You can't tell people anything (2004)

I firmly believe this is almost exclusively a didactic issue, ie. the person explaining does not or cannot reflect what is common knowledge and what needs to be explained in addition to the new ideas.<p>This comment resonated with me so much<p>&quot;I’ve been on the receiving side of this before. What typically happens is the Dunning-Krueger Effect. This is typically understood as incompetent people are too incompetent to determine that they are incompetent, but its lesser-known corollary is that competent people assume everyone else is competent too, and thus they don’t have to explain themselves.<p>Once you understand this, the reason for poor communication becomes clear. The team doesn’t bother to explain their presumptions, falsely assuming that everyone is on the same page. They feel free to use original concepts they developed, internal team slang, unexplained acronyms, etc. Then they’re baffled why people are so stupid and can’t understand their outstanding presentation that obviously went over all the details. &quot;<p>I, too, have been on the receiving end of such treatment multiple times. I wouldn&#x27;t call exclusive or inside knowledge &quot;competence&quot;. What shocks and baffles me is exactly this phenomenon: Companies have inside knowledge, which an outsider starting fresh could not possibly know. An outsider also has a really hard time grasping and sorting the new inside information. Yet, it is common of engineers to not reflect at all about &quot;what can this person know and understand without working here 5+ years&quot;, and prematurely jump to conclusions that outsiders are slow, and they are lazy to not aquire this information on their own. This behavior is not competent, or smart if you ask me.<p>When you try to communicate the issue at hand, it might also fall on deaf ears, because reflecting about such meta levels of knowledge is a skill not everyone posesses and could easily understand. In the end, either side, the insider and the outsider, can experience a lot of frustration, because their viewpoint is so incompatible with the other.

At least in some of these examples, the problem seems to be rooted in a lack of understanding of the audience&#x2F;customer. Implicit in this essay is an expectation that the audience&#x2F;customer will do the work for you. Saying :&quot;We’ll be able to put avatars on web pages. Start thinking about what you might do with that.” Doesn&#x27;t explain the value proposition or the problem solved. Why should they care? You&#x27;ll always be disappointed if you expect the audience to figure this out for you. They&#x27;ve got 101 problems they&#x27;re working on and your asking them to invest in your idea. You need to do this leg work for them.<p>As for the statement &quot;why would people put documents on the web?&quot; That seems a very valid question. If you can&#x27;t nail that answer, you haven&#x27;t invested enough in understanding the customers&#x2F;audience for who you&#x27;re trying to solve problems.<p>Pitching a new idea is hard. You need to iterate on it obsessively, cutting it down to the core value prop in easy to digest words for the specific audience you&#x27;re talking to.

I&#x27;ve been working on infrastructure to support a certain class of applications (medical imaging devices) that have a lot of complex functional and nonfunctional requirements. I initially developed much of the system I own alongside the first product team which made use of my systems, and together we ran into a lot of painful issues and added functionality to support these use-cases.<p>Working with a new team who haven&#x27;t yet shipped such a system to production has been supremely frustrating, because they haven&#x27;t gotten far enough in the process to understand the classes of problems that my system solves. I&#x27;ve gotten a lot of pushback simply because they simply didn&#x27;t have enough context to understand why you&#x27;d even care about this stuff - &quot;Why are you bothering us with these problems? I&#x27;m sure we can figure this stuff out eventually.&quot;<p>But now, after working with folks for a year and a half, they&#x27;re starting to come to me with questions about how to resolve certain things - and that&#x27;s when I say &quot;remember that stuff you didn&#x27;t care about at all last year? fortunately my system already knows how to do that for you!&quot;<p>Glad to know this is a systemic problem with humans and not a personal failing on my part!

The other issue is that people are constantly telling others crap. People are constantly giving bad advice, making wrong predictions, etc. Sometimes these people are very accredited, very smart, and well-intentioned, they just happen to be wrong.<p>So when people receive advice, predictions, etc. they won&#x27;t just accept, they use their own judgement. Which is also often wrong. But either way can be wrong, and people almost always trust themselves more than others.<p>The best thing you can do to convince a skeptic is show them very clearly or move on. The best thing a manager&#x2F;lead can do to convince a skeptical employee of their business&#x2F;design plan is show them very clearly or fire them if they don&#x27;t follow the plan.

