Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon.
Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the word scalable at all. It often works like magic and they quickly reach a shared understanding.
A great word to taboo in hardware tech is "performance".
I once witnessed a very heated argument among a group of programmers discussing some code on a microcontroller. Half of them thought the performance was abysmal. The other half thought the performance was great. To everybody it was obvious to see what the performance was, why were the other half being so bone-headed about it?
Turned out the first group were trained mechanical engineers, the second were trained software engineers. For the first group, "performance" meant how closely the motion of the device attached to the microcontroller tracked the optimal path. I.e. the performance of the function approximation that the microcontroller code was doing. To the second group, it meant how fast the code ran. This was completely irrelevant to the first group, since as long as it managed to run 1000 times per second (which it easily did), nobody cared how many nanoseconds there were to spare each cycle. Why are you even talking about that? The performance is shit, we need to improve it and who cares if it takes a few more CPU cycles.
I wish it was a common practice to ban certain words from difficult conversations. But whenever I suggest it people just talk past me as though I've said some weird thing.
There's facts and opinions, but also definitions, and too often disagreements boil down to a different definition of a single word. Ban that word and say what you mean and the disagreement may suddenly be gone.
Edit: I wrote this before reading the second paragraph. :) I'll leave it as an alternate way of saying the same.
Let me ask, has anyone successfully "tabooed" certain words, or do people not understand the purpose of doing so?
I don't use the "taboo" terminology, but I frequently ask people to operationalise their definitions in arguments. ("What specific steps would I go through to test whether the system is scalable or not?")
The first time I ask, people ignore it and/or don't understand it.
The second time I ask, people get uncomfortable because generally they haven't thought about what they mean to that level of detail, and they try to weasel out of it.
The third time I ask, it diverges. Some people give me a reasonable definition. Some people say "sorry that's not possible" and depending on the subject, I pause the argument at that point to do something else.
I don’t think the parent commenter’s intent was that the words be universally banned, but instead context-specific words banned for a specific conversation. It’s just trying to remove implicitly differing definitions.
Typically I just disengage myself from the topic (or the drama/tension that is brewing up) and start asking what people mean when they use a certain word.
We've somehow started arguing about optimisation, for example. Time to take a step back and ask what "optimisation" actually means.
In fact, me saying "let's step back a bit" is pretty much my go-to phrase for saying we've gone too far down a rabbit hole and we should come back up for air.
I don't think I would have much success trying to make certain words taboo. Much better to create a shared understanding of what something means instead of trying to avoid it.
I didn't know this was a thing that had a term either! I don't talk politics anymore except with folks that I explicitly know want to talk politics, but I frequently suggest that people shouldn't use a whole litany of terms in those discussions: right/left-wing, capitalist, socialist, liberal, conservative, communist, libertarian, fascist...so many people use these terms as short-hand for "stuff I really/don't like", and then project values and policies onto them.
Throw them out, talk about the issues, talk about your shared values, etc, and you'll quickly find that you agree with people a lot more than you realized.
So often I see engineers get sucked into arguing something based on a buzzword that they either believe the system they are building needs to conform to, they think other people (outside the company) care about, or because it agrees with their pre-conceived design notions.
Nuking words interrupts this, I often ban the words "scalable", "Automated", "platform", and "system". It forces the conversation back to specifics such as "Ability to handle X requests per second supporting Y users", "Process requires x, y, z steps rather than a,b,c steps", "service supports use cases A, B, C"
Banning those words also makes the conversation easier to follow for people who don't know the jargon. Jargon can be a quick shortcut when everybody is talking the same jargon and is clear about what every word means, but it can become a massive barrier to discussion if one of those criteria is not met.
I have never heard of this approach before, but it sounds flipping great. I will now look for arguments that I can start and then later solve with this method. Winners all around!
Or even just trying to define the goal you are trying to accomplish. I've seen many disagreements on software projects because people's definition are completely different. The arguments are just a symptom of a deeper problem that no amount of careful discussions are going to fix.
It is very valuable to be able to spot differences in definitions, so you can address them before moving on. If you feel like you are talking past eachother, that might be the issue causing it.
Read "The sequences" [0], may be the Harry Potter and method of rationality book.
For lesswrong (and the Rationalist community in general), I've found that their "broad stroke idea" is what brings the most value. The more in-depth discussions bringing those ideas to specific topics is intriguing to read, but probably much less valuable for daily life.
