The gem of this article is: "Messages that are difficult to process are less compelling."
The best thing we can do when communicating is make it easy -- in both message and medium (with apologies to McLuhan) -- for the folks we want to consume it to consume it.
I think many of us on HN object to imprecise messaging, sometimes to the point where it’s technically incorrect.
But I also have to admit that “Defund the Police”, “Flatten the Curve”, “I have a dream”, “Think Different” are more effective than a precise 2-page memo laying out a concrete plan.
Some people struggle with nuanced, complicated messaging. Others struggle when messages are over-simplified. I posit that the first group is a few orders of magnitude larger, at least in terms of effect of public comms.
Communication, in general, is an energy-consuming process. And when a message is intended to evoke specific emotions in the product consumer, you are doing a great job. With experience, crafting such messages may become easier.
by serendipity I clicked through on this link and sgentle's link to Kay on McLuhan and the following sentence comes remarkably close to my experience of the two presentations of the Selection task:
> .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind.
Communication theory is the medium constrains the possible messages. Further, McLuhan, Postman, others are saying various mediums have their own intrinsic dominate properties, character, which crowd out most other messages. TV gave us the sound bite. Usenet gave us trolls. Twitter gave us Trump. Facebook gave us "fake news" (aka gossip posing as truth).
Yep. It’s easier for a simple message to be carried by the wind.
But the process of growing up is one of increasing capacity for discernment. Ie, you learn more subtlety discerning when thing A or B is a better idea in any given moment. Will a hard or soft approach work better? Use my old tools or learn this new framework? Make a long term or short term decision here?
It’s hard to communicate because this kind of learning takes a lifetime to accumulate.
All communication is tough for me. I have to manually assemble the sort of language skills that most folks take for granted. To achieve even basic communication, I have to collect and process huge amounts of social/human data.
For speaking, this means composing & practicing entire conversations until I've mastered enough variations that I can sound reasonably natural.
With text, I need rewrite my sentences numerous times, before I achieve basic readability between them.
However, when I can pull off mundane communication, getting out something that's excellent or interesting is normally ~0 steps further.
Thats the trade off isnt it. In the pursuit of seeming nuance or complexity, one must inevitably compromise on the incisiveness and forthrightness of one's message.
After having engaged in this activity for some time, I now comprehend how individuals can become rehearsed automatons conditioned by human resources.
I hesitate to elaborate further, as the specifics are likely to attract scrutiny or censure.
That maximally comprehensible bit is so relevant. We are limited by the modes with which we communicate, each of which trades some amount of expressiveness for some amount of signal speed.
The unfortunate truth is that in the competition between systems, those that achieve higher speeds frequently win in the battle to spread the signal. The executive report that reduces the business to a set of metrics one page long, the tweet that gets shared millions of times, the quippy campaign promise.
I've been ruminating on this problem for a long time, and I don't have any answers that I'm satisfied with. The closest I've come to identifying what-to-do is that perhaps if we manage to somehow reduce the global liquidity of communication and reintroduce friction into how ideas spread, perhaps the harder ideas will become more competitive relative to the fast and easy. Put more simply, if everything is made a little more hard, it would benefit the stuff that's already hard. That said, I say it's the "best" idea I've come up with because I recognize that it's still really fraught with disastrous side effects, potentially impossible, and leagues away from actionable.
The more I see, the more I understand Hanson's "Great Filter" argument. It all feels pretty bleak.
There may be something much better, but in many places it's difficult to come up with a form of communication more efficient for the user than textual language. It could be a very tall order to do that in this area.
It truly is a cognitive burden for people who care about how their words are perceived and understood. Logically, I see two ways to succeed in communicating to large groups.
One way is to tune down your level of awareness of, or your psychological attachment to, how your message is being perceived; i.e. turn off the filter and just talk, public perception be damned.
The other way would be to improve your mental approximation of how people are perceiving and emotionally responding to your message, taking the integral of emotional response like some kind of social calculus. Perhaps this consists of bucketing people into groups, the way politicians do, only in more of a real time fashion? I'm not sure, but I do find it interesting.
I think the "medium" (twitter/mail/messenger) and its "limitation" do not matter a lot. I think it mostly depends on the sender and the receiver (and its circumstances). If they have a mutual understanding (same "degree") of the message, the communication MIGHT be more efficient due to lessen time delay. Nevertheless, the sender might use the wrong words ... speaking Portuguese ... you see where this leads ... also, and most fascinating ist the "time factor". Like: "Do you need time to understand / grasp something?"
So as I see it: The communication medium itself is almost always not responsible to for "better human communication". BUT, as all rules, there are exceptions, for example, twitter is a medium that can, with one "tweet", move a whole flock of birds at once (I think this was the initial intention of twitter ... philosopical seen). This "reach" (unprecedented before) opens up a whole new slew to "human communication". Like with one tweet:
1: Some Trump might declare war with ($random-country)
2: A Country might revolt (see Arab Spring)
3: Stock Market might break ...
By the way, not sure if you might like it, but "Cognitive Load" is a very interesting topic in itself. Its about your own possibility to grasp/understand/dissect things. Its mainly about "basic" things that, when cumulated, are totally obvious OR totally confusing. In my opinion, this is the main key to "better human communication".
But to end this topic, here is my recent -Word of the Week-:
If you can't explain something well, its likely you don't understood it either
The best thing we can do when communicating is make it easy -- in both message and medium (with apologies to McLuhan) -- for the folks we want to consume it to consume it.
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