Cicero on the primary goal of oratory:
"As, therefore, the two principal qualities required in an Orator, are to be neat and clear in stating the nature of his subject, and warm and forcible in moving the passions; and as he who fires and inflames his audience, will always effect more than he who can barely inform and amuse them..."
Cicero describes the problem the OP reports:
"But let us return to Calvus whom we have just mentioned,—an Orator who had received more literary improvements than Curio, and had a more accurate and delicate manner of speaking, which he conducted with great taste and elegance; but, (by being too minute and nice a critic upon himself,) while he was labouring to correct and refine his language, he suffered all the force and spirit of it to evaporate. In short, it was so exquisitely polished, as to charm the eye of every skilful observer; but it was little noticed by the common people in a crowded Forum, which is the proper theatre of Eloquence."
Nuanced communication not working at scale, 2100 years ago.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9776/pg9776-images.html
Nuance requires representing uncertainty and is higher complexity from accounting for multiple special cases. Placing more cognitive load and attentional demands on receiver.
Human communication is lossy and decoding can be non-trivial inference. Given that everyone comes with differing priors, the more finer grained and complex details are required in reconstructing message intent, the more likely it is to be misconstruected. Failing to attend to a single core detail can rend meaning.
At scale the chance for errors to propagate without correction increases.
Getting rid of fine grained details and communicating a lower entropy message inline with a crowd's biases also ensures it's more likely to survive in a form close to original intent. A good manipulative orator focuses less on truth or content and more on minimizing mismatch between receiver mental states and orator's directional preferences.
Actually it can be helped when everybody agrees that some information must be known by everybody. Communication campaigns, making it a subject in schools...
So the problem uses to be that there are opposing sides trying to beat each other. OK, that's obvious, isn't it? But come to think of it, is society so divided that most people's interests conflicts with somebody else's?
I understand that there are diverse interests dividing countries or continents, but often differences inside the same country seem to be artificially amplified and fuelled.
This sounds like Dawkins conception of a meme: an idea small enough to replicate as a whole without error.
Communicating with more than one person at a time requires dumbed down slogans and short bits of summarized information. Nuanced long form communication is a luxury that can rarely be afforded.
I guess it scales on text with a specific crowd (HN).
PS. I believe the quotes used are a bit misleading because they are used as counterexamples in the original text.
It feels as if the topic, once thought unwieldy and complicated, becomes tractable and clear.
Perhaps the way to handle complicated nuances situations in life is to connect them to a classic problem.
I feel this strategy also works in mathematical fields.
1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.
2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.
3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message.
4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
7. The more important the situation is, the more probable you had forgotten an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.
This hits particularly hard for me. End of last year I was finishing a bigger group project where actual PM was AWOL. Perception, especially in corporate environments, is everything.
I'm not sure they are 'valid' but they are interesting. I think its more of a negative take, to highlight difficulties. I don't think they are always true. For example "4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds." seems the opposite of say televisual political messaging which relies on bombardment of essentially false information to convey meaning and proposed societal behaviour.
Our natural languages uses incremental inquiry to disambiguate context as opposed to using strong protocol. In "Working Backwards", it's the communicator's job to solicit questions from co-workers via pain-staking detailed reviews in meetings ("Bezos scrutinizes every single sentence"). I think of it like constructing a representative survey of ambiguity, and then putting answers in the FAQ that help increase clarity. The more detailed and representative your survey, the more helpful your questions/answers will be to communicate nuance.
With regard to disambiguating through protocol, Organizations evolve jargon to increment protocol, which probably increases semantic alignment somewhat as group size scales. If you read about the history of language, the Rebus principle created protocols of formal alphabets; protocols like grammar gave us formal writing rules. Protocols like TCPIP let our computers talk. Protocol creates more rigid commitments for communication, but also increases potential semantic alignment. As a thought experiment, if we learned to dynamically and deliberately develop jargons en masse, it might create the channels to disambiguate context and communicate nuance at scale.
Do you have a source for this, guide and maybe a book about Amazon things?
What's interesting is that the nuances don't completely fade out of site. They exist in quiet and sometimes quite intricate underground conversations. I've joined organizations where it was howlingly clear that the official messaging was not the way the company really ran.
