Hello Argo, I like some of the topics that you address.
1. With regard to Internet hardware solutions, I won't say much, the experts are out there to consult. The topic that is not much covered, (well, it is, if you look for it), is privacy. Do we have to submit to surveillance in order to explore the web? Some might say that it doesn't matter. I think they will learn the hard way. I wrote some simple solutions at: https://worlddeterminants.substack.com/p/5-surveillance-and-basic-internet. It is a starting point. For me a more complete solution has become second nature. But I don't share it to the uninterested.
2. On the next topic you are comparing richness and portability in communications. Richness must be like live streaming of public events. Portability is like a poster or a printed flyer with a slogan on it.
I admit that with the speaker’s body language or tone of voice the medium will convey information in ways not directly part of, but integral to, the message. That is if you want to know more about who is delivering the message. Should I vote for this lady or not? But for a clear written message from you or me, I think that how I hold my face is only a distraction, based on my particular tension level. (I am rather relaxed by the way.) So I question; is face to face at all valuable in investigating or discussing some new concepts, or new ways of looking at things?
3. Let's look at the dynamics of the unknown. I am saying that what is new, is presently unknown, at least for those discussing it and considering it to be new. First of all the unknown is uncomfortable, it engenders an emotion. This is a built-in human safety mechanism, a flag that requires us to have an explanation for everything. (Even if the explanation is absurd, is serves us to calm that emotion.)
Second, what is not new, the status quo, serves us in certain ways. If we have a perceived privileged lifestyle we probably think that the current way to look at it prolongs our privilege. With that we have a great fear of what could be new, (unknown results), and a great hesitation to give a fair listening to someone presenting it. We will try to bend the conversation in another way, introduce non-sequiturs, dismiss it, or tarnish the presenter's reputation. So face to face is not effective, unless the topic is very mundane, joking, entertaining, or non-consequential. Or if it was about running a large organization with an agreed upon mission statement, (as you talk about below). I wouldn't be interested in any of those topics.
With writing I can head off certain objections before they come up. I think that mutes them. (What-about this, what-about that.) I say, that is exactly what we are investigating, stay with us.
4. You have said that maximal portability means a weak message that can reach the ends of the earth, and portability is exemplified by text. Frankly I don't see it, nor agree that writing is only for a weak message, quite the opposite. You're also saying writing often becomes difficult to read without a writer actively cutting down on words, organizing paragraphs, and making sure sentences flow into one another. As the medium has to compromise between length and completeness, the richness of a message often suffers. You have 4,800 words here, your paragraphs are organized, and your sentences flow one into another. And I see no problem with it. True, some people are not going to tackle a 20 minute read. They say they are too busy, but really they are too nervous or scattered, and have a huge mental noise running all the time.
I tell you though; you can write in any format you desire, and those people still won't get it, don't want to get it (or anything else). That is the wrong audience. So my claim is how do you convince people; with a Youtube that has 10,000 views, or a master / apprentice guild, or Socrates with 6-8 students or a Jesus with 12 disciples? One-on-one is superior every time for transmitting what has not been thought about before. A new context is the only way to change behavior, and thus change the circumstances.
Of course we live in the Internet age, and we want to go viral and make a few dollars on all of our views, or from our Patreon followers. I am not in that club. No need.
5. For me, writing is the only way to go. I am not repeating some PhD thesis from 30 years ago. I am discovering what is new to me, day be day. It is my latest evolution of thought. If you or the other pick up on it, great, leave a comment on what doesn't compute to you. But my understanding has been increased. I don't even watch videos, just give me the transcript. The written word is linear, but not time constrained like a video. I can scan through text, take copy/paste notes, or jump around to see if it merits further consideration.
6. Society is constantly on the move. So words are constantly "out-of-date". There is the denotation and the connotation. The connotation moves much faster, and it varies from place to place within one language group. By now society is morphing so fast that irrelevant words can no longer be ignored. In much of my writing I have to use a phrase, to hone in on what I mean. Or I put an old word in quotes to indicate, it is not the conventional meaning. Honestly, I find there is not enough vocabulary to adequately express, (especially with world atrocities, which no word can capture them), even though it is so easy to look through the thesaurus. Yes new jargon can be adopted by groups. Word-smithing would be a super addition.