I've often remarked at how common it is to hear two people talking about completely different things using the same words, thinking they're both understanding each other. Communication could be something that we think we're better at than maybe we actually are.
The one thing that was drummed into my head in grad school was to define your terms. I often ask students "How much is 'most?'" as in "most people think X." Technically 50.1% would be "most" but when I say "most" I generally think closer to 75% or more. So people could think they are disagreeing over whether "most people think x" is true but they are really disagreeing over the definition of "most."
Communication is improved if, rather than redefining terms in common use, you just use the terms in common use that already mean what you want. So if you mean “at least 75%”, just say “at least 75%” rather than “most”, especially if you are negating it in a condition where negating it with the common definition would not be true.
>Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon.
Exactly. Whenever I have the inclination to get into an argument about politics, I try to start by finding a common premise, in order to find where the problems or disagreements start. And eventually, I find that we have similar goals where you wouldn't expect sometimes, but are coming at it from completely different sets of facts that guide us to different conclusions.
This is a great idea. Not just for tech discussions; I think some political discussions would also be much improved if we could taboo certain words. Some people get too hung up on certain -isms without explaining what specific policies they're talking about.
This is one of those things "rationalists" do that doesn't always make sense. It is possible to tell someone to "taboo their words" to obstruct someone, in order to make it hard for them to discuss something whose meaning you know very well. It's also possible to tell someone to taboo their words because you want to nitpick an imperfect definition--regardless of whether the flaws in thde definition are relevant to the current argument.
Sorry to be a curmudgeon, it's a poetic little story - but isn't the takeaway a little banal?
"Different people have different perspectives." Well sure.
"Consider things from others' viewpoints." Of course.
I don't know, it rings a little of management-ese, or something overpaid consultants might present in the boardroom that gets everybody nodding their head and feeling like they've received great wisdom, but is a little hollow or obvious when you really break it down.
It's a good takeaway, even if commonsensical I guess.
You're not wrong, but this ability is not common. Our viewpoint is the core to many fundamental issues, which makes us "both right" which leads to endless arguments because we're both optimising for different things.
A really good example is how one "hears" the news. Some people hear "how this affects me", others hear "how this affects everyone else". There's talk of a minimum wage increase, do you think "yay, more money for them", or do you think "my taxes are going to go up to pay for this."
You see this disconnect every time a customer is upset with a business. They imagine that a business optimises for the customer, whereas a business optimises for the business.
Like when a business is acquired and disappears. Users see this as bad, but owners see it as "I got paid".
I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect. If you’re the type of person who read the first half of this story and immediately went “Ah, I know what the problem is, the kid’s looking at the other signal!” then kudos to you for not needing this advice ever again, but I suspect the vast majority of folks could do with being reminded of common sense things from time to time.
> If you’re the type of person who read the first half of this story and immediately went “Ah, I know what the problem is, the kid’s looking at the other signal!”
I'm that person! :)
But admittedly only because a friend experienced a similar thing when she worked as a kindergarten teacher for three months in Bolivia; a few days in she had a conversation with a little girl who seemed very bright to her in general, but then they talked about how you properly cross the street, and when she asked the girl about traffic lights, she insisted you walk when it's red.
Turned out the town they were in didn't have signals for pedestrians, and since the signals for traffic are positioned like in Europe (ie not the other side of the junction) you had to check the signal for the cars and start walking when it turns red.
Something the IQ measurement is actually kind of helpful for is being able to tell if a person is likely to be able to mentally model, understand the abstract and hypotheticals, or empathize intellectually with others.
If you can model what someone else may think, what someone else thinks someone else may think, or understand "what ifs", your IQ will almost certainly measure higher than 80. An example of the opposite is asking, "had you done this instead, what would have happened?" and receiving a response like "that's not what I did".
I have encountered people in functional corporate roles whose ability to grasp beyond what is directly in front of them was exactly why they held their positions. They were highly competitive of and motivated by metrics, no longer or unable to see how things done differently might produce different results ("that's not how we do it"), and generally didn't have a grasp of how their or their department's work fit into the company - they just knew it did. However, they often had a few great interpersonal qualities, like projecting confidence or leadership, patience and self-control in arguments, not easily being flustered or becoming nervous, or having a consistently positive demeanor.
When I think about privilege and justice, I include the existence of people different from me, which means I have to be aware of and understand who they are and what they are like. There's more than one right way to be or live, and it often comes as a shock to some that their communities, classes, and societies are so effective at insulating them from what people different from them are like, only highlighting simple, shallow, or visual differences instead.
