You can't tell people anything | Hacker News Reader

You can't tell people anything

thefarmers.org

77 pointsfrankus18 comments

"When people ask me about my life's ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that's about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement."

I say the same thing except I'm serious.

I didn't read the piece but your comment really made me laugh... thanks for that!

This seems like the logical conclusion you arrive at being an engineer who can't effectively communicate with non-engineers. Although it's definitely true that it's easier to show people a product rather than explain it ahead of time.

Hey Alex,

Though do note that one of the most effective sales tactic is to let people actually play with the product themselves. Of course, that presumes that the product itself is compelling. :-)

Although the "communication skills" shortage you refer to is well understood amongst engineering types and a real problem on its own, I don't think this is solely to blame for the article's premise. For inventions that change behavior a lot, its not even enough to show a product, that still only allows the other person to see what they see, not what you see.

Email has been around for ages (the 60s in various early form), but it wasn't widely considered a killer app until the early to mid 90s.

On your first point, that's why things like the super-short "did you know that XYZ could do this...?" type of demos work great. Of course, see e.g. Kathy Sierra's writings for how to balance.

Re: your email example... You're missing the issue of network effects.

I'm not missing the issue of network effects. Or rather I'm not now as I can see clearly after the fact ;). But if you asked me in 1987 about email, I would have answered different. I think this is the whole point of the article. It is difficult to explain the future. Even the original inventors can't do it. Anyway, I think it was a nice article and worthy of some thought. Sometimes it is nice to know that maybe the right approach is just "do" and let the future do the explaining.

You can't see what you do not believe. That's just your hardware limitation. If there's no logical model for something your perception will filter it out. If you can read this you probably knew it already.

Is it possible for people to surpass their hardware limits, like self adaptive FPGAs, or are all our limits hardwired?

Meditate until you top level pattern matching code is not influencing your low level perception and new patterns are formed based on the true inputs.

Sounds like a line edited out of the original Matrix ;)

Perhaps, but it's probably true. I don't know about other people, but I've been able to identify (at least I think I have been able to) some of the parts of my thought process that do pattern-matching through meditation.

It's a very strange experience, but wonderful (on multiple levels).

This is very good advice. I think meditation allows you to reconnect with your lower level perceptions, both in terms of better understanding of past events and a better ability to remain calm and fully present in the midst of current events.

"I believe that true meditation is about detecting self-deception." Jorn Barger http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/selfknowledge.html

I call the the "imagination gap".

When I was giving advice about the fbFund I had a number of queries about whether the applicants should build prototypes or film screencasts or just spend time writing their proposal.

My advice was always to do whatever it took to minimize the imagination gap. Figure out what shows off the idea in as concrete a form as possible. It is hard work to extrapolate in a way that is identical to the person with the original idea. Make it as easy as possible.

This is it exactly. When I first started at my current company my boss and I did not share a first language. And only just barely a second language. But we did share a sense of imagination, and we were astounded many times to see that in a meeting with several people present, he and I would be easily layering our ideas, while the other people in the room (all sharing his first language) needed to see very explicit drawings before hesitantly seeming to see what we were seeing.

Without imagination, the world is entirely composed of that which you have already seen. How boring.

I agree. The best products are more about their potential, i.e. the internet, than a particular concrete, killer app. But it is easiest to understand a killer app and hardest to understand something's true potential.

Show, don't tell. If you can't show, tell a story. Easier said than done!

There are people who can sell you anything. And it does not require any understanding on buyer's part.

Don't tell, sell it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com