That invites the question of whether it's worth staying long enough (and being bold enough) to get drawn into the nuanced underground dialogue, too. Sometimes yes. Sometimes that's quite exciting and makes the job more interesting and more durable.
Other times, it's just too hard to wiggle into that circle. Or that circle has its own evasions and power struggles. In those cases, it's easier to meet the basic formal requirements of the job, enjoy the extra time to have a rich life outside of work -- and think hard about what kind of next job would be better.
YES. Nailed it.
In my understand, it's broadcast that is weak at communicating nuance. But if you can figure out how to "tell stories" that propagate via conversation, then your capacity to communicate nuance is GREATLY increased. People will only take in so many bits of information, when they don't feel participant in the making.
I put "tell stories" in scare-quotes because imho they're not truly "told" and they're not truly "stories", at least not in the linear sense. It's more like they're "planted", and they're more like network stories than anything else. To tell them is more like building as escape room than writing a one-pager.
Despite that we still have people that assume “I sent an email and I’m important therefore everyone got the message”. Try running those emails through some tool like Mailchimp and you’ll probably find less than 40% even opened the email, let alone read beyond the first paragraph.
I’ve done a lot of organising events for engineers inside companies where there are like 500+ engineers. You need email, slack, calendar invites and more to get people paying attention. And often they’re paying more attention to LinkedIn than what’s happening on the “inside” … you can run campaigns on LinkedIn that target your own people…
I see a similar flaw in programmers. "I said it once, and therefore everyone has it memorized", as if people are computers who store every utterance in a file system.
> I see this for every post, e.g., when I talked about how latency hadn't improved, one of the most common responses I got was about how I don't understand the good reasons for complexity.
> I literally said there are good reasons for complexity in the post
It feels like this kind of half baked point scoring reply is just a risk of posting on the internet. I'm sure I've been guilty of it at times too, and I think forums like HN or Reddit encourage it.
So you end up having to be overclear in a way that hurts your message.
For example, in just my previous post in another thread, I was talking about how I felt IMAP and SMTP support was important for a mail provider. However, I felt that if I just left it at that, some pedant would come yell at me about how IMAP and SMTP are not secure protocols since they're plaintext. So I wrote out IMAPS and SMTPS to ward off that kind of pedantry.
But I'm still at risk of someone else wanting to score points indicating that actually, IMAPS and SMTPS isn't a thing. And they'd be sort of right, IMAPS and SMTPS are colloqial terms for their corresponding protocols over TLS, but you won't find an IMAPS spec, and if you look in the IMAP RFC, IMAPS is not something that is mentioned.
I don't know how you fix this.
> "But let us return to Calvus whom we have just mentioned,—an Orator who had received more literary improvements than Curio, and had a more accurate and delicate manner of speaking, which he conducted with great taste and elegance; but, (by being too minute and nice a critic upon himself,) while he was labouring to correct and refine his language, he suffered all the force and spirit of it to evaporate. In short, it was so exquisitely polished, as to charm the eye of every skilful observer; but it was little noticed by the common people in a crowded Forum, which is the proper theatre of Eloquence."
Cicero tells you that you ought not worry for the pedant, and instead appeal to simpler messaging if your aim is to target larger publics, the fact that you are saying something which could be taken as "conflictive" is itself a benefit if you foreshadow the conflict "there are some whom would say not so! To them I say begone!" and so on, etcetcetc
Wait am I the pedant in this situation? Ah well.
* Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey.
* Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graphic design (bolding one key sentence or whatever).
* Break up a giant nuanced email into sections.
* If something is critical, make it visual: a picture, explainer video, or an infographic can be really useful for something key.
This is harder than it looks. A quote attributed to Mark Twain is "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." It's a lot easier to go overboard than to distill what needs to be conveyed into the core elements.
Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an email. The first one is the only one to get answered.
Oh hell yes, this is definitely a thing with lots of people. It's one of those WTF realizations that everyone who works in a corporate environment gets slapped in the face with really hard.
There are certain people for which you MUST give 1, maybe 2 sentences at a maximum, address them by name, AND, make sure that they're the only person in the "to:" field. Anything different and you risk ghosting or first-thing-only response.
