Isn't this the very reason that homework assignments exist? When I was in college, it took me two years to realize that I could have easily gotten As and Bs (instead of Bs and Cs) in my various math classes, physics, chemistry, etc. had I simply bothered to do my homework properly--or, to put it differently, had I only properly applied the knowledge which I passively acquired by reading the associated textbook sections. Notably, I was always convinced that I "understood" everything I had read, only to find out otherwise when I tried to solve any of the problems. It was only after I actively applied the knowledge I had picked up, that my understanding transitioned from superficial (as in, understanding the underlying logic itself) to concrete (being able to apply the logic toward other problems).

If you apply this to abstract and esoteric technical concepts, it is easy to see why someone might say they understand--and even believe that they do--while in reality only having a superficial understanding at best. The problem then becomes getting the other person to spend the effort to properly internalize the concepts being conveyed, before they have built up the requisite interest in the idea to be sufficiently motivated to carry out said effort.

It's probably also true, however, that this may only apply to sufficiently esoteric and complex ideas in the first place.

I took this realisation to the extreme and decided to completely deprioritise classes in favour of homework and doing the reading in my own time. I figured the cost-benefit, at least for me, was much higher if I spent an hour doing as opposed to an hour listening.

This actually worked really well for me but that might also be because I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up. But even when the learning is 'one-to-one' I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand.

I think you're right in that some of that might be the brain pretending that it understood when in fact it did not. Could it also be a social thing? Maybe because the other person expects you to understand and this causes your brain to try its best to believe that it understood when it did not.

Otherwise yes, you are often better off with the book and homework and actually completing both.

And this is where I usually go off on my rant how college is useless for education - you can 'learn' peer interaction but even this way nothing forces you to make friends or connections, so the inherent use is close to nill.

I find classrooms engaging and I actually internalise information in a way that reading is only ever surface level.

(If you do Deaf Studies in Trinity College, University of Dublin, one of the lectures is on Deaf Culture, Perspectives on Deafness, Working with the Deaf Community. The lecturer is himself Deaf, and will lecture in ISL. There's an interpreter present to voice the lecture for the hearing students (and to interpret any questions, of course). In third year, you lose the interpreter. By that stage, you should be fluent enough in ISL from your ISL classes to no longer need one.)

There were a few topics that I attended the lectures, either because the lecturer was very good or because no book was adequate. The subject was mathematics, but I knew people from other fields who approached study in a similar way.

I never went to my physics classes in college - there was no attendance requirement outside of lab and I saw no reason to since math and science were easy for me to grok on my own.

On the other hand, I also studied languages and classroom and face to face time is almost essential for in-depth language study. Language study isn't usually lecture based, though. Not going to my Chinese or Arabic classes would have been a bad time.

This is a problem for everyone. People may not experience the struggle directly, but it's there. It's the inherent problem with any group class.

> I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand.

Tight loops of interaction will make this nearly impossible. What you'll have to watch out for instead is overwhelming students to the point of distress (speaking from experience).

I had two mathematics teachers in high school that took this approach to class time. They would lecture for 10 minutes then have the class do work in groups on homework assignments for the remaining 45 minutes. Exact times varied based on the complexity of the material, of course. And I do not believe their format was sanctioned by the administration. But it sure helped me retain more of the information.

As an extra bonus, it really helped with procrastination. It was a lot easier to get to work on an already-started homework assignment compared to staring at a blank page and a daunting list of problems.

That depends very much on the lecturer. If he or she just follows one book for the whole semester and doesn't add any additional insight, explanation of tradeoffs, or enlightening anecdotes, then by any means skip the lecture. But if you have a lecturer giving you all from above and the possibility to ask questions, lectures can be invaluable. Luckily I experienced many of the latter kind, although some of the first.

You'll think you get it.

But there are questions that are about a deeper understanding. For these there's some point to the question that isn't obvious from just reading. I remember the first few question sheets I got in uni, there would be questions that appeared to have nothing to do with what was presented at all. Only by asking around did I discover what the cryptic connections were. If you don't do the question sheets, you won't see this.

Yes, this is my biggest gripe with learning as well. It's so individual that you almost need one teacher per student.

Well, it was astonishing when I read the news. Now, at the end of this crazy week, all I can think is "well of course they are!"

* Some only "get it" when it's explained to them in a classroom, preferably by an engaging teacher; while others have to read it in the book.

* Many, perhaps most, won't really get it unless they do the homework; but others can do all of the exercises you give them, and still fail to get the bigger picture, and will be lost if faced with something slightly different than what they exercised.

The way I like to tell people this is, you know that thing where you want to take your kids or your students and make sure that they don't have to go through the same pain that you did to learn what you had learned? That feeling?

