| I'll preface this comment by saying that whilst I've always worked in technical fields I've always thought of myself as just one of the pack and nothing special so my comment comes from this perspective. It's interesting you juxtaposed your first words 'non technical client' with your last sentence given that a neuroscientist is a highly technical field so I sense your frustration with your client. I've experienced similar situations throughout my career and I'm always taken aback when it happens. Often these people are more highly trained than me, they often have higher paying jobs with seemingly more responsibility but somehow they're essentially clueless outside their specific area of expertise. It seems to me their true expertise comes their ability to learn their specific profession rather than having an a priori interest in science and tech per se, thus they don't instinctively pick up ideas or nuances from other technical professions. As a neuroscientist, your client would have had both high school and some undergraduate physics behind him, so from my perspective it takes a bit of imagining to figure out how he could not have heard of Feynman somewhere along the way. Similarly, even if he didn't know much about JavaScript, it's rather odd that he couldn't have extrapolated concepts from other languages which he must have come across in the pursuit of his profession. I'm not saying for a moment that as a rule someone skilled in one profession should have a wide knowledge of another (I only have to look at my own limitations in this regard), but your client's limited knowledge does seems strange to me. Almost by definition, a neuroscientist should have a broad interest in other areas of science simply because neuroscience involves so many other scientific disciplines. That's what makes the point of your post all the more interesting. (BTW, it seems to me you were correct in screening the video so I'm not surprised you were kind of bugged off—knowing your client's profession.) Nevertheless, Feynman is right, sometimes explaining some process or idea to someone who has so little notion or understanding of even conceptually similar ideas means that one cannot fall back to analogies, thus providing a simplified explanation is nigh on impossible. A trite example would be a pianist trying to explain how he/she plays the piano to someone who'd never seen the instrument beforehand. Your post got me thinking about whether people like your client are more common in professions than I'd have previously thought. Incidentally, I mentioned in my earlier post that I'd not previously seen this Feynman video as over the years I'd thought I'd seen most of them (and I'm glad to have seen it). Whilst I didn't mention it in my post, I couldn't help but compare Feynman's expansive flamboyant explanation with that of Wilczek's almost dismissive one-liner that a 'field is type of matrix'. Given the complexity of subject matter, perhaps both approaches are apt in the circumstances. |
Non technical probably isn't the right term here, he clearly possessed a lot of technical knowledge. But he was non technical in regards to the project he engaged me on which was to build a a web app for his lab.
Either way it was a dissapointing experience. I was more excited to take that project than any other in my life but by the end I was happy to walk away from it because it wasn't productive.
I think another part of the problem was that this guy had a lot of money to throw around via grants but I don't think it particularly felt like real money to him. I think it was a use it or lose it situation, but he didn't seem very serious about getting return on the investment. Once he realized the project was going to take real effort to manage on his end, he was seemed immediately ready to abandon his sunk cost and move on.