If there's other folks in the cc who I know may actually read for context, I will add a '"*** details ***"' separator after a few blank lines and then write up normal paragraphs. I know the "details" stuff will get ignored by the target, but that's OK. It's just there for reference and for others who may chime in.
If I receive an email and it’s something I can quickly answer on my phone while waiting for the bus etc., I’ll do so and you’ll get a quick answer. If the email requires me to sit down and compose a long response (or worse, read a paper, or find and run some code) the email gets put on a priority queue to deal with during dedicated email-answering time.
If I receive an email with multiple questions, and one of them I can answer quickly, I might fire off a partial answer (under the theory that a partial answer now is preferable to a complete answer much later).
How hard would it be to have a shared todo list where the team can put every blocking question which needs answering, and everyone who needs to answer can either do that or delegate the decision or approve skipping it? (And I don't mean a sluggish Jira / Electron / Teams / helpdesk which needs 50,000 fields entered to raise a ticket, either).
I suspect it isn't done because nobody can usefully make all the decisions which other people want to push off onto other people, it would take inhuman amounts of time and attention. And that part of the reason "answering only the first question" happens is to drop most questions on the floor, with the idea that important ones will be raised again, as a way to filter out the huge number of unimportant questions. And as a way to deal with the fact that answering one question can change all subsequent questions - if the answer is "that's waiting on finance approval" then it might be about to have a budget cut, or be cancelled, or be delayed until a new financial year, and answering other questions is a waste of time.
Still, for when the other questions are needed, it should be something computer people, programmers, IT specialists, can have machines keep track of without absolutely awful interfaces - and maybe involving automated email and replies if needed, like forum posts and newsgroups have had for decades.
For me, I tend to 'jump' to the first answer that comes to mind, without reading the full nuance, likely because I'm optimizing at replying sooner, so I can move onto the next task, because I have many tasks I need to do. I quickly pattern match and move on.
I had this recently with something I wanted to order online. I asked two questions, the second was answered, the first was ignored. So I had to send a second email to ask the first question again.
I'm really curious if it's a symptom of limited modern attention spans, or if you'd find the same issue in vintage hand-written letters.
- Don't pick the first bullet point, pick the best :)
1. Subjects with keywords. The subject clearly states the purpose of the email, and specifically, what you want them to do with your note. Keywords: ACTION, SIGN, INFO, DECISION, REQUEST, COORD
2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Lead your emails with a short, staccato statement that declares the purpose of the email and action required. The BLUF should quickly answer the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. An effective BLUF distills the most important information for the reader.
3. Be economical. Short emails are more effective than long ones, so try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient doesn’t have to scroll. Use active voice, so it’s clear who is doing the action. If an email requires more explanation, you should list background information after the BLUF as bullet points so that recipients can quickly grasp your message. Link to attachments rather than attaching files. This will likely provide the most recent version of a file. Also, the site will verify that the recipient has the right security credentials to see the file, and you don’t inadvertently send a file to someone who isn’t permitted to view it.
===
[1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...
Don't communicate weightless, measureless, abstract fluff. Give clear goals, a utility function to combine them, deadlines or other time incentives (discounting or bonuses for being early), gather feedback, align with personal affinity, break down responsibility between groups (SREs, infra and platform teams provide the reliability, others build on that).
Set budgets and fix the constraints, draw up the solution space and let the people work.
It's not a mystery.
That's a necessary part of having more than one goal. If they weren't in conflict, you'd only have one goal.
But there are some people you can't get through to, no matter what.
When this happens it screams corporate communication / fluff piece to me, and I generally skip it entirely.
What would help more is if we didn’t get so much pointless information in our mailbox.
1) Assume no prior knowledge of a situation.
2) Provide some context for intent, objectives etc..
3) Greatly simplify the thrust of the message and initially provided only the most highly relevant details.
If you do that - then 'everything else is a detail' - meaning, if someone has a basic understanding of what the situation is, they can go into detail as needed.
If context is not provided, people have no idea what is going on and their professionalism, conscientiousness and curiosity is wasted.
I like the AMZN approach but I'll gather it could be done in a different way.
Help your readers triage. They already get too many emails.
