captures and other low
level tools to observe hard problems at the lowest available level to see
what's happening, instead of guessing and coming up with possibly expensive
workarounds based on guessing.

~~~
closeparen
A thousand times this. The better I get at debugging, the less inclined I am
to guess and check. It’s almost always worthwhile to learn or write a tool
that will show you what is actually happening. This can feel like getting
sidetracked, but it isn’t. The answer almost always becomes clear.

I have seen a case where _so many_ people wanted to go and see part of a
company’s operation that it started putting on a traveling stage production of
itself, setting up in an HQ conference room every few months. I joined early
enough to see it _in situ_ and found that the touring version was nothing like
the real thing.

------
bsenftner
Anything truly new is met with everything but understanding.

Back in 2006 I had the seeds of an idea that you probably know today as a
"deep fake", but I was calling it "personalized media". By 2008 I had a fully
operating feature film quality automated actor replacement pipeline (my
background is visual effects.) However, even with a working system nobody
could understand the ramifications this could have on education, entertainment
and advertising. Even today, I'd be surprised if you, dear reader, understand
the ramifications of being able to replace actors in filmed media. The
shortsightedness of, well everyone, is obvious. People think of creating porn
when they think of a deep fake, yet that is the dumbest implementation of the
technology one could waste their time doing. Why not create an advertising
system where consumers, and their friends appear in video advertising using
the products being advertised? Add celebrities and you have virtual celebrity
experiences. Add political candidates and you have virtual meet your candidate
experiences. Educational media where you and your classmates are on location
in historical events. This is just the smallest example of how far media with
the viewer embedded in it could go. I pursued the idea until I went bankrupt.

~~~
totetsu
the Russian film and novel "Generation P" from around that era explores the
implications of this tech. It's very ahead of out times.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_P_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_P_\(film\))

~~~
bsenftner
Looks very interesting, I will have to watch.

------
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).

~~~
memexy
I've found interleaving
([https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving](https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving))
and spiral approach
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_approach))
helps. First came across the spiral approach when reading the pickaxe book to
learn ruby
([https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/index.html](https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/index.html))
and the idea stuck so now I try to approach new subjects using the same
technique by gradually making the "spiral" smaller as I focus in on a given
topic.

------
Jenz
> One final point: I expect none of you to really get what I’m talking about
> here, because this principle also applies to itself.

This is a bit discontenting... as the author himself notes:

> without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t
> have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things
> you are telling then.

Generalizing from mine and friends’ experience, all who have ever tried
explaining anything in depth have been exposed to this, thereby we–I expect
the HN crowd have all been there–should understand this, we should “get it”.

As an ending note, both OPs post and my comment are grossly simplified; for
example, even with “a touchstone” people won’t understand with mere exposure
confronted with anything of slight complexity, they probably won’t get it
until knowing the stone inside out; I remember after half a year with
programming in high school, many people that genuinely tried to learn, still
didn’t get why they should bother with getting the syntax exact...

------
carapace
This happened to me the other day with something called Lab Streaming Layer. A
friend of mine explained it to me and I nodded and said, "Yeah, that's cool."

Then I saw this video and the penny dropped:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1at7yrcFW0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1at7yrcFW0)
Introduction to Modern Brain-Computer Interface Design - Christian A. Kothe ;
Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of California San
Diego

I go back to my friend, all excited, and tell him what I saw, and as I'm
describing it I realizing that I'm just repeating back to him just what he
told be the other day! I stopped and apologized.

I like to think I'm on the ball but sometimes things just go over your head
even when you think you know what's going on.

------
myth2018
I think I got what he tells because that summarizes pretty well the challenge
I face to sell my core product.

It's a "private youtube".

Obviously not pioneer nor innovative, but we don't follow those many gurus who
advocates for building fast growing startups and not getting yourself into the
not-scalable consultingware trap (things operate a little different in
developing economies with risk-averse investors, but that's another story).

Anyway, it's been a bit tough to get into the market since the clients who
take the value of such product as obvious already have their providers; and
the other ones who have similar scenarios but never considered such solution
often ask why in the hell they'd pay for a private youtube when google already
gives them a full featured one, for free.

