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Comment by bazooka | Hacker News Reader

He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking points and can’t provide you with specifics that can be quantified.

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It's the job of an expert to communicate their understanding of the world in a way that motivates non experts to make the correct the decision. If an expert isn't successful in this, they need to improve their methods of communication. Everything else is an excuse.

This presumes that the expert shouldn’t be the one making the decision.

Law firms are run by lawyers. The chief of surgery is a surgeon. Architecture firms are run by architects at the top.

Why is it that in IT it is expected that all management of IT is “non technical” to the point of not understanding what they’re hearing from direct reports!?

Would it be normal in your mind for a chemical plant foreman in charge of the process to not know what atoms are!?

What real life project only involves experts on specific field? Are you working on toy problems? Isn't there cost/benefit analysis to everything? If I understand something well, I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way. If I can't, then I probably lack full grasp of the topic

> I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way

Ok? But you are required to motivate a decision that is based on terms, conditions, probabilities, consequences that can only be encoded at knowledge-level A. When projected down to knowledge-level C, it sounds like "otherwise bad things might happen".

The jargon is not what matters. The logic of the decision is not meaningful or believable without knowledge of the "physics of the system" at level A.

Most people understand nuclear bombs in layman terms, and they understand them intuitively from watching videos and pictures. Without videos and pictures, no one would care.

Nuclear risk is about the reaction to somebody using a nuclear weapon, not the bomb itself being bad.

'Eschew' is probably the word you want instead of 'eskew'.

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