Public discussions quickly devolve onto messaging rather than preserving nuance which itself goes against the main intention and use of said chambers of national debate
For the interested
https://congressionalresearch.org/
Citations from dozens of academics on the topic https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html
Here is a proposal. It has this HUGE upside and this SMALL downside
response: because of this HUGE downside, and the TINY upside, I reject this proposal
If they said "what if the upside wasn't as big as you stated but the downside is larger than you stated" at least you could discuss the evidence. But people love to leap on problems and devils-advocate them into the ground.
You see this all the time in IETF mailing lists. I'm not talking about nit-picking during working group last call on a standard, thats justified. People who simply want to be contrarian, take a devils-advocate stance, leap on any stated downside and on the premise its the proof, destroy the original idea, irrespective of the relative merits pro and con.
So, "we should move to Postgres because of its support of IPv6 and JSON" dies on "but the sheer amount of code we have in MySQL makes this untenable" -which is not a good argument, given the budget and willingness to incur the cost. It doesn't address the upsides of the move at all. Or "but we don't know all the places which use the old SQL forms" which is true, but presupposes we couldn't handle case-by-case the legacy calls into the old SQL binding, or find some way to uncover them.
The negative case arguments used, typically are shorthand for "I don't want to think about this"
It's also ironic to me that someone would try nuanced communication on Twitter, a platform whose very design discourages it. You can't do nuanced communication in 280 characters, but you can do vitriol just fine. So they do the tweet storm which turns off anyone who isn't incredibly interested in what you're saying.
I agree, but I think it's more nuanced than this: smart people can regularly be observed being unable to think critically during conversations (particularly on certain topics), yet the same people can think critically writing code. Assuming this is true (it's certainly quite true), it seems to me that differences between these two contexts causes the mind to behave differently.
Sure it makes sure that the x% of employees who don't get the nuance won't ask questions about it, but it prevents ambitious employees from learning how decisions are made at higher levels.
Understanding how the organization makes decisions can help you make decisions in your day-to-day work. Not to mention the fact that if you one day have aspirations of leading an organization, you need to understand how decisions are made. When over-generalized public statements are made, it not only conceals this information but corrupts it and can lead people to false understandings of how things are done.
Some of the best insight I've gotten about why my organization and my company makes the decisions it does have come from reading discussions from senior leaders in google doc comments. I wish I could be a fly on the wall for live meetings or private conversations.
In the optimal company, employees who don't want to have to grok the nuance would be able to trust the decisions of the leads. However all decisions should be made in the open so that those who do want to go to the effort of understanding something can learn.
You just produce content and the people are just consuming the content in whatevre way they please. Large percentage of people won't consume it in the way you wish.
Because of the disconnect what you want is way less important fir the result than what they want.
If the lieutenant could figure it out, then Napoleon could relay orders to his generals (who would in turn send orders to their subordinates and so on) with confidence that the meaning would not be lost on the battlefield.
Yes, nuanced comms don’t scale so why isn’t the answer—-don’t require scaled comms?
Sometimes to get everyone aligned (as best you can) you have to give everyone the same message at the same time — but it has to be a simple message.
There’s several “checksums” commonly employed in the US Army. The subordinate command’s orders will contain the verbatim mission statement (typically one sentence with the five whys) from the both their commanding unit and the next level up. The order also includes the expanded intent from their commanding unit. Finally, a commander will require back briefs from subordinate commands to make sure plans align.
Eg,
n-level comms are where a CEO communicates to the entire org
1-level comms are where CEO->CTO->VP->Directors->EMs->ICs
2-level comms:
CEO->CTO+VPs
CTO->VPs+Directors
VP->Directors+EMs
Director->EM+ICs
I do wonder if flat is an overreaction though. Intuitively I’d expect a mixed strategy to be most effective.
Edit: reflecting more, most claimed flat companies aren’t. So maybe they are pursuing mixed strategies and comm’ing out a simplified message.
but i wonder why non-scaled communication (if we can also call it that) works in the military?
Thinking about the outcomes of these with this explanation in mind does explain a lot.
Just not sure if this is a case of Confirmation Bias or a genuinely helpful way of looking at corporate communications.
Probably need more examples/data to better understand if he is on to something.
Nonetheless do I think it is a good framework as clearly communicating one thing and dropping the nuances would probably increase the likelihood that the content is being parsed as intended.
Human language is an incredibly lossy form of communication. Practically the entire field of philosophy is a consequence of this.