If you have ever had that feeling you must understand that it was horribly mistaken. The problem is precisely that learning and pain go hand-in-hand. We learn abstractions precisely because they relieve a sort of confusion, a sort of difficulty, they organize the pain that we have experienced and make it tidy and less painful. Even as kids abstractions like “this is what it means for the stove to be on” work this way, not that you have to get burned, maybe you just need to be yelled at, but it organizes that pain of being yelled at and tells you when are you getting yelled at and why.

Not all learning is this way, for example memorization and repetition... but to a first approximation you have to get lost in the forest before the landmarks on the map are recognizable.

Corollary: you CAN tell people things, but it might be more involved than just a casual conversation. Either you have to establish a shared context, tap into the pain/confusion that they already have... Or you have to get them interested enough that they will follow you down a rabbit hole of confusion and difficulty so that you can finally explain the thing.

I am not yet convinced. Let me take the following example because I remember it well: I tried to learn about geometric optics and lenses. To do so, I downloaded multiple lecture PDFs from the internet and read them.

All of them started to explain lenses by describing how large the image of a real object is, defining focal length and such. Literally not a single one of them even defined what an image is. The whole talk about image size and focal length and magnification and what not was totally worthless because it was all based on the same fundamental word that had no meaning. In the end, I tried to make up my own definition that was consistent with all those PDFs, but it left me unsure if I got it right.

The "pain" was there, but there was no relief from it, and I am still convinced that that simple definition could have avoided it. If I were to teach optics, I would give such a definition, and I am still convinced that it would help with the pain.

The other example was one of those PDFs that showed a real object that was "wide" along the distance axis from the lens, and so by my understanding should have an image whose magnification changes along the distance axis, but the explanatory picture in the PDF showed equal magnification everywhere. Today I am convinced that this "explanatory picture" was simply wrong.

Again, there was "pain", no relief (because I could not be sure), and I am still convinced that a learner can be saved a lot of pain when you just exlucde factually wrong content from the learning material.

I would say though, about abstractions, I'm not sure hot stove is an abstraction. I think hot is an abstraction that allows you to apply the lesson you learned on the stove to the toaster and the coffee maker and all the other hot appliances you encounter.

Other subjects are the same, obviously, but when writing a history essay you can BS and not think too hard and skate by with a C. With a math problem, if it's difficult for you, you need to really put your whole self into solving it to make any progress at all. And I think that can be painful, in a certain way.

That discrepancy between the goal (photorealism, or at least beauty) and the result (ugly art) is very painful for me, to such a degree that it discouraged me from putting much effort into art, despite my love for it.

I would say that in the kind of math you study after calculus it becomes more common to have that "I know what the solution should look like but I can't seem to get there" feeling.

This isn't to say give up on photorealistic drawing: but don't bludgeon yourself with it. If you don't find it fun, you're probably not at a point where practice will make perfect.

Absolutely. It is also why I will never understand why it is considered a virtue (especially in the maths and physics community) to set assignments without exemplary solution. I'm not asking to give this exemplary solution to students right away, but it should definitely exist and be given when students have shown honest effort and especially to weaker students that are struggling.

Instead the "left as an exercise to the reader" mentality is celebrated when in reality - in my opinion - it is almost always just a convenient excuse for the laziness of the professor at the expense of their students.

1. Struggle with exercise.

2. Check proposed solution.

3. Thinking that your understanding of the proposed solution constitutes an ability to solve it yourself.

This is analogous to the original problem, where you assume the ability to follow reasoning translates to being able to reproduce it.

The main use of exercises without solutions is to try and force students to go to their teachers and interact, so that someone can try to pinpoint what exactly the missunderstanding is.

This can probably be better done with assigned homework. However grading can be time consuming, so trying to filter so that only those that have problem with specific exercises come to see you is one way to try and get some time economy going.

Also yeah. This is better in course specific work sheets than in books, since books should be self contained enough to be usable without the guidence of TAs or professors.

And those questions tend to be the hardest and most prone to bullshittery by students. Many times in exams I made up proofs that made no sense and hoped no-one would notice.

Often when given the end result of a computation students just make up some nonsense integral or something and pretend they evaluated it, even if they didn't. Not having the answer immediately at least forces an honest attempt.

Let's not kid ourselves, we were all students at one time and we know students are lazy.

I had a boss years ago who would encourage me, whenever I was interested in e.g. a new library or framework, to go and reinvent the wheel in my spare time i.e. build it myself from scratch first to understand what the problems it solves actually are.

I've never built my own anything quite as low level as the build-your-own.org projects, but doing things like implementing a PHP web server with a class loader without any frameworks, or a JS templating system which stores the state of the UI in a big ol' object and updates the DOM automatically, has given me the deeper understanding of these things that I've later needed to debug weird issues and find creative fixes.

A friend of mine was going to graduate, and had one required class that she had to take. She had dropped it twice before because she said it was too difficult for her. If she didn't pass, she couldn't take the class again, or maybe for a year, not sure exactly.

Well, at the start of the semester at the first mid-term, she failed the first one. At that point, I decided to step in. I made her read every single chapter, completely, and understand most of it, before going to class, where the teacher went over everything and she could ask the one or two very incisive and important questions that she honestly didn't understand in the book.