7. Problems of interrelations in a large enterprise, I cannot comment on. The larger the interrelations, the more standardized behaviors and decision-making has to become. Then to "sort of" keep up to date, you have to make massive revisions, or at least tinker with it every 6 months, which throws everyone into a loop, especially the customers. You have to fit yourself into this giant machine. You have expounded upon it well. Why a fixed procedure can make such a success, well that is political, and called monopoly markets. Without a monopoly, you would have to be agile. Take it all the way, monopoly means gunboat diplomacy.
I successfully avoided the corporate throughout all of my career. Probably precisely for that reason, that I wanted to remain agile. If you are speaking from personal experience, which I think you are, I feel for you.
A few comments: New stars get promoted because they have a cheaper salary requirement and less of a pension burden.
Leaders are out of touch (with you, because you are not important), but they intently follow the power oligarchs, and those that give them campaign donations.
Psychopaths do make promises to preserve your perceived privileged lifestyles. (Not for everyone though).
Okay, since some of these points seem to solve themselves, as interesting as they are, I'll respond, specifically, to #s 2, 3, 4, and 5.
2: I agree with you that writing is the best way to spread new concepts and ideas in my experience. It's also the easiest way to provide a record to go back to. Key to the discussion, however, is that individuals are not all the same. They may have different levels of verbal ability, have learned English differently (British vs. American English) or have a different frame of mind/of reference in mind that impedes transmission via writing. For those situations, the additional context provided by voice, video, or face-to-face is necessary.
Delivery of emotional components is also important, and best delivered with a context bomb in face to face communication.
3: In the specific case of a leader of an organization, face-to-face allows people to understand, clearly, that it is you that is speaking. In the general case that the unknown is easier explored through writing, I only disagree in some cases. While it is better for exploring a concept that is already fleshed out in your mind, face-to-face and video/audo calls allow for, if I may say, higher bitrate instant collaboration. The setting and body language can also help calm your conversational partner's mind - rather than putting them on edge, you try to soothe them and convince them that you are on their side (or at least, not out to get them).
It depends heavily on the specific massage, the where, and the why.
4: I was looking at this mostly from an organizational perspective, particularly in terms of cost, and for those, it is much easier to keep an image file or a big document full of text and run off copies than to get everyone to watch a video of a speech. That being said, I was wrong to use the word "weak" - without specifying that I meant emotionally or contextually weak. The total bitrate and the, uh, "emotional component" of that bitrate is lower than nearly all other media in my opinion. I pointed out in a previous piece on Verbal Algebra that good word choice comes down to the bitrate of the words used - or their ability to convey more meaning in less time. See link below.
Not my best work and somewhat unedited, but I felt I needed to simply push it out, because it was interesting. Perhaps I'll revisit it in the future.
As for words, technically, there are four articles that I consider one big one - the Information Superhighway, Communication Overhead, Diversity Is Our Strength (Upcoming) and Global Paradox 2023 (also upcoming). Those in total... I don't even want to think about it, but it comes up to over ten thousand words, probably fifteen thousand before I cut it. I cut it into four, both because it became unlikely that anyone would read, and very unwieldy to write.
When I said you couldn't suffer communication overhead with yourself, I think that was an oversimplification. You can suffer communication overhead with your past or future self. That might be fodder for another proper article.
5: You've hit upon one of the reasons I decided to write in the first place. Most of the time, I have simply discussed these ideas with others, and they seemed to like it, so I can simply put them down for the record.
Now for the personal stuff:
No, I have not done corporate, but I know from friends and from an internship experience what it's like. While I agree that it is stultifying, I believe it does have a place. There are people in this world who have chosen to abdicate responsibility (more on that in GP 2023), and that is their choice, as much as I disagree.
New stars' salaries, I agree with, though to put it in this essay may have broken the flow somewhat. While I could have put them in footnotes or parentheses, I was focused on the argument.
Psychos will make that promise even if they know they can't do it. And at that level, communication has become truth - the symbol has become the phenomenon - so most of them go along with it. It is quite literally their job.
For the richness medium examples, I do feel that a well written text is a lot more efficient at delivering information than video or audio calls. I would often have long work meetings for 30-60 minutes which could honestly be summarized in a short read. Written logs have the amazing benefit of being easily revisited instead of trying to recall what the person said in the hour long meeting. Though the main benefit of the live calls was being able to have synchronous feedback
For communication overhead, yeah, I've read that startups try to minimize this via having a flatter structure. This might be similar to the decentralization thing you mentioned.Though, once it hits a certain size, it does tend to have a soft chain of command, similar to more standard organizations.