On one hand, yeah, may be nuanced message doesn't work at scale. However, when saying literally two things (vs one) became nuanced. I wound understand if it was a speech talking about a dozen of different things and their interplay... These were literally two things - create a solid product and let's move forward fast. That's it.
Also, why the hell whole hierarchy of middle management exist in such case? The only reason for it to exist is exactly ability to execute at scale (when things which are coming from the top are propagated properly).
When in fact these things, and 100 other goals and considerations like being green or hiring fairly or paying interns better etc... merely influence each other a little and don't preclude each other except at absurd hyperbolic extremes.
The different goals DO influence each other. But the output product can in fact have a whole bunch of both speed and reliability, probably at the expense of yet another dimension like cost, but actually the same applies there too, you can possibly have all 3, at least to some degree, if the leadership is insightful enough to figure out a way like employing underutilized people or geography, or gamification or crowdsourcing or alternative incentives, whatever.
Pay more or sacrifice in one dimension to get more in another is merely the obvious and easy way, not the only way dictated by some zero sum law of conservation.
Two of his principles are: 1. Create Clarity. 2. Overcommunicate Clarity.
Executives always think they are overcommunicating (they hear themselves speak many times on the same subject so it gets super repetitive for them), but teams rarely have clarity.
A good counterexample to the article would be Amazon's success with its leadership principles--much has been written about this, and I feel no need to repeat it here--or JFK's speech urging America to the moon, in which he spent significant time discussing the tradeoffs and sacrifices required to pursue the lunar landing, and in the end did not unilaterally decide to pursue the mission so much as he proposed a conversation about it and asked Americans to discuss the nuances and decide together. Nuance is possible at scale; it is a sad sign of the times that some now believe it is no longer possible.
If you haven't listened to JFK's speech, I strongly urge you to take a listen, and compare his measured, collegial tone to the tone of our politicians today.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1961...
I have a 'slow is fast' mantra and it's definitely something that a lot of people misunderstand, willfully or otherwise.
I've often shrugged it off as the fact that going fast is exhilarating, while the effort of 'making the change easy' starts to sound dangerously like discipline. Perhaps I've downplayed the fact that A->B can sound an awful lot like A & B.
Nuance will be pruned at scale if inessential. It’s a feature, not a bug.
The popular stories are [perceived as essential] for survival and propagation.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O...
The amount of complaining about "dumb management" amongst software engineers is truly out of control I find.
Newsflash, usually your principal engineer and VP are a lot cleverer than you, on average. They're at the top of a process to weed out idiots and are paid a multiple of your salary.
I usually start from the position of "my VP is a smart and clever person" and work backwards, ALWAYS. It seems like this attitude is exceptionally rare though.
The managers obviously didn't want to use nuance. They openly state that it would then enable those who they manage to negotiate with them, which is a power dynamic they'd rather avoid.
If management was sensitive to the feedback, they could intelligently guide the organization through the trade offs involved, instead of blindly charging forward into subsequent, totally avoidable, brick walls.
Software isn't as simple as making gears. Gears themselves are nowhere near as easy to get right as you think, by the way. When you produce gears, there are well known trade-offs in terms of manufacturing costs, maintenance requirements, and service life. None of that is true with software.
Because the best source of information is with the programmers, and the users of the software, any feedback paths between them should be encouraged, and listened to by management, not crushed to meet the quarterly goals.
And the Romney critique as the "flipping Mormon" can also be seen as a rejection of nuance.
Romney was a pretty successful Governor of a liberal state. He needed to appeal to nationwide Republicans in the primary so he slid a lot further to the right. Then he was up against a reasonably popular Democratic president, so he slid back to the middle.
The only nuance was that he tried to muddy the sloshing to make it look like he wasn't changing his positions.
Post on any internet forum about some minor drawbacks of Technology X, and the comments will instantly split between those who feel personally offended and must defend the sanctity of X, and those who take the post as proof that X must not be used at all. People love to think in black & white. People don't like to parse "A if (B and (C or not-D))". It takes much training and discipline to overcome the instinct for simplification.
You can clarify yourself and correct any misunderstandings if you're in a small group that shares a lot of context, but this quickly becomes impossible as the group gets larger. Even competent statesmen struggle to convey "A if B else C" in their speeches.