I also "made" her do an extra credit paper (meaning I really just put the screws to her to do it, no mercy. For her own good - ie not graduating and failing out with one semester to go.)

As you might expect, she got perfect scores on her next two mid-term tests, and her report she also had an A+.

Reading to understand and working hard at it, you will understand. And reading it before each class, in order to ask the one or two or four honest questions that you have to fill in the honest few things you just can't understand.

And actually, with the internet, for almost all things, you can look up multiple sources on the topic and read them all - because each author has a different perspective and when you see the concept from many different perspectives, you really do understand deeply.

I got pretty much all C's, but then started doing this and then got all A's. Plus I leared memory mnemonics - Tony Buzon - for perfect memory. Learning mnemonics required a lot of work, but so worth it I would make it a required topic to teach starting in 1st grade, and every grade after that. Just like everyone should be required to take probability and statistics classes starting in 7th grade to 12th grade. Just those two.

As per article above in which the hubris is its own comeuppance.

You absolutely can tell people things! But to tell someone something, you need to do three things:

  - Establish enough shared context that they can understand you
  - Speak about something they actually care about (or convince them to care)
  - Use a format that works for what you're trying to communicate

The article is frustrating because it puts the blame onto the listener. But that's not how communication works! You don't have the right to just "tell people things" - you have to put in the work to be understood and to show people it's worth their time to pay attention. Communicating well is part of the job.

The author does this even in this piece. He says: "For example, with just a few magic HTML tags we could stick avatars on a web page — pretty much any web page. For months Randy kept getting up at management meetings and saying, “We’ll be able to put avatars on web pages. Start thinking about what you might do with that.”

Well yeah - if someone stood up in a management meeting and told me to think about what I might do with an avatar, my first thought would be "What's an avatar" and my second thought would be "I'm already busy with other things". He hasn't said what an avatar is or why anyone should care about them. So people pay no attention.

Then the demo shows what an avatar is and lets people see immediately how it might be useful, in a format that works regardless of the skill of the communicator. And so of course now they understand!

And maybe the thing you're trying to communicate is so novel that you can't establish context or convince people to care without showing them a demo. But at least take the time to understand why you can't tell people about it.

For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"

> “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?”

These are good questions and you better have a well-worded answer! In fact, it is easy to answer these if you have prepared for them. Did you just assume that the potential customer would already have familiar with the technicals of your product? If that was the case, they would have bought it from someone else already. Your target demo is the uninformed.

As much as I appreciate the author writing this piece, I have to agree with your comment. I was half wondering if the entire article was an exercise in “this is how you don’t communicate, here’s the final para which explains everything I wrote!”. Reading the comments on the article and here on HN helped.

It was first released in 1986, and awarded at Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. So, pretty old-school stuff. The site is about that game, and stories around it, so perhaps one can assume that readers know at least that much context.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

None of those details are important to the story. Leaving out extraneous detail is good communication.

This distinction to me is what distinguishes various informational approaches, in which delivery is one-way, from instructional approaches, in which the teacher closely observes and monitors students to see what understanding they're forming, and to bring them back on course if they're straying from it.

This is challenging at scale, or at distance, or over time (e.g., in writing a book that's used passively in instruction). It's a chief reason I suspect that various methods of scaling instruction perform poorly. It's why even generative-AI approaches to machine-guided instruction are likely to perform poorly --- such tools can explain material or respond to prompts, but it seems don't of themselves address the monitoring-and-guidance approach.

That said, in technical contexts whether in school-based teaching, professional training, or marketing support / vendor-based instruction, efficacy can be hugely improved by adding this step.

That's fine and I don't disagree but the problem is that there are very few truly good communicators out there (there is just not enough to go around).

Communication is difficult and really effective communication is very difficult. I'll use myself as an example, When I post to HN I usually know what I want to say and I generally make myself clear—in fact I go considerable lengths ensure I'm not misinterpreted or misconstrued.

To ensure this does not happen I'll often restate what I've said in a different way and or provide examples. This makes my comments long, prolix and boring so few bother to read them.

I don't have a Shakespeare-like talent to be short, pithy and simultaneously convey what I'm saying both succinctly and accurately, and I believe that not many people do.

OK, so when people have some talent, skill or knowledge that needs to be conveyed to the world and they can't get their point across effectively then what are they to do?

Try, and try again.

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What do they know already? What will they think when you say this or that? Is that what you want them to think?

Whilst I used myself as a example I'm not really concerned about my own communication skills to the extent that I worry about them. I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one. Also I'll often just comment to straighten out my thoughts on a matter not expecting others to take much note.

Putting oneself in the shoes of one's audience is easy when there's general agreement with what one is saying but as so often happens there are two sides arguing who have diametrically opposing views. One can say something innocuous which is essentially to say nothing or one takes a strong stand and alienates half the audience which is usually my situation. (I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.)