Unfortunately, yeah, from my experience soft skills are a big deal. To get promoted at my current job, most of my feedback basically consisted of working on "leadership" skills. there was rarely any comment on trying to improve technical aspects.
I've noticed this too with the people who are managers or leads. They tend to be more outgoing or visible (not really sure how to describe it), which makes sense. Managing people is a skill. Communication, in general, is a skill, and an average developer who is good at communicating would (in theory) work better in a team than a rockstar lonewolf dev
I've read about other developer's similar experiences too.
Also, if you look at it from the receiver's perspective, how would you know someone's ideas are good if it's not being communicated well?
Text can be risky and not very good for much other than dashing off quick messages if not handled correctly. Hugely painful.
To your point that soft skills are a big deal for internal promotions, I think that technical skills are still a big deal - just that they were already selected for at your level, and that the next sort is by soft skill, because that's what's more necessary going forward.
As for knowing whether an idea is good and not communicated well - that takes context and judgment. You need to know both what was said and what the person actually means before being able to evaluate if it's a communication issue or not. It is at that point that you should probably move to a richer method of communication, taking the person aside for extended conversation, audio chat, or proof of concept.
Generally, though, if you find yourself puzzling over something someone said, wondering what the meaning of the expression is, there has been a communication failure. Whether that is due to misuse of jargon or technical weakness (just download more RAM) cannot be parsed out without greater context and explanation - the quickest way is to move to a richer method.
That's the general principle when dealing with large amounts of communication - use the most portable method available, only upgrading to richer ones if the messages don't reach.
Great points all the way through. I explored some of this on the Con[of]Text exploring the risks of 'reading' into the writen words. This essay adds a lot more with the other implications and ideosyncracies.
I actually read that before starting this, and it made its way back in - there's a part of the definition where I call out writing skills as specifically different ones from the ones you hire people for, so most people need to adjust.
Hello Argo, I like some of the topics that you address.
1. With regard to Internet hardware solutions, I won't say much, the experts are out there to consult. The topic that is not much covered, (well, it is, if you look for it), is privacy. Do we have to submit to surveillance in order to explore the web? Some might say that it doesn't matter. I think they will learn the hard way. I wrote some simple solutions at: https://worlddeterminants.substack.com/p/5-surveillance-and-basic-internet. It is a starting point. For me a more complete solution has become second nature. But I don't share it to the uninterested.
2. On the next topic you are comparing richness and portability in communications. Richness must be like live streaming of public events. Portability is like a poster or a printed flyer with a slogan on it.
I admit that with the speaker’s body language or tone of voice the medium will convey information in ways not directly part of, but integral to, the message. That is if you want to know more about who is delivering the message. Should I vote for this lady or not? But for a clear written message from you or me, I think that how I hold my face is only a distraction, based on my particular tension level. (I am rather relaxed by the way.) So I question; is face to face at all valuable in investigating or discussing some new concepts, or new ways of looking at things?
3. Let's look at the dynamics of the unknown. I am saying that what is new, is presently unknown, at least for those discussing it and considering it to be new. First of all the unknown is uncomfortable, it engenders an emotion. This is a built-in human safety mechanism, a flag that requires us to have an explanation for everything. (Even if the explanation is absurd, is serves us to calm that emotion.)
Second, what is not new, the status quo, serves us in certain ways. If we have a perceived privileged lifestyle we probably think that the current way to look at it prolongs our privilege. With that we have a great fear of what could be new, (unknown results), and a great hesitation to give a fair listening to someone presenting it. We will try to bend the conversation in another way, introduce non-sequiturs, dismiss it, or tarnish the presenter's reputation. So face to face is not effective, unless the topic is very mundane, joking, entertaining, or non-consequential. Or if it was about running a large organization with an agreed upon mission statement, (as you talk about below). I wouldn't be interested in any of those topics.
With writing I can head off certain objections before they come up. I think that mutes them. (What-about this, what-about that.) I say, that is exactly what we are investigating, stay with us.
