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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Explaining things is not that hard, and if you’re bad at it, you can get better with practice and by learning a few tricks. But explaining is mostly useless in the real world. What will get you ahead is, instead, the ability to be convincing. That is, to pry people loose from their existing beliefs, and nudge them to adopt beliefs of your choosing. This, perhaps surprisingly, does not involve explaining your beliefs and hoping other people see the error of their ways. People don’t work like that.

Also, the three-step structure he advocates is a bad idea, as described here (IIRC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

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Consider that not all communication is about "getting ahead".

Also no, explaining things well is very difficult. Otherwise there wouldn't be so much bad explanatory writing out there. If you think it's easy, then you are either naturally skilled at it, or you are actually bad at it and don't realize.

>Consider that not all communication is about "getting ahead".

But you don't need to follow any advice if you do not seek to get ahead (i.e., better) in some sense. So, that doesn't make sense as a counterargument. OP's point is that you can become better at explaining, but that on its own does not add value. This is quite evident in scientific writing. Plenty of well-written papers are rejected if they do not provide sufficient value.

You’re implying that the only possible goal is to “get ahead”, which is not true. There are clearly other goals one can have in writing and in life.

No, I'm not implying that. I'm saying that you do not need to heed to advice if you do not wish to become better, for whatever definition of better or 'getting ahead' you use. Saying that you don't want to get ahead is like a null statement. It doesn't add anything and is quite irrelevant to this discussion. It's like saying, "but I don't care; I'll do my own thing". You can say that for anything.

I find that unconvincing. Great explanations are usually also great at convincing me.

I think some people (like you) have opens minds, because they have realized that there is no point in insisting on wrong things, especially when those wrong things lead us to make wrong decisions.

You probably did not have any significant preexisting opinions about those subjects, then. When people already have an opinion about something, a mere explanation of a contrarian viewpoint will mostly accomplish nothing.

Of course, you might be the great exception, a perfectly reasoning actor, which we hear so much about in thought experiments.

Thanks for sharing the link, best thing I have seen on effective writing, ever.

I for one am not going to watch a video on effective writing!

> What will get you ahead is, instead, the ability to be convincing. That is, to pry people loose from their existing beliefs, and nudge them to adopt beliefs of your choosing. This, perhaps surprisingly, does not involve explaining your beliefs and hoping other people see the error of their ways. People don’t work like that.

Can you give an example of writing that does this? Is it more about making declarations (with sources I hope) to nudge the reader to your beliefs? I'm not sure how you convince intelligent people without some explanations.

Mostly, convincing and explanations are mixed together. But some examples of convincing without any explanation is advertising, including “submarine” articles (as should be known to HN readers).

Examples of explanations without convincing can be found in most academic writing.

Your claim that explaining is mostly useless is a bafflingly terrible take. The video you linked is a well known video of someone explaining how to write well.

The video also starts with, and continues throughout with, convincing people why their current writing style is bad, and why a new style is better.

The video also starts with, and continues throughout with, explaining to people why their current writing style is bad, and why a new style is better. It happens to be a convincing explanation.

> It happens to be a convincing explanation.

It doesn’t just randomly happen to be convincing. The convincing part is why it works at all.

Apologies, that was the wrong link: the explicit mention of the three-step structure is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM#t=41m40s

ALthough, I think that the first link is a better version of the two.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/but-you-did-not-persuade-me/

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