What I have to say doesn't count for much as I don't post widely outside HN, rather what's important is the wider public debate—political, scientific, environmental, etc. What I've noticed in recent decades is a general decline in the standard of debate—of discussion and discourse. I've been around long enough to recall talking heads like Bertrand Russell and A.J.P. Taylor who could not only captivate and hold an audience—whether they were for or against the proposition being put—but do so succinctly and with great precision. They were so good they would spellbind their audiences. (It's worth watching old TV footage of these two and others of the era on YouTube just to be reminded of how good the public discourse was back then.)

In my opinion, the reason for why we are witnessing a decline in the standard of the public discourse and that communications have become so dysfunctional is that formal argument in the public arena has all but died. Not only do we no longer have speakers who can clearly articulate arguments but also audiences no longer have sufficient patience and perseverance to listen.

I'm an example of failed communications: I'm the idiot who went bankrupt trying to create Personalized Advertising, which is now known as Deep Fakes. I had a feature film quality system working in '08! But I could not convince investors how placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase would be a viable business. Granted, the global financial crisis had making new tech investments difficult to impossible to land. However, despite my placing VCs into film clips right in front of their eyes, they still did not get it. And inevitable one of them would have the "ah ha!" moment and declare "we should make porn!" and then that would be all they could conceive. I spent 5 years pitching, I took communications courses, hired marketing firms to critique my message. Still to this day, I cannot get people to realize the advertising value of placing consumers directly into the advertising. It is the ultimate "show them what this is", but I can't get people to grasp the value of that.

This is subject I could discuss for days but I've spent too much time here already. Perhaps you could read my last reply to krisoft, it's perhaps a bit tangential but it enlarges on my earlier comment.

Thanks for your post.

"Placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase" would have made intriguing dystopian fiction 40 years ago. Today it sounds like a bad parody.

Life is an iterative game. You fail one day, you pick yourself up and try again the next one. The very act of trying makes you better at it. (For example by having a better internal model of what other people might think of a given text.)

> I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one.

For whatever it is worth I find what you write perfectly clear.

> I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.

Oh i see! Controversial subjects be controversial. I don't think aiming for "non-controversialness" is a worthy goal in itself. Of course one should pick their battles, but I wouldn't take that as a sign that there is anything wrong with how you communicate. You are not going to convince everyone, every time about everything. If you could, we would probably call that geas not communication anyway. :)

> They were so good they would spellbind their audiences.

I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation.

I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example. (and here I intentionally picked ones ideologically far from each other.) Now of course since I don't know your examples I can't judge how they measure up to them.

First, thank you for your reply.

See, your comment clearly shows that there was a significant communications failure on my part because I failed to get my message across with accuracy. In fact, my failure was so bad that it deserves to be awarded close to 0/10 because you interpreted the opposite meaning to my intent.

As an old phil. student I make a clear distinction between formal argument as found in say Book I of Plato's Republic and that which now goes for general debate on say HN or Twitter. My point had nothing to do with being non-controvertial, in fact formal argument is usually just the opposite, subjects are often very controversial indeed.

Both Russell and Taylor would never have let an error of misjudging their audience to that extent slip through, they would have prefaced their discussions with explanations to avoid confusion. Here, I failed to do that by assuming that everyone was on my 'wavelength' and had the same understandings (definitions) as I have.

"I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ihaB8AFOhZo

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._P._Taylor

Part 1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vnkZ4o7C-DE

Part 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rnxI8YMD9BY

There's also part 3 and many more like them if you wish.

"I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example."

No doubt there are but they aren't as widely known nor as well respected by friend and foe alike as those who've I've mentioned. They were intellectual superstars before intellectual became a dirty word, they were known to everyone as well as we know the name 'Einstein' today.

How do you know?

And I've noticed the longer my comments the fewer replies they receive.

That wasn't the impression I got from the article - I think the title was a tongue in cheek way of saying quite the opposite: telling people isn't enough, it's your job as the explainer to guide people through the full path to understanding.

That's more or less what you described in the rest of your post, so I sense you're in concordance with the author

That still doesn't make it sound or feel like a good idea, to me. :)

> Well yeah - if someone stood up in a management meeting and told me to think about what I might do with an avatar, my first thought would be "What's an avatar" and my second thought would be "I'm already busy with other things". He hasn't said what an avatar is or why anyone should care about them. So people pay no attention

> And maybe the thing you're trying to communicate is so novel that you can't establish context or convince people to care without showing them a demo. But at least take the time to understand why you can't tell people about it

Forget novel ideas, even relatively simple ideas within your domain are hard to communicate to other people especially if they are outside your domain.

Add people being busy and you having limited time to explain things on top of that and it becomes extremely difficult to get anything done unless someone trusts you and does not require a full explanation.

Stack ambiguity on top of that (E.g. "we think there's something here but can't pinpoint it) and there's a 0% chance of it happening.