When you appreciate the nuance, how do you decide what to strip away?
Nothing really useful in the thread but the conclusion caught my attention: "Azure has, of course, also lapped Google on enterprise features & sales and is a solid #2 in cloud despite starting with infrastructure that was a decade behind Google's, technically."
This didn't happen because of any communication strategy from VPs to developers. It happened because MS is an enterprise company with a strong brand.
but nuanced communication is also a skill that can be worked on, and certain classes of misunderstandings can be mitigated. dan calls this out in his post, but ironically a major one was missed in it as well: the resulting conversation seems to be entirely about individuals capability (based on IQ and other BS) to understand messages conveyed to them, rather than about the complex organizational dynamics that might result in someone being pushed into interpreting a message as something other than what it is
EDIT: I'd also note that nuanced comms are equally difficult in large orgs irregardless of the size of the group being spoken to. For example, I've had VP+ (a smaller group given that the comms are going upward rather than down the org chart) misinterpret technical findings presented to them. There's so much extra cognitive overhead inherent in interpreting messages when you're in a Machiavellian experiment (aka the modern bigco environment)
The “work” is challenging, but the communications is much harder than I expected. It’s difficult to actually say anything at all because nobody will perceive what you say the same way, and then the telephone game with amplify whatever insecurities or worries that folks have.
The hard part about flipping from “move fast and break things” to more order is knowing when the right time is to transition. The other hard part is that the official “communications” functions live in a different vertical, and getting them involved often makes things worse. So we get stuck getting engineers and interns to communicate with people.
But just as much, this is a Microsoft division. That company has historically won by having more features sooner than competitors with the problem of the whole thing being a mess being a secondary consideration. Sure, in this case, the risk is they'll push so hard the whole thing blows up - but that doesn't mean you don't push as hard as possible because it's at least perceived that if you don't that, whether you blow-up or not won't matter (see the concept of technical debt, etc).
Bruh
When I was in grade school I remember my teachers used to constantly stress the importance of primary sources. And I didn’t really understand the importance until much later in life. Why do all that work when someone else has neatly summarized it for me on wikipedia? Now I basically have a rule where I don’t allow myself to have a strong opinion on something unless I’ve gone and read up on primary sources.
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/danluu/status/1487228574608211969
I'm preparing to launch my SaaS, and I'm wondering do I start with the fun and cheeky marketing "Hey, this was designed for board games, but you can use it for so much more" OR do I pair with "Infrastructure designed for JamStack" (which is a bit of a lie).
I've started writing the Amazon style press release and FAQ to help me, but I'm excited to start the train on selling a crazy new platform.
Communication is very hard.
That's a pretty good question to ask, at any job interview. I will use this tip! (won't ask it on the first interview, but it's pretty usefull for a second or third interview)
You just picked a single item and acted as though it were the only consideration in the universe.
Did be anywhere say that this interesting phenomenon he observed was the worst thing in the world and made MS intolerable? Did he anywhere say that this was a uniquely MS problem?
This article was about dynamics of one-to-many communication with humans, not about why MS sucks.
> You just picked a single item and acted as though it were the only consideration in the universe. Did he anywhere say that this interesting phenomenon he observed was the worst thing in the world and made MS intolerable? Did he anywhere say that this was a uniquely MS problem?
This also seems like a great example.
I’ve genuinely never considered that.
once you’ve got reliability deep-seated in the culture, then you can talk about velocity all you want without worrying that your teams will make confused tradeoffs. in effect, you’ve communicated the nuanced concept that “we move fast, but always within the constraints that provide for a reliable product”. most people aren’t consciously thinking about it that way (not a bad thing), but their behavior matches what you were originally wanting to convey with a nuanced message.
1. Communicate intent.
2. Explain why.
3. Do not use more than 3 bullet points.
If your organization is large, you create one actionable, concrete, clear message, and you stick to it, and you communicate it downwards.
Seeing it in action is Microsoft is not shocking.
Many of the failures of public policy in recent years stems from a failure to confront how stupid the public at large is.
"Nuanced communication usually doesn't work." seems more accurate. Being precise and clear is hard.
