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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

There’s some cognitive bias in which we assume that when we regard some information as important, that anyone exposed to that information will fully absorb it.

The reality is - while learning how to communicate well is hard, actually getting anyone to listen is many times harder.

I used to joke that in any meeting with more than 4 people, at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming.

And since mobile phones and social media all this has got many times harder; attention spans are shorter and there’s a higher expectation that information should be somehow entertaining.

These days communicating something simple like an important date to 10+ people inside a company requires multi level marketing; email, calendar invite, Slack, face to face time ... use it all and still one of the 10 will somehow miss the message.

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> multi level marketing

This phrase has a specific meaning I’m quite sure you did not intend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing

Perhaps “requires a multi-pronged approach” captures your meaning clearly?

Ah yeah - NOT a pyramid scheme - multi pronged is what I meant

You can't tell people anything. [0]

[0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

Interesting essay. Reminds me of some of the issues that come up in teaching. Even when you think you have explained something at the simplest possible level you are often missing background assumptions that seem to obvious to you that you can't even conceive of not knowing them

I’ve read that essay before and I re-read it just now and I still don’t understand what is meant by “avatars walking around on top of our company home page”. So I guess the essay proved its point.

> I used to joke that in any meeting with more than 4 people, at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming.

This was a big problem with me in college. While going through proofs in a lecture, I would frequently have questions in my head and try to pursue them, and in 10 seconds I would have lost the line of reasoning of the proof.

For me, writing notes work to overcome that. If I write notes, I can keep focus longer. Plus, I would scribble all those questions on side and come to them later if they were not answered by something in lecture after.

Funny, I've always viewed that behavior as more conducive to learning than trying to follow a proof or lecture exactly.

It's alright if there the proof is sketched down somewhere, but I had a couple advanced courses where there were important concepts that weren't already written down anywhere.

> I used to joke that in any meeting with more than 4 people, at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming.

This is my experience too. Based on this I concluded that 3 is the optimal number of participants in a meeting. Two would be having an active conversation the third one would be actively absorbing the content of that conversation chiming in once in a while. In fact even in a meeting with 6-8 people I noticed this pattern of 3. Just that members of this 3-clique would slowly change over the course of the meeting.

Edit: wording.

Just because 3 means that theoretically everyone is paying attention the entire time (certainly not the case) doesn't mean it's the optimal number.

There's also the problem (for me, and I have observed for others) that emails sent to lists or large numbers of recipients/CCs automatically get less attention and priority than emails sent to me individually.

If I get an "all hands" type of group email, I skim it, or maybe just read the subject line, depending on who it's from. Over time I've learned that there's almost never anything directly actionable for me in these messages.

The day is too short and there's too much to do to spend time carefully reading long-winded broadcast messages.

If you miss a word in a conversation, you automatically fill it in. This is usually pretty reliable even with unfamiliar material, since if you follow standard grammar rules there's a decent amount of redundancy. Sometimes, though, this doesn't work. You think you were paying attention, but you missed parts and filled them in with what you wanted to hear.

Ideally there is a back and forth that checks that important information was correctly passed on. Failing that, some redundancy can make a big difference.

> I used to joke that in any meeting with more than 4 people, at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming.

You don't even have to joke: you can put it in statistical context. If people day dream around 45 % of the time spent in meetings, and assuming that day dreaming time is distributed independently among meeting-goers, there's only a 0.55^5 = 5 % chance of nobody day dreaming at any given moment.

If you're willing to accept a lower p-value and go for an even money bet, people only need to day dream for 14 % of the meeting for you to win money in the long run.

Of course, in practise, day dreaming time is probably not independent: multiple people probably think of the same part of the meeting as dull.

> There’s some cognitive bias in which we assume that when we regard some information as important, that anyone exposed to that information will fully absorb it.

Part of the problem is that people get really upset when you don't assume that.

> at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming

I dunno, I'd maybe weaken that a bit before putting money on it:

> at any given time at least 1 person isn't day dreaming.

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