4. You have said that maximal portability means a weak message that can reach the ends of the earth, and portability is exemplified by text. Frankly I don't see it, nor agree that writing is only for a weak message, quite the opposite. You're also saying writing often becomes difficult to read without a writer actively cutting down on words, organizing paragraphs, and making sure sentences flow into one another. As the medium has to compromise between length and completeness, the richness of a message often suffers. You have 4,800 words here, your paragraphs are organized, and your sentences flow one into another. And I see no problem with it. True, some people are not going to tackle a 20 minute read. They say they are too busy, but really they are too nervous or scattered, and have a huge mental noise running all the time.
I tell you though; you can write in any format you desire, and those people still won't get it, don't want to get it (or anything else). That is the wrong audience. So my claim is how do you convince people; with a Youtube that has 10,000 views, or a master / apprentice guild, or Socrates with 6-8 students or a Jesus with 12 disciples? One-on-one is superior every time for transmitting what has not been thought about before. A new context is the only way to change behavior, and thus change the circumstances.
Of course we live in the Internet age, and we want to go viral and make a few dollars on all of our views, or from our Patreon followers. I am not in that club. No need.
5. For me, writing is the only way to go. I am not repeating some PhD thesis from 30 years ago. I am discovering what is new to me, day be day. It is my latest evolution of thought. If you or the other pick up on it, great, leave a comment on what doesn't compute to you. But my understanding has been increased. I don't even watch videos, just give me the transcript. The written word is linear, but not time constrained like a video. I can scan through text, take copy/paste notes, or jump around to see if it merits further consideration.
6. Society is constantly on the move. So words are constantly "out-of-date". There is the denotation and the connotation. The connotation moves much faster, and it varies from place to place within one language group. By now society is morphing so fast that irrelevant words can no longer be ignored. In much of my writing I have to use a phrase, to hone in on what I mean. Or I put an old word in quotes to indicate, it is not the conventional meaning. Honestly, I find there is not enough vocabulary to adequately express, (especially with world atrocities, which no word can capture them), even though it is so easy to look through the thesaurus. Yes new jargon can be adopted by groups. Word-smithing would be a super addition.
7. Problems of interrelations in a large enterprise, I cannot comment on. The larger the interrelations, the more standardized behaviors and decision-making has to become. Then to "sort of" keep up to date, you have to make massive revisions, or at least tinker with it every 6 months, which throws everyone into a loop, especially the customers. You have to fit yourself into this giant machine. You have expounded upon it well. Why a fixed procedure can make such a success, well that is political, and called monopoly markets. Without a monopoly, you would have to be agile. Take it all the way, monopoly means gunboat diplomacy.
I successfully avoided the corporate throughout all of my career. Probably precisely for that reason, that I wanted to remain agile. If you are speaking from personal experience, which I think you are, I feel for you.
A few comments: New stars get promoted because they have a cheaper salary requirement and less of a pension burden.
Leaders are out of touch (with you, because you are not important), but they intently follow the power oligarchs, and those that give them campaign donations.
Psychopaths do make promises to preserve your perceived privileged lifestyles. (Not for everyone though).
Looking forward to your future posts.
.
Okay, since some of these points seem to solve themselves, as interesting as they are, I'll respond, specifically, to #s 2, 3, 4, and 5.
2: I agree with you that writing is the best way to spread new concepts and ideas in my experience. It's also the easiest way to provide a record to go back to. Key to the discussion, however, is that individuals are not all the same. They may have different levels of verbal ability, have learned English differently (British vs. American English) or have a different frame of mind/of reference in mind that impedes transmission via writing. For those situations, the additional context provided by voice, video, or face-to-face is necessary.
Delivery of emotional components is also important, and best delivered with a context bomb in face to face communication.
3: In the specific case of a leader of an organization, face-to-face allows people to understand, clearly, that it is you that is speaking. In the general case that the unknown is easier explored through writing, I only disagree in some cases. While it is better for exploring a concept that is already fleshed out in your mind, face-to-face and video/audo calls allow for, if I may say, higher bitrate instant collaboration. The setting and body language can also help calm your conversational partner's mind - rather than putting them on edge, you try to soothe them and convince them that you are on their side (or at least, not out to get them).
It depends heavily on the specific massage, the where, and the why.