Sounds more serious than "meme pics" style. :)
It's ironic that he's communicating this on Twitter, a medium where nuance is particularly hard to convey, and where the audience is especially prone to missing it. I'm sure that's not lost on him.
One thing to note: the part about it being less of a problem when people misunderstand an article on HN than if they misunderstand a business communication made me think of (one time) when the CEO of our company defined a new strategy based on an article on Product Lead Growth he'd read. Or rather evidently misread, since he neglected the most important parts. My conclusion is that these things are interrelated, and mistakes can compound.
I really do think that reading comprehension is one of those things everybody (especially STEM people) assume they're good at, but usually they're actually just terrible at it, and supremely confident about that. The same goes with clear writing, which (to me) is even harder.
It's not just not easy to convey there, it's not tolerated by a large part of the population there.
Covid policy for example. Some countries take into account natural immunity (more nuance). Others don't and simply require everyone to be vaccinated regardless (less nuance). Some recommend or even require kids to get the Covid vaccine (less nuance - everyone take it), other countries recommend against (more nuance - some should, some shouldn't). They all have access to the same data. Is this simply reflective of a different approach in communication? Or a different level of confidence or respect for the population to grok nuance?
It's just easier to control people if you justify treating them like idiots.
Quickly self promote aggressively for its own sake and product and users be damned
That said, Organizations with professionals should be able to do nuance, at least a bit of it.
But the general public at large ... you're dealing with 'lowest common denominator' which is 'issues with literacy' and harder to grasp - very limited, care, attention span, and may not even be listening to the message - and may be getting misinformation from elsewhere.
Communicating clearly is a skill.
A lot of marketing people I believe have missed the message on this, every day I come across a new product and can't really understand what it does, the value proposition, who it's for, etc.. while at the same time there's tons of arbitrary marketing verbiage. Words matter.
The rules for Public Communications are the same as they are for branding: Consistency, Clarity, Authenticity. A simple, legitimate message, repeated consistently. "Keep Calm and Move On". "Get Vaccinated". "Wear a Mask". etc..
Early in the pandemic, virtually all the major health orgs spread the message "masks for the public don't work". Of course, the real issue was that there was a valid fear that there would be a run on masks and not enough for healthcare workers. There was never any significant evidence masks for the public don't work, on the contrary there was at least some flu-based evidenced that they were beneficial, but at best you could say "we don't know".
So I'm very sympathetic to the authorities trying to give simple messages, but in the end the original guidance really bit them in the ass and made a lot of people lose trust. I wonder if the simpler message could have been "don't use a mask, because it means nobody will be left to treat you when your nurse/doctor needs a mask".
We aren't supposed to make decisions on medical interventions based on "evidence that X doesn't work". Otherwise, we'd default to just doing stuff until we had evidence that it was worse than doing nothing at all. Literally every failed drug ever tested had a biologically plausible reason for starting the test, and yet we know that most drugs don't work when you take them out of the lab!
Saying that there were some papers out there recommending masks is beside the point, because you can find papers recommending lots of things that don't work. Pretty much anything, in fact. We can see the double-standard at play directly with the Ivermectin debate. Public masks and Ivermectin both have an evidence base of low-quality data, with weak effect sizes and huge error bars overall, and a clear bias of the strongest reported effect toward the lowest-quality evidence. But one is evil and the other is magic, depending on your politics.
To take it back to the subject of the OP, here we have two issues that are fundamentally nuanced (the evidence bases are ambigious, at best), and collapsing the range of allowable communication to "you must do X!" leads to obviously wrong outcomes no matter what you do. So maybe we shouldn't be doing anything at all? Or maybe...maybe...we could try to get answers with experiments, instead of just making things up and asserting that we're right?
For whatever it's worth, I recommend this paper as a balanced, comprehensive review of mask literature (not just cloth, though that is the title). You will not find a more complete treatment of the data for public masking:
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-11/working-pa...
Speaking down from a moral high ground obviously does not motivate everyone to do what we want, but it does motivate everyone ... a) it makes those who agree feel good for following the agreed rules b) it makes those who disagree feel like their human experience is invalid and motivates them to find a counter argument that feels just as strong (I HAVE to fight to protect my RIGHTS)
Obviously this is not the only thing that's going on. Every crisis is someone's opportunity.