I'm surprised this guy's management actually let him build the thing given the way he recounts how things went down.

Agreed. The worst part is when they nod and pretend they got it and then that really important thing that you thought you had communicated everyone that was akin to the sky being on fire is not being prioritized/funded/worked on.

Being able to convey an idea often forces it to be closer to the simplest and most comprehensible version of that idea.

Absolutely. I used to work in an aviation company writing software. When we were discusing architectural decisions (big or small) we often played around with the following thought experiment: Imagine that there was an accident with an airplane which was using our software. Maybe it was our fault, maybe not. Nobody knows. You are sitting in a cramped room with an irate NTSB investigator who points at this part of the code and asks “why on earth did you think this was a good idea?” If you don’t have a good and easy to understand answer to this question maybe we shouldn’t do it that way.

I've found that in situations like that, I just write out a prototype and that clears up the confusion.

Usually, what I'm trying to explain is good, but there's some context that I can't get out of my head and into theirs that's critical to understanding the thing I'm trying to explain.

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

What do you think is the ratio of "they didn't understand my genius until I built it" to "I built it and nobody cared or used it"?

And I'm starting to believe the reason power/status corrupts is that it removes it as an option for character development.

Creating mock-ups and going back and forth costs time and money.

While most of the time what I do is good enough - I am getting tired of people trying to block work until unimportant details are “discussed”.

It would not be frustrating if customers would be willing to pay for mock-up work and then for actual work but what most want is working application right away not mockup but they also want to waste time blabbing about details that would be clear in mock-up or in first version of the app.

Put another way: the only thing that you can verify when communicating that the sky is on fire is that the other party knows you think the sky is on fire. Whether or not they think the sky is on fire, or whether they think you're blowing hot air, is pretty inscrutable. If they don't agree with you, they're still likely to not show it because you (to them) are a neurotic hothead who they don't want to upset.

The only truth in what you manage to communicate to people is the effect it has on how they act. In other words - they can't tell you anything! They can only show you.

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

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

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

The idea of verifying after communicating is in line with the original article, and the comment by outworlder. What do you think they failed to consider?

Huh?

To clarify, in my example of the veteran car mechanic assessing someone's proficiency, there's no set-up required, they can verify it 'in the moment'.

No special or unusual tools or environmental conditions are needed to conduct verification.

Well at least some environmental conditions are required: if you ask someone to change an oil filter, there has to be a car in the environment to do it on. To get any value of out of it, you also have to be able to oversee the process - it's no use if you're instructing someone over the phone, for example.

More generally, I think the point of the original post, and the original comment, are that verifying that something was communicated successfully requires out-of-band actions. Physically demonstrating something, or watching someone demonstrate something, are both out-of-band: neither work over all communication channels, like user manuals, or phone calls.

Even in-person communication is often restricted to make verification difficult: imagine if you're in a water-cooler meeting with another developer, and you mention that you think they should take a different approach to a certain problem. Are you going to follow them back to their desk to verify that they really choose to do so? Probably not: it's both incredibly rude, and a bad use of your own time. But there is nothing in the water-cooler conversation that you can really do to check that they'll take your advice.

Of course? That's the implication of not just taking someone's word for it in the context of an office environment.

> Even in-person communication is often restricted to make verification difficult: imagine if you're in a water-cooler meeting with another developer, and you mention that you think they should take a different approach to a certain problem. Are you going to follow them back to their desk to verify that they really choose to do so? Probably not: it's both incredibly rude, and a bad use of your own time. But there is nothing in the water-cooler conversation that you can really do to check that they'll take your advice.

That would be the case if it was a trivial matter. But for really important things, then I don't see a problem?

Life will slap you with this lesson time and time again.

It's not funny because it's absurd, it's funny because it's almost plausible.

> At Communities.com we developed a system called Passport (I’ll save the astonishing trademark story for a later posting) that let us do some pretty amazing things with web browsers. For example, with just a few magic HTML tags we could stick avatars on a web page — pretty much any web page. For months Randy kept getting up at management meetings and saying, “We’ll be able to put avatars on web pages. Start thinking about what you might do with that.” Mostly, nobody reacted much. After a couple of months of this we had things working, and so he got up and presented a demo of avatars walking around on top of our company home page. People were amazed, joyful, and enthusiastic. But they also pretty much all said the same thing: “why didn’t you tell us that we could put avatars on web pages?” You can’t tell people anything.

I guess they've just proven their point. I was a web developer in 2004 (I don't miss that!), and I still have no idea what this means and why people want it. You can't tell people anything, it seems...

Which naturally extends to "You don't know", and I believe, the equivalent of this 2004 article. Now, as the article suggests, this is best shown - instead of explained.

A Neuroscientist was interviewed in a podcast [2] and illustrated this point with a story. He tells of a time when he dated long distance. Whenever he called his gf, she would ask him to call back and do facetime instead. At first, he thought it was cute, but eventually this quirk started eating at him, making him irritated. Finally, he built the nerve to ask. Why do you always want to do facetime ?