------
teddyh
The Dao that can be told is not the true Dao.

~~~
alasdair_
Is the true DAO the one before the fork, or after it?

[https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-
hack-...](https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-the-
soft-fork-and-the-hard-fork/)

~~~
firethief
No

------
Kednicma
I suspect that, in addition to the difficulty of communicating anything using
words, there is often a situation where people are not actually listening;
people can't be told anything.

~~~
numpad0
I think people aren’t good at understanding statements that are not actionable
or offer them no immediate benefits.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That's a different problem. I believe that Kednicma is talking about people
who aren't even _trying_ to understand.

Let's say the conversation is about Haskell, and some random HN commenter
wanders in who has never used Haskell. (Let's call him AnimalMuppet, just to
put a name on.) You can't really explain monads to him; he has to go try them
to get what's going on. But there's a difference between AnimalMuppet saying
"Tell me why you'd want to program that way", and saying "No, monads are _not_
a burrito, they can only give metaphorical indigestion, not the real thing."
One is trying to understand (without the background to be able to do so). The
other is just wanting to argue, without even caring whether the basis for
doing so has any relevance to the discussion.

"It is useless to have a conversation with those who will not listen." \- me,
but it sounds deep and almost Buddhist, so maybe I stole it from someone.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Training is hard.

I've been training remarkably difficult-to-train people for decades, with
really spotty success.

Part of it was that I have never been "trained to train," so I cleared the
minefield by dancing through it.

I have learned to take Responsibility for communication.

In my experience, if "they" don't "get it," it's _my_ fault.

The biggest problem that I have, is starting at too high a baseline (sounds
like what happened here). In many cases, I need to back up, and do a
"preflight" of "the basics."

~~~
throw681158
This reads like sales speak. My experience is the opposite. Some people take
to concepts like a duck to water, some people are dopey and forget things you
told them an hour ago, some people (most people) want you to hold their hand
every step of the way and will actively try to avoid figuring things out
independently.

I want to say it's enthusiasm that matters, but a lazy smart person takes less
time to train than an enthusiastic moron, in my experience.

If you're paid to train people it's healthy to take responsibility for that
but IMO it's not realistic or true. Training someone with poor aptitude is
like swimming through tar. It's palpably different.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
_> This reads like sales speak._

I am not a sales person. I have been training people _as a volunteer_ for
decades. I have never made a dime (in fact, I am usually out-of-pocket by a
fair amount). I am not a professional trainer or orator (or even a
particularly good one), but I am an experienced one.

The people I have trained have faced enormous challenges in life, and are
trying to get back up, after having been knocked down. I have not had the
luxury of an eager, high-functioning audience. In fact, the audience has
sometimes been actively hostile, and my training has not been effective (more
often than I’d like).

Their enthusiasm is often unlike anything many folks will ever encounter; born
of desperation, but so are the challenges. Many are folks with “knee-jerk”
reactions to authority figures, which means I have needed to approach them
carefully, and my personal demeanor and attitude could have a huge impact on
my effectiveness.

The stakes have often been quite high (life and death). It’s been important
for me to ensure that people get the help; not that I feel proud.

I simply wrote about _my personal experience_. This was not a typical
“Internet armchair expert” post. Please note that I made a point of stating
this was _my experience_.

 _" Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."_
–Attributed to Nasrudin, but made famous by Will Rogers.

I understand that your _experience_ is different. I appreciate and honor that.
I only ask that you provide me the same courtesy.