My takeaway is that if the number of people this was helpful to was a surprise, your standard of common is too narrow.
My takeaway (and something I've been thinking about regarding precision in communication) is that people often believe to be talking about the same thing, yet will be talking about different things.
This is super frequent, especially in more heated discussions, and it leads me to want to look at writing things precisely, even the banal stuff, so that we can actually figure out what is going on. This is especially helpful in the "I can't believe you actually think that" cases
I think its pretty common, especially when building software for other people, to make all manner of invalid assumptions. This is a nice, succint story to demonstrate how easily things can get over our heads. To ground it a bit -- if people aren't buying your product, or aren't using your feature the way you expected, you try to understand them. But if they or the world don't make sense, you might need to more literally get into their shoes to figure out why. How often on HN do we see people complaining that what someone does makes no sense. Whether another political party, upper management, non technical people, etc. Its actually the main thing that drives me away from HN at times, because those comments never go anywhere substantive.
Yes, but that's not how we _learn_. You can read all the succinct bullet points of advice you want, but seeing a lesson explained through the eyes of an engaging story is a strictly better way of _ingesting_ said lesson and makes you more capable of actually pattern matching situations where it is appropriate.
"Consider things from others' viewpoints" is a summary of the lesson, but you could have told that to the mother in the story all day long and she wouldn't have grokked how to apply it to her situation, or even that she would benefit by doing so!
It's so easy and so human to criticize other people's views, filtered through my own world view. But then I'm really only criticizing own interpretation of their view.
For me, this is a lesson that almost can't be repeated enough, because I tend to slip into forgetting about it.
But good for you if you find it obvious and banal :)
It's weird it took her so long to realize what was happening - I knew as soon as I read the first paragraph what was going on.
I suppose it's because I am younger (and thus have memories of being a kid) and was rather short as a kid, so I know what sorts of limited visibility you can have as a kid, and more recently I'm also used to driving at confusing intersections where it's not clear which light applies.
Your comment was the top one and it encouraged me to just click through to the article and... I just don't get it after the first paragraph. Indeed, colour blindness? But that doesn't make you "know" it wrong, that makes you not be able to tell (afaik). So then... the kid was either joking, had learned it the wrong way around, or tied the name 'red' to the bottom position perhaps.
... turns out it's a localization problem. If you're sitting too low at the front of the queue, you'd see the overhead traffic light often better than the drivers do. I didn't think that this must, of course, be another USA-localization story and the traffic lights are elsewhere over there (across the crossing I guess).
> used to driving at confusing intersections where it's not clear which light applies
and I guess that explains why there are different systems. Why not change them around in the USA as well? It's not as if people could be confused and look at the wrong lights, as the others' lights are simply not visible when the lights are all on the side nearest to the lane(s) they apply to.
I'm not sure if you caught this or not, but I think the actual key to the story is that the child in the rear seat of the car and looking out the side window at the light for the stopped crossing traffic. Unfortunately for the anecdote, the "rear seat" part isn't mentioned until the 4th paragraph: "So I was in the back seat sitting next to Ben".
I think the issue is that in the US, all children below some age must be in a car seat, and in some US states, that car seat must be in the back of the car. The author presumed that by mentioning her son was 3 at the time, that her audience would automatically understand that he was in the rear of the car. Even as an American, I didn't.
I think it would make a better story if this was made explicit.
> Why not change them around in the USA as well? It's not as if people could be confused and look at the wrong lights, as the others' lights are simply not visible when the lights are all on the side nearest to the lane(s) they apply to.
As a German in the US, I find the positioning of traffic lights to be one of the very few traffic-related this that are better in the US. In Europe I find myself frequently leaned forward and looking up at the traffic light to see it at all. I never have an issue seeing the traffic light in the US. Figuring out which light is yours very rarely is a problem. At least not on the west coast where you usually have grid patterns.
I still remember the moment I realized (maybe at age 5 or so?) that even the cars coming toward us on the left side of the road were driving on the right side of the road from their perspective.
I don't think it's an age thing, I think it was just bloody obvious. So much so that I suspect that story was embellished a lot of dramatic effect. ie the author figured it out themselves quicker than they claimed to but it wouldn't have been as dramatic read if it was the literal sequence of events. Another oddity was the suggested age: 3 years old is very later to be teaching your kids the different between red and green.