I don't just mean "lay people", I mean the relatively well-educated HN crowd and even some medical professionals misunderstood what was said. Across the entire group, literally every part of what was publicly said by government agencies was misinterpreted in some way and turned into an argument.
For example, the "We don't recommend the general public wear masks at this time" was consistently misinterpreted to mean "Masks don't work", which is not what was said at all. The more nuanced and complex statement has too many parts to it, and just like Dan Luu said, the second you have an AND or an OR, (or IF, THEN, BUT, etc...) people will just blank and see some random subset of the logical statement.
The full nuanced statement was: "The CURRENT scientific evidence that is available does not support (OR deny!) that mask wearing by (specifically) the general public is (cost) effective enough to legally mandate. ALSO, at THIS TIME there is insufficient supply of masks, AND UNTIL supply can be increased the masks should be prioritised for health workers (that are trained to wear them properly)."
(This of course implies that once evidence is available to support the efficacy of public mask wearing AND the supply problems are solved, the recommendation may change.)
Something like 50% of the people listening to that misunderstood it. And then when the recommendation changed, they lost their minds. "I don't even know what to believe any more! They keep saying different things!" was a common response.
People got especially confused by the "current scientific evidence does not support", because to them that sounds like "scientists say it doesn't work". That's not what that says at all, it's just a statement to say that not enough studies have been done at all to say anything one way or another confidently.
This kind of precise speech as heard from scientists is ironically less effective than simpler but technically incorrect statements!
For developers: One issue I've had with Agile techniques is that that same people that just can't wrap their heads around government agencies changing their recommendations to fit the changing scenarios of an unfolding event like a pandemic also work in large enterprises and are unable to comprehend a plan changing. Ever. Not even once. Everything has to be known ahead, forever, and be set in stone and never change in any way. It's "just too confusing", a sentence I've heard verbatim more than once.
Anthony Fauci literally said that "there's no reason for the general public to be walking around with a mask". On television. I'll link to this version, since hilariously, facebook has "fact checked" it:
https://www.facebook.com/DeannaForCongress/videos/3682499312...
(note that I have no idea who "Deanna for Congress" is. This is the first version of the video I could find -- linked from a reuters article also claiming to "fact check" it [1] -- because google has gone out of its way to bury the video.)
It's pretty darned ironic that this is your preferred example of people "not understanding" messaging. If you search for this, you will find hundreds of other articles "fact-checking" this, even though he said it, it's not debatable, and the various walk-backs and fact-checks and whatnot simply make the issue look ridiculously farcical.
Just to underscore the point here, the Reuters "fact check" admits he said it (since, to be fair, he said it), and the only "fact checking" involved is that the official government position has changed. It wasn't taken out of context. It wasn't a misquote. It wasn't "misinterpreted". He said masks don't work other than blocking "the occasional droplet", and that there's no reason for the public to wear them. This was March 2020.
While it's true (and obvious to anyone) that the government position has changed, it doesn't change the "fact" of what was said in the past. And yet, people persist in trying to do this absurd stuff.
Let's be honest with ourselves: if this leads to doubt amongst the public, is this the fault of a dense public not understanding sophisticated, super-nuanced messaging, or simply that the messaging was muddled and has wavered over time, and that some parties are engaged in blatant attempts to re-write the factual record?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-...
> The full nuanced statement was: "The CURRENT scientific evidence that is available does not support (OR deny!) that mask wearing by (specifically) the general public is (cost) effective enough to legally mandate. ALSO, at THIS TIME there is insufficient supply of masks, AND UNTIL supply can be increased the masks should be prioritised for health workers (that are trained to wear them properly)."
100% false. The statements were about what individuals should do. Not what governments would mandate. And some authorities said masks don't work expressly. "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"[1]
> People got especially confused by the "current scientific evidence does not support", because to them that sounds like "scientists say it doesn't work". That's not what that says at all, it's just a statement to say that not enough studies have been done at all to say anything one way or another confidently.
Current scientific evidence showed masks were effective for closely related coronaviruses. Do you doubt they would have recommended masks without a shortage?
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200301144229/https://twitter.co...
Science doesn’t tell anybody what to do. People can completely understand the science if something but still feel a given course of action is inappropriate. And that is just fine.