4: I was looking at this mostly from an organizational perspective, particularly in terms of cost, and for those, it is much easier to keep an image file or a big document full of text and run off copies than to get everyone to watch a video of a speech. That being said, I was wrong to use the word "weak" - without specifying that I meant emotionally or contextually weak. The total bitrate and the, uh, "emotional component" of that bitrate is lower than nearly all other media in my opinion. I pointed out in a previous piece on Verbal Algebra that good word choice comes down to the bitrate of the words used - or their ability to convey more meaning in less time. See link below.
https://open.substack.com/pub/argomend/p/verbal-algebra?r=28g8km&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Not my best work and somewhat unedited, but I felt I needed to simply push it out, because it was interesting. Perhaps I'll revisit it in the future.
As for words, technically, there are four articles that I consider one big one - the Information Superhighway, Communication Overhead, Diversity Is Our Strength (Upcoming) and Global Paradox 2023 (also upcoming). Those in total... I don't even want to think about it, but it comes up to over ten thousand words, probably fifteen thousand before I cut it. I cut it into four, both because it became unlikely that anyone would read, and very unwieldy to write.
When I said you couldn't suffer communication overhead with yourself, I think that was an oversimplification. You can suffer communication overhead with your past or future self. That might be fodder for another proper article.
5: You've hit upon one of the reasons I decided to write in the first place. Most of the time, I have simply discussed these ideas with others, and they seemed to like it, so I can simply put them down for the record.
Now for the personal stuff:
No, I have not done corporate, but I know from friends and from an internship experience what it's like. While I agree that it is stultifying, I believe it does have a place. There are people in this world who have chosen to abdicate responsibility (more on that in GP 2023), and that is their choice, as much as I disagree.
New stars' salaries, I agree with, though to put it in this essay may have broken the flow somewhat. While I could have put them in footnotes or parentheses, I was focused on the argument.
Psychos will make that promise even if they know they can't do it. And at that level, communication has become truth - the symbol has become the phenomenon - so most of them go along with it. It is quite literally their job.
Great read!
For the richness medium examples, I do feel that a well written text is a lot more efficient at delivering information than video or audio calls. I would often have long work meetings for 30-60 minutes which could honestly be summarized in a short read. Written logs have the amazing benefit of being easily revisited instead of trying to recall what the person said in the hour long meeting. Though the main benefit of the live calls was being able to have synchronous feedback
For communication overhead, yeah, I've read that startups try to minimize this via having a flatter structure. This might be similar to the decentralization thing you mentioned.Though, once it hits a certain size, it does tend to have a soft chain of command, similar to more standard organizations.
Unfortunately, yeah, from my experience soft skills are a big deal. To get promoted at my current job, most of my feedback basically consisted of working on "leadership" skills. there was rarely any comment on trying to improve technical aspects.
I've noticed this too with the people who are managers or leads. They tend to be more outgoing or visible (not really sure how to describe it), which makes sense. Managing people is a skill. Communication, in general, is a skill, and an average developer who is good at communicating would (in theory) work better in a team than a rockstar lonewolf dev
I've read about other developer's similar experiences too.
Also, if you look at it from the receiver's perspective, how would you know someone's ideas are good if it's not being communicated well?
Text can be risky and not very good for much other than dashing off quick messages if not handled correctly. Hugely painful.
To your point that soft skills are a big deal for internal promotions, I think that technical skills are still a big deal - just that they were already selected for at your level, and that the next sort is by soft skill, because that's what's more necessary going forward.
As for knowing whether an idea is good and not communicated well - that takes context and judgment. You need to know both what was said and what the person actually means before being able to evaluate if it's a communication issue or not. It is at that point that you should probably move to a richer method of communication, taking the person aside for extended conversation, audio chat, or proof of concept.
Generally, though, if you find yourself puzzling over something someone said, wondering what the meaning of the expression is, there has been a communication failure. Whether that is due to misuse of jargon or technical weakness (just download more RAM) cannot be parsed out without greater context and explanation - the quickest way is to move to a richer method.
Hope that helps!
ah yeah, I noticed that when there's something not clear, my coworkers' first instinct is "are you free for a quick call?"
That's the general principle when dealing with large amounts of communication - use the most portable method available, only upgrading to richer ones if the messages don't reach.
Great points all the way through. I explored some of this on the Con[of]Text exploring the risks of 'reading' into the writen words. This essay adds a lot more with the other implications and ideosyncracies.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/the-conoftext
I actually read that before starting this, and it made its way back in - there's a part of the definition where I call out writing skills as specifically different ones from the ones you hire people for, so most people need to adjust.
Good point.
What about literature?