Also worth baring in mind that the story happened roughly 20 years ago and I certainly can't remember every conversation I had with my family 20 years ago.
That's funny since I am older, and I sat in the front seat of the car my entire childhood; there were no car seats. When my mother had to make a sudden stop she'd hold out her arm to keep me in place. I remember being dazzled by the arrival of a light with 5 signals (yellow and green arrow and circle) and begging to stay in the intersection to watch them all cycle.
wow, I am exactly opposite. I didnt realize until I read the full story. I am in my 40s and didn't have car until I was in my 20s and actually rarely sat in one because of abundant public transport at the place where I grew up.
Something about the context--this is a short article posted to HackerNews--makes it easier to realize. I already had a feeling that the story was leading to the adult being wrong somehow.
As a kid my mom ran out of gas several times, and it was always on the same road, which had a gravel shoulder. We'd be riding along, she'd pull off into (what I call "the rocks"), the car would stop and she'd say "we're out of gas". Since the car was moving along fine before pulling off the road, and I had no concept of how cars worked, I made the connection that pulling into "the rocks" caused the car to run out of gas. After making that connection, I used to scream not to pull into the rocks when she ran out of gas. My parents eventually made the connection as to what I was thinking, and instead explaining how it worked used to tease me with it well into my adult years.
Earlier today I mentioned to my first grader that when I was a kid we didn't have an ice maker in our freezer, and we just used ice cube trays, instead. He sat there for a minute, stumped, and finally asked, "so what made the freezer cold?"
It took me a minute to figure out what he meant, but finally I realized that he thought the way our freezer worked was that we had a machine that made ice, and the freezer was cold because it was full of ice. It's really easy to reverse cause and effect when you can't see what's happening.
I got a similar teasing because I used the word "lightricity". Too too long ago to really know where/why my brain locked into that word. Lights=>electricity=>lightning, it all gloms together.
This anecdote is a ridiculously great example of something I’ve found to be VERY VERY IMPORTANT with parenting (and probably lots else.)
You must be incredibly delicate with “wrong” answers otherwise you might gaslight, discourage, or otherwise mess with your child’s ontology.
I’ve learned to ask “why do you think that?” When I get a “confident wrong answer” as I call them. A surprising amount of the time my child has some very rational explanation.
Someone once told me, “most arguments among engineers boils down to communication. Usually you’re not arguing about the exact same thing.” These moments with my child really made me grok that.
I wish “being wrong with an explanation” was rewarded the way it should be when I was a kid.
Note that (AFAIK), for adults, "why" can get you the wrong response (puts people on the defensive), so (AFAIK) it's recommended to use "what" instead (which tends to get at the "why" you wanted in the first place) -
"why do you think that?" -> "what led to you thinking that?"
"what led to you thinking that?" -> "what led to that thought?"
My preferred version: "what was the motivation for choosing that?".
It's especially helpful on a team working with legacy software. Because the root cause can sometimes be a historic team decision, no longer attributable to anyone on the current team. Where "led you" can result in the "oh it wasn't my idea" responses, rather than "I think they made that decision because ..." responses.
I've been using "How did you figure that out?" which I got from Marilyn Burns and her wonderful interviews with kids.[0]
Her videos are really cool to watch — often the kids will self-correct their wrong answers when talking through their reasoning. Even if they make the same mistake the second time, it gives the listener really great insight into how they're thinking about the question.
And it's a great question to ask when the kid is right too — often I'm surprised by my son's answer, such as when he figured out how to spell "only" by looking out the window at the right-turn only sign painted on the street outside.
Why is clearly a personal judgement. What is something other, not the person, and we can even possibly feign objectivity and share a point of view of the matter.
This makes me recall the time I was riding on the bus, and there was a little boy (maybe 4 years old) with his mum. The little boy was proudly reading the numbers off the other buses he saw drive by.
"7, 23, 5, 86," the boy proudly stated. Then a bus numbered "5X" came by.
"What's that?" The boy said, pointing in confusion.
"That's the bus number!" his mom said.
"X is a number now?" the poor kid asked in a painful tone. You could just hear his understanding of the world crumbling around him.
(where "wrong" is considered in the larger domain. It is probably "right" for your use-case and niche-domain, though. E.g. where you are certain you'll never ship to Thailand. Ever)
This why I evaluate future coworkers (interviewer or interviewee) on the speed at which we can align mental models. I have worked with some great engineers with whom I felt like bashing my skull in trying to get them on the same page, and some very middling engineers with whom I was immediately able to understand. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I would rather work with someone I can communicate with than an unapproachable great.