I think about this from the opposite perspective all the time when I&#x27;m trying to learn a new skill or when I&#x27;m doing something out of my realm of experience, anything from server configuration to hanging a door: <i>someone already knows the best way to do this</i>.<p>Over and over again people will configure their servers wrong and hang their doors askew because of the concept described here, even though the correct way is well known. On the flip side, there are some benefits: each person figuring things out for themselves undoubtedly leads to innovation, especially in realms like the arts.<p>Still, I can&#x27;t stop myself from daydreaming about some way to transfer door-hanging knowledge into my head matrix-like (my eyes pop open and I say: &quot;I know how to hang a door!&quot;) similar to the useless way I sometimes find myself thinking <i>someone should do something about that sun</i> when I find myself driving west at sunset.

<i>One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody.</i> [1]<p>The thing about the &quot;you can&#x27;t tell people anything&quot; statement is, it&#x27;s a good shorthand for a certain kind of situation. In this article, it&#x27;s shorthand for people not understand a situation even if they&#x27;re given what to you may seem a complete logical explanation. The simplest explanation, somewhat alluded to in the text, is that the people you&#x27;re explaining the thing lack the context to understand even if they understand the terms used in the abstract. It&#x27;s easy to see how people wouldn&#x27;t &quot;get&quot; hypertext in a pre-Internet era. It&#x27;s easy to say how people wouldn&#x27;t &quot;get&quot; a client-server application if they&#x27;d never been exposed to the client-server architecture previously at all.<p>Which is to say, I think it&#x27;s quite possible to tell people things - in the context of a big, difficult abstract - if you go step-by-step, verify understanding at each step, break up the explanation process if it&#x27;s not working, ask questions etc.<p>And often, when a person fall back on &quot;you can&#x27;t tell people anything&quot;, it&#x27;s because they fail to do the laborious explanation process. The bureaucratic standards don&#x27;t allow it, there&#x27;s no time or whatever. And some people just fall on this by reflex, they&#x27;re reconciled to the situation. It&#x27;s very annoying when a certain type of person gives a single explanation and then responds &quot;you just don&#x27;t get it&quot; when questioned, etc. But it&#x27;s worth being clear that, in the abstract, &quot;you can tell people things&quot;.<p>[1] Worth nothing that in the reality is no one at all &quot;got&quot; hypertext or the Internet when to &quot;get&quot; involves a good grasp of the implications, in ways, we still don&#x27;t get everything here. No one had the full context in 1980. The full context is still being created.

Counterpoint: Some people are really good at telling people things. To the point where the eventual reality often is a disappointment by comparison.

I was just thinking about this earlier today with respect to Mastodon and federated social networks. As someone who has been very actively using Mastodon for years, it is frustrating — painfully frustrating — when people criticise it in the abstract. &quot;It will never work&quot; then why is it working? &quot;People won&#x27;t know how to sign up&quot; it is easier to sign up than any the average email service - blah, blah, blah - actually it&#x27;s not worth anyone&#x27;s time answering these questions. Just use it. _use it_ for goodness sake.

I&#x27;m convinced the only way you can really convey (non trivial) information is if the people receiving the information actually ask questions. When I&#x27;m talking to business people they usually say they get it - but I know they haven&#x27;t if there are no questions.<p>Likewise, when someone is explaining something to me I always ask a ton of questions and I&#x27;m not afraid to sound stupid. If I don&#x27;t have a model in my head that allows me to ask relevant questions I know I don&#x27;t get it.

From the title I was expecting something about Op Sec, but the article is actually about “show, don’t tell” i.e. that it’s really hard to have people “get it” without letting them experience “it” for themselves

It&#x27;s just a giant ipod touch? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.idg.com.au&#x2F;article&#x2F;334152&#x2F;early_ipad_reaction_it_just_giant_ipod_touch_&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.idg.com.au&#x2F;article&#x2F;334152&#x2F;early_ipad_rea...</a>

&gt; 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.<p>It&#x27;s one of the reasons schooling doesn&#x27;t work as it should: for a lot of things taught, children don&#x27;t have a direct experience of, and therefore they have difficulties understanding those things.<p>There is a way to overcome those difficulties though: teach by a real-life metaphor as an example. I have tried it myself, in many cases, where the thing I had to explain was difficult to understand due to lack of direct experience. A real life metaphor usually did the trick.

