Comment by d23
6 years ago
I also call this the head nod effect. It's particularly a problem in technical discussions. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of the time 90% of people don't understand what 90% of what's being said. You essentially have to start from a point of already understanding entirely what the person is saying to be able to keep up, unless they're just saying something completely trivial.
The glue that keeps the illusion that communication is happening alive is that pernicious little head nod. No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon and ill-explained thing that comes out of their mouths. So the slight misunderstandings snowball until you're really getting a fraction of whatever the speaker is trying to communicate.
At this point, unless the head nod is aggressively positive, I have come to assume it actually means they have stopped following fully. I then have the decision as the speaker whether to ask for questions or just slow down a bit or stop altogether and see if they naturally show their curiosity.
> What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them.
The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't.
> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon
I have found that one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work (as an SDE) and the trust associated with it is you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone, and can afford to look stupid.
I actually learned this from Principal engineers who over and over would start questions with "I'm sorry, I'm an idiot who must be missing something obvious, but can you explain this it doesn't make sense to me?"
I have found doing this exhilarating and ADDICTIVE, because of how often the question ends up revealing that the person just glossed over something or doesn't understand something themselves.
Now instead of trying to understand people, I find myself trying NOT to understand something and make sure I'm not letting any hand waving or imprecision trick me into thinking I understand something when it isn't properly explained.
I was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without a framework/UI library.
I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question. Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious effort planning how to explain such a concept. And that's just a small part of the answer to the question.
My point is that sometimes the answer to the question you're asking is just huge, and requires a lot of context to understand. And providing such answers on the spot is very hard. So I think we should cut people some slack when they can't immediately provide an answer. Sometimes things are just not very obvious.
Just to be clear, I don't want to discuss the merits of React here. My point is just that sometimes things are too complex to explain fully in every situation. Everything cannot be understood from first principles. You need abstractions to be productive. By all means, question the abstractions, but perhaps not always?
I'm really struggling to empathize with your point here.
I SUSPECT you are expecting that the questionner is going to hold you to an incredibly high and rigorous bar and in fact I don't think that's true. If you say "It will improve our user's perceived client latency" i expect that is sufficient - IF TRUE.
And this is the key. In software everything is a tradeoff. I don't know what the tradeoffs with using React are, but tenerally the industry trend right now is React is worth it. But why? I think it's a fair question to understand that, otherwise you're just cargo culting an architecture without understanding it.
BTW blindly following a trend is itself a choice and a tradeoff. You might not need a deeper answer for using React than "A lot of people use React, so if we use React it'll be easier to hire people to continue to make changes." That's a valid technical decision to use something!
I'm not a frontend engineer, BTW. However I just googled Javascript Locality and React Locality and found basically nothing reasonable except https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-local...
So I do feel like i'm going to illustrate my point here and ask you "What is locality in this context? Why is it important? Is React the only way to achieve it? What are we choosing as a tradeoff?"
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Given what you wrote, to me it sounds like the asker suspected React was the wrong tool for the job. Not every front-end required an all-out framework with its own weighty cd/ci pipeline. It’s possible the scope of the project was just some static HTML backed with a snippet of JS. If you are dead set on using React then you need to be ready defend the technical tool _choice_, not React itself.
I also ask these simple questions and it’s funny to watch the head-nodders rush to prevent the question from being answered by the presenter by jumping in with what is often incorrect information. There is a powerful desire to maintain the illusion that the whole room understands what is being said, to the point defending it can be instinctual.
Over time this behavior changes as it becomes known I’ll follow up to a cover-up with even simpler questions. :) Some of them have started asking their own!
> one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work.. you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone
but to reach Senior, you must head nod a lot when you're junior (and then later research it yourself if interested), because otherwise you'll likely be deemed stupid and won't make it to Senior.
Not only deemed stupid, it can also be perceived as an attack by making the presenter "look bad" and up in retaliations.
People remember how they felt a lot longer than who was factually correct.
Agreed with you, but I think you don’t push enough on:
> I then have the decision as the speaker whether to ask for questions or just slow down a bit or stop altogether and see if they naturally show their curiosity.
Much like people don’t get 90% of what is said 90% of the time, I find that 90% of the time speakers don’t really want to cause understanding in their audience. They want to show off how smart they are, how cool their solution is - they want validation and recognition, but not to teach.
If your goal is to create understanding in your listeners, then you have to also be listening to their feedback (vocal or not) and aggressively adapting your approach based on the feedback you get, rather than rattling 500 words that sound SO GOOD in your head.
You are likely to end up in a situation where the “listener” is doing most of the talking, and that’s a great sign! But people think of a great teacher/explainer as someone who finds the magic words to make the right connections in their student’s head, but that’s not really how it works.
This is why I insert multiple choice questions throughout my lectures to test understanding of the concepts. They're usually brutally simple, but once you've taught a course a few times and see how students get confused afterwards, you can put answers that diagnose that misunderstanding in pretty straightforwardly, and having to actually figure out a multiple choice question and then getting it wrong are enough to force people to integrate information.
> The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't.
You might already know about this but you should ready about the "Memory Palace" technique used for remembering lots of things. Using a physical space in your mind to "store" information.
Personally, I need a place for things to live for me to remember it. That either needs to be a physical space - I write something down to help me remember it, in a way because the memory is on the paper in my mind, or at the end of a linked list of memories, so that I can remember it by the things it's associated with.
I've noticed this linking of physical space and memory many times, and I've heard of this memory palace technique, but I've never given it a shot. Thanks, perhaps I'll try it with some learning I'm doing on the side.