I think it would be worthwhile to ask "why do you think that?" on some confident correct assertions as well. Will help with collaborating on developing the child's use of rationality in case they're right for the wrong reasons, and also to avoid overly associating being asked why with being wrong.
The problem with this analogy (as the author ties it up to the end point) is it implies you're leading a team that simply can't see the reality.
More often, the change in perspective allows the person in the back seat to see the car that is about to run a red light and smash into you, rather than it being a question of presenting them a better context.
The child wasn't seeing something that wasn't real. The child was looking at a different light. The miscommunication occurred because neither realized that they were looking at different lights.
> it implies you're leading a team that simply can't see the reality
If everyone on the team has the same level of visibility into everything, there is insufficient specialization and/or utilization.
The child in the analogy wasn't blinded from seeing the light ahead. He could theoretically access that information. But in practice, he didn't, and that lead to a miscommunication.
I don’t think the story takes a position on who is right at what level (and, in fact, it sounds like the story teller herself concedes that leadership should be digging into why their teams are saying “red light” when it’s a green light).
I think the story should be ingested as “we don’t know why someone else can’t obviously see what we see; that problem itself warrants investigations perhaps before any conversation about what to do next.”
As it turns out, our company is currently having this problem: the market and employees of my company are screaming at the leadership to not follow through on a business plan, but leadership has their head buried in the sand and are bound and determined to move ahead because all they see is green lights.
And sure, there’s enough anecdotes out there about people zagging when everyone else zigs, but I think an unspoken prerequisite to those anecdotes is that you at least made sure you understood why they were zigging.
I had a very similar experience as a child. I always wondered how other drivers could tell which way we were turning. My parents told me that they can tell from your turn signal. 6-year-old me just thought turn signals entailed the green flashing arrows on the dash (not also on the car’s taillights). I just assumed all drivers were tall enough to see into the other car and tell from their dash (for at least the next year or so)!
Funny, I remember as a child wondering how my parents knew how to get where we were going. I saw the green lights on the dash (and couldn't see the signal lever from the backseat) and just thought that the car was smart enough to give them directions.
Readit News
Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the word scalable at all. It often works like magic and they quickly reach a shared understanding.
I once witnessed a very heated argument among a group of programmers discussing some code on a microcontroller. Half of them thought the performance was abysmal. The other half thought the performance was great. To everybody it was obvious to see what the performance was, why were the other half being so bone-headed about it?
Turned out the first group were trained mechanical engineers, the second were trained software engineers. For the first group, "performance" meant how closely the motion of the device attached to the microcontroller tracked the optimal path. I.e. the performance of the function approximation that the microcontroller code was doing. To the second group, it meant how fast the code ran. This was completely irrelevant to the first group, since as long as it managed to run 1000 times per second (which it easily did), nobody cared how many nanoseconds there were to spare each cycle. Why are you even talking about that? The performance is shit, we need to improve it and who cares if it takes a few more CPU cycles.
Do you mean speed? Efficiency? Accuracy? Say what you mean.
Deleted Comment
There's facts and opinions, but also definitions, and too often disagreements boil down to a different definition of a single word. Ban that word and say what you mean and the disagreement may suddenly be gone.
Edit: I wrote this before reading the second paragraph. :) I'll leave it as an alternate way of saying the same.
Let me ask, has anyone successfully "tabooed" certain words, or do people not understand the purpose of doing so?
The first time I ask, people ignore it and/or don't understand it.
The second time I ask, people get uncomfortable because generally they haven't thought about what they mean to that level of detail, and they try to weasel out of it.
The third time I ask, it diverges. Some people give me a reasonable definition. Some people say "sorry that's not possible" and depending on the subject, I pause the argument at that point to do something else.
We've somehow started arguing about optimisation, for example. Time to take a step back and ask what "optimisation" actually means.
In fact, me saying "let's step back a bit" is pretty much my go-to phrase for saying we've gone too far down a rabbit hole and we should come back up for air.
I don't think I would have much success trying to make certain words taboo. Much better to create a shared understanding of what something means instead of trying to avoid it.
Throw them out, talk about the issues, talk about your shared values, etc, and you'll quickly find that you agree with people a lot more than you realized.