She explained that whenever he calls, she literally couldn't picture him in her head. Apparently she had a rare and poorly research condition[3], where the affected person cannot mentally draw a picture of the interlocutor (caller). So for the gf, resorting to facetime was the only thing that she could do, in order to picture of him.

You can't tell people anything = You just don't know. One of the same. Egotistic vs Humble. Take your pick.

[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/08/15/fact-check-plato-hard-b... [2] econtalk.org [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

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

When I overhear people having a conversation, almost always, I can see that the two people aren't really understanding each other, and neither of them realize it. Unless the content is basically emotion only, with no real new information. If I try to be aware of this dynamic when listening to people, it frustrates them... without me jumping to (probably wrong) conclusions and pretending to understand, it seems like I have some kind of communications disability and/or obnoxious personality, where I am drawing out the explanation way more than they expected to be necessary. The social norm is to think or at least act like you understand immediately when you really don't.

I often get the impression, when trying to explain totally new ideas to people, that they just assign it to the nearest known trope/meme, and assume it's that, and are unable to see how it's different. Even when it's really really different!

As an academic scientist this is a HUGE problem. All of my really new ideas, I cannot communicate to anyone, and get funding for them. Only the obvious/stupid things, the things they expect, get understood and funded. I then do my real work, the stuff I later get tons of praise for, "in my spare time." Like the author, I too wish I was independently wealthy, so I could actually do my job!

I like this perspective because it puts the burden back on me, and gives me something to act on. How can I put them into this experience, so they really get it?

I have wrestled with this since I was a child. For a long time I felt I was frequently missing information everyone else was picking up on (which was surely true in some cases, but not all)-- it even led to a brief delusion where I became paranoid about a large subpopulation of telepaths living alongside us, with access to their own hidden world containing significantly richer detail and depth, who pitied disadvantaged individuals like me.

Turns out a whole lot of people have simply felt forced into faking deeper understanding due to pressures of social competition, and gotten really good at it. Like an arms race of bullshitting. A facade of wisdom and knowledge.

Like you, I've often been accused of 'over-explaining' - which many do in fact find annoying - but we only do it because we've found it's necessary to avoid miscommunication.

So, thanks for writing your comment, I feel slightly better about the situation now.

Human-powered GPT.

But GPT 4 definitely listens and understands. Usually.

"Draw me a picture of a house"

You draw a picture of a house. Someone else also draws a picture of a house (but it looks different from yours, as they had a different idea in their head as to what a house should look like).

"That's not right, it's supposed to be on a hill"

You draw a picture of house on a hill.

"Still not quite what I had in mind. It should have 3 front windows, with a chimney on the left side, and a tree between the door and the driveway."

You redraw the picture again.

"Not that kind of tree... it should be pointier"

"You mean like a conifer?"

"What's a conifer?"

Words simply aren't very good at conveying a lot of information, so it can take many words to get a clear message across to someone. Additionally, there's often multiple ways to interpret words, which humor typically plays on. And then, with people not all sharing the same knowledge/understanding of things, it often becomes very difficult to tell someone something, especially complicated things. I mean just imagine how hard it would be to try telling tribal people who live away from civilization, who don't even know what a computer is, about ChatGPT... that is, if they even understand the language you speak.

I have noticed exactly the same. But meanwhile, you and me are sitting there understanding what each of the two means, and how each misunderstands the other. So clearly it's possible for someone to understand what is said??

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchopac-means-and...

I've had more than a couple coworkers over the years who pull me into random decisions because they think I ask good questions. Part of me would rather be known for having good answers, but it's better than being discounted, and practically it may end up being more effective.

You cannot build an ideal society in theory as it will not be realisitic in practice, and you cannot explain reason and feel with words alone, but others need to walk the same experiential path as you did. But since you already figured it out you can help them walk it faster. Thats why we now learn in primary school what originally took a long time until some greek matematician worked it out.

But - unrelated to your point - I think there's more empathy (or understanding, at least) - unexpectedly - downwards. A CEO knows how to become homeless (quit job, give away house and money) if they chose to for some reason. A homeless person has no path to CEO.

Is not how people become homeless. There's no path to empathy there.

No one foresaw the internet.

At best they did expect things like "we'll have networks with bigger bandwith".

But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead.

[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09

That’s because it was Byte magazine. If you were reading High Frontiers (1984), which became Reality Hackers (1988) and finally Mondo 2000 (1989), you would have thought otherwise. I used to buy them at Tower Records throughout California primarily to read about what the internet was to become. By 1990, Mondo 2000 foresaw and had a fairly complete vision of the nascent internet. A lot of the artists involved went on to produce independent works that promoted these ideas. Around 1992-93, I saw a theatrical production in SF that simulated and modeled the entirety of what life was going to be like and how it would work in a connected world. These are very old ideas (E.M Forster, 1909; Vannevar Bush, 1945; Marshall McLuhan, 1964) and many people were aware of and working towards manifesting them in reality.

