You can't tell people anything (2004)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhat related: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://backtotheroots.com/products/watergarden

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

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

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

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

I recently quit my job to pursue an idea. We'll see what happens! I did decide to tell people what I was doing, but my previous experience taught me to disregard anything they say, including encouragement. I've been told "go for it" by some and "the gap will look bad on your resume" by others. It might have been a mistake to tell them anything at all because I do believe that exposing yourself to negative ideas can be damaging to your motivation, and same with positive ideas if you become worried about living up to them, but at least I've discovered that I've become a master of not giving a shit about what others think.

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

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

In a nutshell, it all started around 1974 when some therapists were videotaped during therapy sessions and the transcripts were studied in light of Chomsky's Transformational Grammar and regularities were detected. Within a decade something like the "operating system" of the human mind was mapped out. As a side-effect, various algorithms and techniques were developed. One example is the "Five-Minute Phobia Cure" which is a simple algorithm that eliminates phobic responses. (If you have a phobia and would like to not have that phobia you should look into this. It's a simple verbal algorithm that any practitioner should be able to lead you through. It only takes five minutes or so, works immediately, and is permanent.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1]: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/public_html/ruiz/EGDFall2013/readi...

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

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

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

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

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

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