[hilbert42]

"...you have to put in the work to be understood and to show people it's worth their time to pay attention. Communicating well is part of the job."

That's fine and I don't disagree but the problem is that there are very few truly good communicators out there (there is just not enough to go around).

Communication is difficult and really effective communication is very difficult. I'll use myself as an example, When I post to HN I usually know what I want to say and I generally make myself clear—in fact I go considerable lengths ensure I'm not misinterpreted or misconstrued.

To ensure this does not happen I'll often restate what I've said in a different way and or provide examples. This makes my comments long, prolix and boring so few bother to read them.

I don't have a Shakespeare-like talent to be short, pithy and simultaneously convey what I'm saying both succinctly and accurately, and I believe that not many people do.

OK, so when people have some talent, skill or knowledge that needs to be conveyed to the world and they can't get their point across effectively then what are they to do?

[krisoft]

> OK, so when people have some talent, skill or knowledge that needs to be conveyed to the world and they can't get their point across effectively then what are they to do?

Try, and try again.

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What do they know already? What will they think when you say this or that? Is that what you want them to think?

[hilbert42]

Trying again is often not an option. For instance, comments on HN are often only 'alive' for hours, by the next day the story is usually dead.

Whilst I used myself as a example I'm not really concerned about my own communication skills to the extent that I worry about them. I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one. Also I'll often just comment to straighten out my thoughts on a matter not expecting others to take much note.

Putting oneself in the shoes of one's audience is easy when there's general agreement with what one is saying but as so often happens there are two sides arguing who have diametrically opposing views. One can say something innocuous which is essentially to say nothing or one takes a strong stand and alienates half the audience which is usually my situation. (I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.)

What I have to say doesn't count for much as I don't post widely outside HN, rather what's important is the wider public debate—political, scientific, environmental, etc. What I've noticed in recent decades is a general decline in the standard of debate—of discussion and discourse. I've been around long enough to recall talking heads like Bertrand Russell and A.J.P. Taylor who could not only captivate and hold an audience—whether they were for or against the proposition being put—but do so succinctly and with great precision. They were so good they would spellbind their audiences. (It's worth watching old TV footage of these two and others of the era on YouTube just to be reminded of how good the public discourse was back then.)

In my opinion, the reason for why we are witnessing a decline in the standard of the public discourse and that communications have become so dysfunctional is that formal argument in the public arena has all but died. Not only do we no longer have speakers who can clearly articulate arguments but also audiences no longer have sufficient patience and perseverance to listen.

[bsenftner]

The quest for an understanding of the need for good communication skills in developers, as well as everyone else, has become my personal vocation. I've been working in tech for four decades, and my vantage sees weak and poor communications as the underlying factor of all this chaos, this absurd reliance on extreme tooling, the overly complicated tech stacks, and the industry failure of resorting to "leet testing" to gain employment.

I'm an example of failed communications: I'm the idiot who went bankrupt trying to create Personalized Advertising, which is now known as Deep Fakes. I had a feature film quality system working in '08! But I could not convince investors how placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase would be a viable business. Granted, the global financial crisis had making new tech investments difficult to impossible to land. However, despite my placing VCs into film clips right in front of their eyes, they still did not get it. And inevitable one of them would have the "ah ha!" moment and declare "we should make porn!" and then that would be all they could conceive. I spent 5 years pitching, I took communications courses, hired marketing firms to critique my message. Still to this day, I cannot get people to realize the advertising value of placing consumers directly into the advertising. It is the ultimate "show them what this is", but I can't get people to grasp the value of that.

[hilbert42]

Oh how I agree with your first paragraph. And there's nothing like experience and hindsight to provide such wisdom.

This is subject I could discuss for days but I've spent too much time here already. Perhaps you could read my last reply to krisoft, it's perhaps a bit tangential but it enlarges on my earlier comment.

Thanks for your post.

[relaxing]

Yeah that's an astonishingly terrible idea.

"Placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase" would have made intriguing dystopian fiction 40 years ago. Today it sounds like a bad parody.

[bsenftner]

Perhaps to you, but to all the fashion fans and all the super hero fans it would be a must have.

[krisoft]

> Trying again is often not an option.

Life is an iterative game. You fail one day, you pick yourself up and try again the next one. The very act of trying makes you better at it. (For example by having a better internal model of what other people might think of a given text.)

> I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one.

For whatever it is worth I find what you write perfectly clear.

> I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.

Oh i see! Controversial subjects be controversial. I don't think aiming for "non-controversialness" is a worthy goal in itself. Of course one should pick their battles, but I wouldn't take that as a sign that there is anything wrong with how you communicate. You are not going to convince everyone, every time about everything. If you could, we would probably call that geas not communication anyway. :)

> They were so good they would spellbind their audiences.

I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation.

I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example. (and here I intentionally picked ones ideologically far from each other.) Now of course since I don't know your examples I can't judge how they measure up to them.

[hilbert42]

"Oh i see! Controversial subjects be controversial. I don't think aiming for "non-controversialness" is a worthy goal in itself."

First, thank you for your reply.

See, your comment clearly shows that there was a significant communications failure on my part because I failed to get my message across with accuracy. In fact, my failure was so bad that it deserves to be awarded close to 0/10 because you interpreted the opposite meaning to my intent.

As an old phil. student I make a clear distinction between formal argument as found in say Book I of Plato's Republic and that which now goes for general debate on say HN or Twitter. My point had nothing to do with being non-controvertial, in fact formal argument is usually just the opposite, subjects are often very controversial indeed.

Both Russell and Taylor would never have let an error of misjudging their audience to that extent slip through, they would have prefaced their discussions with explanations to avoid confusion. Here, I failed to do that by assuming that everyone was on my 'wavelength' and had the same understandings (definitions) as I have.

"I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ihaB8AFOhZo

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._P._Taylor

Part 1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vnkZ4o7C-DE

Part 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rnxI8YMD9BY

There's also part 3 and many more like them if you wish.

"I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example."

No doubt there are but they aren't as widely known nor as well respected by friend and foe alike as those who've I've mentioned. They were intellectual superstars before intellectual became a dirty word, they were known to everyone as well as we know the name 'Einstein' today.

[ericbarrett]

Re windy comments, I sympathize, but I've learned it's ok to be terse. You will never get across to 100% of your readers. Make your prose worth reading for those whom you reach.

[hilbert42]

Thanks, that's what I try to do. You'll note I've enlarged my comment with another windy addendum above. :-)

[cxr]

> few bother to read them

How do you know?

[hilbert42]

Simple, either the thread goes dead or if it's still active and no one posts a comment in reply then one's pretty certain that it's been ignored.

And I've noticed the longer my comments the fewer replies they receive.

[cxr]

That's not the same thing.