I'm looking forward to exploring more of their archive:

Mondo 2000: https://anarchivism.org/w/Mondo_2000

High Frontiers: https://anarchivism.org/w/High_Frontiers

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

And yes, that was driven mostly by the Web.

Check page 366 for a couple examples on both sides of the forecast.

And then there are the sections on Project Xanadu as well as hypertext and hyperdocuments that get a couple pages each.

Quite a lot of science fiction authors did indeed see this coming.

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

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

That's why it's important (especially for those in leadership positions) to assume that the people around you are smarter than you (at least for some time). If you assume that someone is dumber than you, you will miss any nuance and signs of deep domain expertise hidden within.

I find that very clever ideas from very clever people don't provide an instant 'Aha' moment; it takes a bit longer to see the brilliance. It's not obvious at all, that's why it's brilliant.

Smart people are often wrong; this has little to do with intelligence. The problem is that most people lack vision and can’t see beyond their narrow reality tunnels. It takes extraordinary minds (not necessarily smart ones) to be able to see beyond tomorrow and take what might seem like stupid risks to get there. Very smart people will often be risk averse and stay the course.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...

It's almost like people categorically reject the possibility of greater levels of nuance existing. If they didn't they'd be looking for it carefully, because that is always where deeper insight comes in, right?

If you look at, for example, popular news and political discourse- it is lacking nuance to the point where it's meaningless nonsense, which also lacking any humility, insight, or open-ness to the possibility that more nuance may be possible.

I think outside of markets and finance, there are areas where nuanced thinking delivers results, even if it's not necessarily rewarded appropriately by management. In tech, it might lead to a feature being implemented in a way which some users will really appreciate (without understanding why).

>> another thing I’ve learned is to pay attention to things I find myself saying; that way I’ll know what I really think

is what led to Nixon leaving office.

Recordings of yourself haven't gotten any more private since he did that in the Oval Office... to preserve his thoughts and, presumably, to document what he really thought.

If you're not a total alcoholic, you'll find your thoughts in similar situations are coincident with your previous thoughts, to the point of being indistinguishable. You probably shouldn't actually write them all down or record them. In fact, if you have to record them to remember them (that they might never recur) then they probably aren't firm enough to be worth going back to.

And if, like me, you are an alcoholic, you can virtually depend on saying the same things over and over.

The article would be much better titled as, “It’s more difficult to explain new concepts to people than you think it is.”

A PoC that is too rough around the edges has the risk that less imaginative people will not get it.

But a PoC that is too polished risks being confused with an end product and people may start to focus on implementation details rather than the concept.

Also related to tutoring: quite a lot of people fake "getting it." They'll nod, they'll say "yeah yeah," maybe even parrot back some phrases ... but they don't get it. This is its own unique impediment and it requires, for want of a better term, quizzing. Test the success of the communication. By the time the kids found their way to me, they had already developed a raft of coping mechanisms, mostly counter-productive in the long run, and faked comprehension signals were a large part of it.

These are impediments to just communicating new ideas to a blank slate. Much worse is an audience who already has some other idea in their head, and even in the rare case of some kind of objective measure of validity, you're swimming upstream. Many is the time I had heard the dreaded phrase, "I know you're very smart but ..." The objection was their idea, of course, and only after repeated and crumbling failure would it be discarded. Maybe there was now room for my thing, or maybe not, but I had often lost much passion by that point.

Sometimes I despair of being understood. I soon have to face the music in which I must explain to higher-ups that one of our data source providers will need to supply unique and stable identifiers on their data if we would like to accomplish Project X. I know the questions I will get: what if we just did it without it? If you can't, why shouldn't we get a consultant who will tell us what we want to hear? Have you asked $ThisParty? What if we make up our own identifiers? I will probably have to engineer an exercise to explain the pitfalls, and even then ... you can't tell people anything.

Didn't see this coming xD good luck with engineering...

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=You+can%27t+tell+people+anything

Clearly this post touches a nerve somewhere.

I got this impression on my own self while studying math in college.

I noticed it when I made the connection about the studied subject, wondering why didn’t the professor say it that way to begin with. Because everything made sense now…

After few likely moments I asked myself the question: was the last explanation really better or did I just happen to understand the thing at that particular moment?

Later on, you get the “better” explanation while practicing the art…

We’re usually not aware of the process of understanding itself.

I've thought about this a few times, and written comments about it like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28122728

That being said, I do actually also literally rote memorize actual definitions and equations (using a flashcard program), because conversely, intuition is not enough. Rigorous definitions and "intuitive" ways to grasp math go hand in hand: One informs the other. It's immensely useful to be able to just recall complex definitions and equations while intuiting.

