Hacker News Reader

Comment by agonzalezro | Hacker News Reader

I also know an example to explain the arithmetic mean. I have read it somewhere but I don't remember the exact book.

"If I have 2 chickens and you don't have any chicken, in average we both have a chicken, but you are going to be hungrier than me."

View on HN

Here's one I like:

You wouldn't want to walk across a river that's 4 feet deep _on average_.

---

First read it from N.N. Taleb, not sure if he came up with it.

I use it to explain to clients why "average" metrics in analytics tools are useless if you're not specific enough.

Finding these examples is always hard. We should have a collection somewhere.

Like a Tech2Biz dictionary or something like that.

That would be a cool project. Sometimes you need to explain a concept that is difficult for non techies and you don't know how.

Actually, it should be useful as well the other way around. When they talk to me about finance concepts and stuff I get properly lost :D

Heh. My parent were small businesspeople, including real estate along with my father's mother. I ended up explaining real estate things like its very slow clock cycle to a number of startup founders I worked for.

Even among tech people you can have trouble explaining things, why would it get that much easier to talk to people across an entirely separate world and dimension of concerns? No tech "dictionary" or translator can ever make up for sheer lack of inability to grasp a concept in the first place. Good luck trying to explain transcendental numbers or the number of servers Google has to the Piraha tribe, right (heck, they're actually not even interested)? This is modified partly by how deep the person is in their domain as well as how smart they can be (horizontal thinking mostly). For example, in the cloud infrastructure business, a LOT of people that are in charge of companies' infrastructures are in their late 40s, 50s, and 60s, and it's been a struggle oftentimes to explain basic concepts like image-based deployments, cross-region failover, etc. The dad from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs lives in a world of fishing in his head obviously - maybe you'll have to learn a little bit about fishing to communicate with him right. However, a talking point that works really well for these people seems to be "imagine your mainframe was built out geographically across the world" and then you get all sorts of different conversations.

It's extremely rare in larger businesses to find people in charge that care enough about WHY something is not working when it comes to their operations or even legal as much as just having it resolved and when it'll be fixed. These guys are having to put up tons of defense against an army of angry customers and managers above themselves that want something done NOW. So, it's best to respect these folks' time by giving the most execution-focused response possible and if they want to know more, then you tell them and ONLY then. If you don't know, don't be afraid to tell them you don't know - then they know they need to come up with a really, really good smoke screen and it won't be solved soon (within minutes or less than an hour or somewhere in the timeframe of 1-2 phone calls).

Never, ever, ever try to "talk down" to anyone unless it's been proven beyond a doubt that they truly are actually dumb (and at that point, you should make efforts to leave because the truly dumb tend to run their companies into the ground). I've inadvertently done this before and nobody has a good impression of an asshole even if they're actually not like that. Perception is reality when it comes to people, it's part of why politics is so image-focused by necessity.

See also, Wittgenstein's Ladder ("lie to children"). At Wikipedia (via its general principles and policies docs).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com