Even family members trust social media, google search, and news outlets more than their own family members now.<p>This is why disinformation has taken a firm hold on our society. Many people don&#x27;t understand the concept that anyone can generate fake buzz and information, and publish or delete it on a web site and even edit that content any way they see fit without any sort of paper trail... Including &quot;trusted&quot; corporations.<p>Some books can and have been proven over time to be wrong too, but people had to confiscate, shred, or burn them to hide trails of lies. Maybe that&#x27;s why this is a fairly new trend.<p>The saying &quot;actions speak louder than words&quot; always holds true despite all the deception and manipulation we are being inundated with. We need to hold people individually accountable for their actions just as much as to their words.<p>I don&#x27;t need people to understand me so much these days as much as I just want them to not stand in my way as I work towards my own personal success, and I&#x27;m sure as hell not posting my best ideas and thoughts on social media for anyone to pick apart or mimic.

This is required if the concept is abstract.<p>No one needs to be told what a flying car does and why it moght be useful. But things like PDF or REST are too abstract to understand just by the definition.<p>Really we don&#x27;t know what we want. Even the people who designed home computers probably couldn&#x27;t imagine most of their applications--they just figured it would be useful <i>somehow</i>.

reminds me of PDAs before iPhone. No one but a few geeks got why carrying a computer in your pocket was useful. Palm Pilot, Sony Clie, Dell Axim, Compaq iPaq, were geek only devices until Apple made their PDA with a better UI and non geeks finally got it.

Shorter version: &quot;the concepts of paradigm, and paradigm shift, are real.&quot;

Dear whoever worked on Xanadu ever ever ever. You keep on saying that you went around the world, talked to anybody who would listen, and nobody got it. Maybe, just maybe, the problem was the message, not the listeners.<p>I just re-read Wired profile of Xanadu from 1995, and it&#x27;s the same thing over and over again. It&#x27;s not the world. It&#x27;s the message. I mean, once anything is published online, it can never be edited because you link to &quot;start character&quot;-&quot;end character&quot; integer positions as the supposedly immutable snippet? What kind of a universe does that online world live in???

While I was in grad school, I had to teach some math-heavy engineering courses. This lesson came through very clearly there, and learning it early made my teaching much more effective.<p>You can&#x27;t tell students anything, you have to show them, and you have to know where to start when you show them. Sometimes this meant starting back in the prerequisites to the course (a brief refresher on ODEs) and sometimes it meant arguing by anology before returning to the topic at hand.

This is why I moved into frontend development about 8 years ago. People thought I was nuts to do so, but I got tired of trying to explain architecture and ideas for projects, where people claim to understand, but then so clearly not.<p>Making the visible part of software really helped to cut through the blah blah blah and get real understanding and feedback on what was meant.

It’s funny, because I’ve been meaning to write something up like this for a while. Now when I want to explain this concept to my friends, I’ll show them this post, but again, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t get it until they experience the emotion&#x2F;feeling for themselves.

There are some people who, if they don&#x27;t already know, you can&#x27;t tell &#x27;em. — Yogi Berra

Dunning-Krueger Effect is fascinating.<p>I often worry that I might miss how it affects my own view of the world.<p>That is, the easy bit is <i>&quot;Other people don&#x27;t know what they don&#x27;t know&quot;</i>. The hard bit is dealing with what we ourselves don&#x27;t know and can&#x27;t perceive easy.

Unless they&#x27;re willing to listen and greatly respects you, you can truly explain and tell people what you&#x27;re trying to imply.

Controversial opinion: this is happening with cryptocurrency right now.

Don&#x27;t tell me, show me.

My favorite word for really, REALLY understanding something - do you grok it?<p>It takes time to really grok something.<p>Most people don&#x27;t have time anymore I guess, too busy keeping up with social media posts