I think you hint at that, but often for me the definitions start out as "abstract nonsense" while learning them, and I just memorize them, but the further my intuition goes, the more the definitions themselves become crystal clear.

But one thing I learned from it is that if you can identify specific people who get you, generally speaking, you should then see if you can mold newly-discovered communication problems around this already-functional communications relationship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_reduction_theory

Edit: Not sure if that response is really correct, but at least it is a tractable way to try to approach this. ChatGPT let you fuzzy match words or theories much better than Google, and then you have things you can Google.

What body of work / what field are you talking about?

Sort of like the Oracle in the Matrix, only cynical, or perhaps more like Willy Wonka. "I wouldn't do that, I really wouldn't." <does it anyway>

I guess I'm just an ass for saying I told you so when this happens, but I firmly believe you need to let people make their own mistakes before they learn, both how to solve the problem, and to gain a begrudged respect.

Our brains build models to interpret (translate) everything.

We use languages to communicate and share things.

When brains share the same models communication is simple. It’s simple to talk about day, night and light with anyone and, similarly, well formed teams (or couples) need few words to communicate even complex ideas because they have shared models.

When models differ the language needs to be adjusted or learned. Identical problem/solutions may sound different in different domains.

However when the model doesn’t exist in someone elses brain to communicate, the model needs to be built. Building models (learning) takes time.

Natural language evolved for natural things. Hence, it’s not very efficient for abstract things that require accuracy. Math (and code) is an accurate language, and (often) effective to communicate models that require accurate replication.

For example. It takes time to build the intuition for some things (e.g. fluid dynamics). Once you build the intuition, the easiest way to explain it is through the formulas. Someone can read the formulas, understand what the model communicates and then build intuition accurately.

You watch and learn to build a mental model, you download the mental model, someone uploads it and builds the model.

This is my mental model for communicating models

THIS! I think most people can relate to this concept if they ever tried to explain something completely new to someone else. I have struggled with this many times with my own project.

I have a new kind of data management system that is much different than other systems. I can try to explain it to others in a personal or a public setting. I have written blogs, whitepapers, and other documentation. I have a set of demo videos that are each less than 10 minutes. It is still very, very difficult to get people to understand what I am building.

So far only a few people have taken the chance to really 'experience it' by downloading the software and using it to do something useful that they need. I have some really good beta sites that are enthusiastic about it once they get that 'Aha moment'.

It will take a lot more work before the masses 'get it' like the average teenage now 'gets' the Internet.

You can work around it (to a limited extent) by explaining the same thing multiple times, with slightly different descriptions.

Phew!

Humanity only ever works, only becomes human, when we are allowed the agency of the experimenter. When we can find out.

This has slowly lead me towards detesting applications. The idea of interface is almost always a curtain, a veil, that obfuscates & hides some pretty graspable real truths. Interface & apps often take something real & make it virtual, impervious, symbic, in a decoupled lying way. We are complicit all too often in raising a worse, in-natural science helpless version of humanity. We say it helps users to get tasks done. But it's all fractured narrow experiences, something small distilled out where few lessons port. It masks, without any chance to begin to improve beyond, to see like a human ought to be able to.

When communicating, the more the topic involves an experience the harder it is to communicate. We use metaphor, simile, and analogies to help people relate it to something with which they are familiar, but it fails for many reasons. When building a prototype for a new camera system, we began with a physical mock up which was cut from wood and painted. The client's first comment was that is was garbage because no one would take a wooden camera seriously. Even after an hour-long presentation, his final comment was "This all sounds great, but it absolutely cannot be made out of wood." Some people have terribly abstraction skills, and there's simply no getting through to them until they see the final product. They need the experience to understand.

--

Understanding is relatively easy, with good communication. "Oh, that makes sense!"

It happens in our working memory, which operates somewhat symbolically, but can't hold much, iterate, generalize, or interpolate well. And forgets quickly.

You can "give" understanding, but it requires spelling out everything to be understood, very clearly. And it won't stick.

People will "feel" they understand for a moment. The big "win" is if they later recall you said something or other that seemed to make sense.

--

Fluency begins when we have experienced something ourselves.

It is all about training our subconscious, the more intuitive part of our brain, which is very sensory and intuition driven. A lot like deep learning.

It compresses sample experiences into a general, spontaneously available form, usable in combinations with other fluencies, and give you "light bulb" epiphany moments when new combinations are surprising.

It is very hard to "give" fluency.

But you can smooth the path, by making experiences clear, fun, interesting, useful, surprising, low barrier, and low latency.

I know HN has this weird custom to assume without evidence that all old failed technologies were superior (or at least equivalent) to their more successful competitors, but it isn't always that simple. Sometimes technologies fail because they aren't that great.

fits the article very well

Isn't the answer to those ultimately "online ads"?

  T--/-
 O|-/O

This resonates with me so much today it's uncanny.

Step 2: Now with the whole picture and terminology in mind you can embark on active learning the course!

The key is noticing that actions betray not getting it.