Nuking words interrupts this, I often ban the words "scalable", "Automated", "platform", and "system". It forces the conversation back to specifics such as "Ability to handle X requests per second supporting Y users", "Process requires x, y, z steps rather than a,b,c steps", "service supports use cases A, B, C"
Or even just trying to define the goal you are trying to accomplish. I've seen many disagreements on software projects because people's definition are completely different. The arguments are just a symptom of a deeper problem that no amount of careful discussions are going to fix.
How to find value from LessWrong? I see people derive value from it, but when I visit it, it’s not obvious
For lesswrong (and the Rationalist community in general), I've found that their "broad stroke idea" is what brings the most value. The more in-depth discussions bringing those ideas to specific topics is intriguing to read, but probably much less valuable for daily life.
[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
What value you'll derive from it varies (especially if you're not into AI alignment) but there are a few gems every few weeks.
Exactly. Whenever I have the inclination to get into an argument about politics, I try to start by finding a common premise, in order to find where the problems or disagreements start. And eventually, I find that we have similar goals where you wouldn't expect sometimes, but are coming at it from completely different sets of facts that guide us to different conclusions.
"Different people have different perspectives." Well sure.
"Consider things from others' viewpoints." Of course.
I don't know, it rings a little of management-ese, or something overpaid consultants might present in the boardroom that gets everybody nodding their head and feeling like they've received great wisdom, but is a little hollow or obvious when you really break it down.
It's a good takeaway, even if commonsensical I guess.
A really good example is how one "hears" the news. Some people hear "how this affects me", others hear "how this affects everyone else". There's talk of a minimum wage increase, do you think "yay, more money for them", or do you think "my taxes are going to go up to pay for this."
You see this disconnect every time a customer is upset with a business. They imagine that a business optimises for the customer, whereas a business optimises for the business.
Like when a business is acquired and disappears. Users see this as bad, but owners see it as "I got paid".
I'm that person! :)
But admittedly only because a friend experienced a similar thing when she worked as a kindergarten teacher for three months in Bolivia; a few days in she had a conversation with a little girl who seemed very bright to her in general, but then they talked about how you properly cross the street, and when she asked the girl about traffic lights, she insisted you walk when it's red.
Turned out the town they were in didn't have signals for pedestrians, and since the signals for traffic are positioned like in Europe (ie not the other side of the junction) you had to check the signal for the cars and start walking when it turns red.
Difficult to do, isn't it?
If you can model what someone else may think, what someone else thinks someone else may think, or understand "what ifs", your IQ will almost certainly measure higher than 80. An example of the opposite is asking, "had you done this instead, what would have happened?" and receiving a response like "that's not what I did".
I have encountered people in functional corporate roles whose ability to grasp beyond what is directly in front of them was exactly why they held their positions. They were highly competitive of and motivated by metrics, no longer or unable to see how things done differently might produce different results ("that's not how we do it"), and generally didn't have a grasp of how their or their department's work fit into the company - they just knew it did. However, they often had a few great interpersonal qualities, like projecting confidence or leadership, patience and self-control in arguments, not easily being flustered or becoming nervous, or having a consistently positive demeanor.
When I think about privilege and justice, I include the existence of people different from me, which means I have to be aware of and understand who they are and what they are like. There's more than one right way to be or live, and it often comes as a shock to some that their communities, classes, and societies are so effective at insulating them from what people different from them are like, only highlighting simple, shallow, or visual differences instead.
My takeaway is that if the number of people this was helpful to was a surprise, your standard of common is too narrow.
This is super frequent, especially in more heated discussions, and it leads me to want to look at writing things precisely, even the banal stuff, so that we can actually figure out what is going on. This is especially helpful in the "I can't believe you actually think that" cases
"Consider things from others' viewpoints" is a summary of the lesson, but you could have told that to the mother in the story all day long and she wouldn't have grokked how to apply it to her situation, or even that she would benefit by doing so!
Other peoples world views are valid.
It's so easy and so human to criticize other people's views, filtered through my own world view. But then I'm really only criticizing own interpretation of their view.
For me, this is a lesson that almost can't be repeated enough, because I tend to slip into forgetting about it.
But good for you if you find it obvious and banal :)
Especially in technical discussion where they are focused on "important things that everyone should already understand".
Then it turns out that simply asking to clarify assumptions helps a ton.