Please have some compassion. The world needs as much of that as possible, and
I feel that social media has been highly corrosive to empathy.

~~~
slfnflctd
Hey, thanks for whatever you're trying to do out there. I grew up among a
bunch of kids with pretty poor prospects, and we all started building
invisible barbed wire fences around ourselves from an early age. It takes guts
to try to do any improve-the-world work pro bono, and even more so when you're
working with people who don't shower you with praise for it.

I'm sure that even when you seemed to get nowhere or worse, occasionally some
of those expressionless faces across from you squirreled something important
away that helped them later on. Make sure you get the rest you need so you
don't burn out too quick.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Thanks. I’m not exactly tilting at windmills. I’m part of a much larger
organization.

I’m also tough as nails. I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years.

I have, in the aggregate, made significant inroads, but there’s plenty more
needs doing, and one of my more important capabilities, is the ability to step
aside, and let the next generation take the reins.

I am now actually looking at doing training of software developers. It’s a
different venue, but I also have a great deal of experience in that arena.

------
Animats
I'm still amazed those guys were able to cram the Habitat client into a
Commodore 64. I can why Fujitsu didn't take the risk of trying to cram a
somewhat more ambitious client into the tiny user side machines of the era. If
it doesn't fit, the whole project fails. Here's a video of the gameplay,
running on a Commodore 64 emulator.[1] Remember, this is 64KB (not MB, not GB)
over a 300 baud connection.

The trouble with Xanadu was the business model. Everything is pay per view in
Xanadu. It's all about micropayments. Really micro micropayments. Edit
something by someone else, as with Wikipedia, and you get a tiny fraction of
the revenue. Ted Nelson wanted to track the history of every snippet. Also,
the design was all built around centralized servers. Not open at all.

[1] [https://youtu.be/VmpAnhp31C0](https://youtu.be/VmpAnhp31C0)

------
Strilanc
Related (a proposed mechanism for this effect): Expecting Short Inferential
Distances [1]

1:
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-
short-inferential-distances)

------
totetsu
> "What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a
> touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their
> minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t
> stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted"

I was just thinking about this today when reading about "Petrodollars",
Gaddafi, and all the wars and hostilities started with countries that try to
sell oil for anything but US dollars. There is a lot of complexities to geo-
politics that are far outside the confines of the simple versions that are
transmitted over and over again in news and popular culture. When we come
across these big complex issues, it's hard to synthesis this new information
into understanding, or an extended worldview, because there is nowhere to
stick it in the first place. It takes a lot of mental energy to build the
scaffold to hold new information. I think the aversion to expending mental
energy is one thing that leads to just ignoring these things, or seeking the
easy path of conspiracism.

It is the graphic and emotionally compelling part of these stories that my
mind tends to be able to hang onto. In the case of Libya, video of the young
Tuareg men in now ungoverned southern regions driving their beat up car from
one town to the next and being shot at by snipers. Think about the HK or BLM
demonstrations. It is often these tactical scenes that are transmitted to us,
more than the cultural or political side. I guess the manipulation of these
emotional images is just propaganda and is as old as conflict. ("the other
side are baby eaters")

Maturation as a critical thinker is a long hard process that can't be done
alone. I worry that it is not something that we as societies are generally not
well set up to do. With the shift to a tribal, partisan world, where there are
more informations comes from privately employed Public relationships
specialist, than Journalist working in the public interest, what will be the
state of scaffolds in many peoples minds, and will they be able to support
being told anything new..

------
andrewstuart
You _really_ can't tell people anything when they are starting their first
business.

You may be able to offer them hard won wisdoms about revenue, cashflow, the
nature of what a startup is, why they shouldn't be wasting time on making a
logo and why not to hurry to trademark their business name etc etc, but the
lights are off.

They'll only come to understand the importance of your advice as they make the
mistakes and pay the price - i.e. blowing 3 months of their financial runway
getting a logo, website, business cards and trademark, only to go out of
business 3 months later because they've run out of cash.

------
chauhankiran
It is hard to explain something which is in your mind and haven't implemented.
But, for my day-to-day talk with something who don't know my situation, I
explain by jumping in her situation and give the feel by comparison.

For example, if I have to explain her about how I feel today at work when I
was assigned with front-end task that I don't know as I'm back-end developer
and just spent complete day to solve that small problem. I usually use her
context like, you're tailor and you know how to make shirt but now you
assigned to do some alter work on pant because you know tailoring.

------
jes5199
this is a lot like Wiio’s Laws “Communication usually fails, except by
accident.”
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws)

also, I can’t remember the source but someone wrote that if a person says “I
understand” then they probably don’t, but if they say “I don’t understand you
but I just thought of something myself” then you probably had a successful
transmission

------
gfody
relevant Ted talk, "don't tell people what you're doing tell them why you're
doing it" \-
[https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...](https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
I don't like to be dismissive, but that video is pure fluff.

> whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright Brothers, they all
> think, act, and communicate, in the exact same way. And it's the complete
> opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it.

I very nearly stopped watching right there. Does this kind of nonsense really
appeal to anyone? It strikes me as bordering on insulting.

Wikipedia describes this guy as an 'author and motivational speaker'. He makes
a living claiming to have cracked the _one weird secret_ to success, but is
not a visionary, a pioneer, or a leader.

It's like someone selling you an investment strategy. If it really worked,
they wouldn't be selling it, they'd be busy making millions.

~~~
gfody
well it appealed to me or I wouldn't've shared it, and I think his advice is
eminently useful to anyone frustrated that you can't tell people anything -
ie: rather than specific details you think might interest them, try sharing
your motivations, beliefs, vision and once they get that (and if they're still
interested) let them ask for specific details. iow: you can't guess the
details that will interest them, and if they're not interested then they're
not listening to whatever details you're sharing, so get them interested first
(by explaining why they should be interested, or why you're interested, your
motivations, etc.)

------
solotronics
I gave up trying to explain and started answering questions with the same
thing back. What will having a CICD system accomplish? We will get a complete
CICD pipeline.

------
redis_mlc
No mention of an architecture diagram - to, you know, tell people something.

Sure explains the mess at Fujitsu.