I suppose it's because I am younger (and thus have memories of being a kid) and was rather short as a kid, so I know what sorts of limited visibility you can have as a kid, and more recently I'm also used to driving at confusing intersections where it's not clear which light applies.
... turns out it's a localization problem. If you're sitting too low at the front of the queue, you'd see the overhead traffic light often better than the drivers do. I didn't think that this must, of course, be another USA-localization story and the traffic lights are elsewhere over there (across the crossing I guess).
> used to driving at confusing intersections where it's not clear which light applies
and I guess that explains why there are different systems. Why not change them around in the USA as well? It's not as if people could be confused and look at the wrong lights, as the others' lights are simply not visible when the lights are all on the side nearest to the lane(s) they apply to.
I think the issue is that in the US, all children below some age must be in a car seat, and in some US states, that car seat must be in the back of the car. The author presumed that by mentioning her son was 3 at the time, that her audience would automatically understand that he was in the rear of the car. Even as an American, I didn't.
I think it would make a better story if this was made explicit.
As a German in the US, I find the positioning of traffic lights to be one of the very few traffic-related this that are better in the US. In Europe I find myself frequently leaned forward and looking up at the traffic light to see it at all. I never have an issue seeing the traffic light in the US. Figuring out which light is yours very rarely is a problem. At least not on the west coast where you usually have grid patterns.
Also worth baring in mind that the story happened roughly 20 years ago and I certainly can't remember every conversation I had with my family 20 years ago.
It took me a minute to figure out what he meant, but finally I realized that he thought the way our freezer worked was that we had a machine that made ice, and the freezer was cold because it was full of ice. It's really easy to reverse cause and effect when you can't see what's happening.
You must be incredibly delicate with “wrong” answers otherwise you might gaslight, discourage, or otherwise mess with your child’s ontology.
I’ve learned to ask “why do you think that?” When I get a “confident wrong answer” as I call them. A surprising amount of the time my child has some very rational explanation.
Someone once told me, “most arguments among engineers boils down to communication. Usually you’re not arguing about the exact same thing.” These moments with my child really made me grok that.
I wish “being wrong with an explanation” was rewarded the way it should be when I was a kid.
"why do you think that?" -> "what led to you thinking that?"
:shrug: It works, sooooo.
"what led to you thinking that?" -> "what led to that thought?"
My preferred version: "what was the motivation for choosing that?".
It's especially helpful on a team working with legacy software. Because the root cause can sometimes be a historic team decision, no longer attributable to anyone on the current team. Where "led you" can result in the "oh it wasn't my idea" responses, rather than "I think they made that decision because ..." responses.
Her videos are really cool to watch — often the kids will self-correct their wrong answers when talking through their reasoning. Even if they make the same mistake the second time, it gives the listener really great insight into how they're thinking about the question.
And it's a great question to ask when the kid is right too — often I'm surprised by my son's answer, such as when he figured out how to spell "only" by looking out the window at the right-turn only sign painted on the street outside.
[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=ListeningToLearn.com&src=typed_...
Like the saying goes, nobody likes a "whys guy."
"7, 23, 5, 86," the boy proudly stated. Then a bus numbered "5X" came by.
"What's that?" The boy said, pointing in confusion.
"That's the bus number!" his mom said.
"X is a number now?" the poor kid asked in a painful tone. You could just hear his understanding of the world crumbling around him.
Just to continue on the "number" theme: that address-form you recently built is probably wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_numbering
(where "wrong" is considered in the larger domain. It is probably "right" for your use-case and niche-domain, though. E.g. where you are certain you'll never ship to Thailand. Ever)
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More often, the change in perspective allows the person in the back seat to see the car that is about to run a red light and smash into you, rather than it being a question of presenting them a better context.
If everyone on the team has the same level of visibility into everything, there is insufficient specialization and/or utilization.
The child in the analogy wasn't blinded from seeing the light ahead. He could theoretically access that information. But in practice, he didn't, and that lead to a miscommunication.
I think the story should be ingested as “we don’t know why someone else can’t obviously see what we see; that problem itself warrants investigations perhaps before any conversation about what to do next.”
As it turns out, our company is currently having this problem: the market and employees of my company are screaming at the leadership to not follow through on a business plan, but leadership has their head buried in the sand and are bound and determined to move ahead because all they see is green lights.
And sure, there’s enough anecdotes out there about people zagging when everyone else zigs, but I think an unspoken prerequisite to those anecdotes is that you at least made sure you understood why they were zigging.