This is an observation that goes back to at least Cicero.[1]
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.
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.
> Communication campaigns, making it a subject in schools...
Both of those are basically so delayed and holey that you can forget using it for anything but the most basic points. Just look at how bad some people are at math and that's something both essential and taught extensively for basically the whole time one is in the education system.
> 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.
This sounds like Dawkins conception of a meme: an idea small enough to replicate as a whole without error.
You've put into text format, something which most extroverts already intuitively understand.
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.
Much of Shakespeare's genius was to pitch his work simultaneously for multiple levels of sophistication ... social commentary, poetry and fart humour, all at the same time.
The reference book here is a collection of dialogs made by Cicero where he argues that there are two types of oratory: the short, "elegant", straight to the point one and the profuse, "appealing", heart touching one. Cicero himself says (in that book) he is in favor the latter. The book is not about nuance, but rather discourse style. In his (Cicero's) view, the better oratory style is the one that touches the audience as opposed to carefully chosen words. Based on the book, IMO, Cicero is more focused on arguing in favor of passionate speeches than nuance per se.
PS. I believe the quotes used are a bit misleading because they are used as counterexamples in the original text.
One of my favourite memories from school was translating parts of Cicero's words from latin. He is considered "easy" to read and translate precisely because he took great care of not using difficult or ambiguous language in his writing as well.
That's an interesting quotation, but it doesn't sound like the problem with Curio's was too much nuance. If anything, very plain (albeit clear) speech has a lack of nuance.
I think GP is trying to make the opposite point, that Calvus (not Curio) introduced too much nuance in his speech, making himself a less effective orator.
This comment is truly on point and very meta — it takes a nuanced twitter thread and distills it down via the force of an authoritative source in a way that people immediately get the point.
Cicero lived 2000 years ago and is still widely considered one of the greatest orators and writers of all time. For the art of rhetoric, it really doesn't get much more authoritative than that.
I know the HN crowd is dismissive of old stuff, because fields like math and science advance fast enough that nobody calls (say) Pythagoras or Archimedes "authoritative", but the art of convincing other humans remains essentially the same.
I don't think it's HN; I think it's a few folks who never learned the value of history. Kind of like that kid in middle school who would say "all people in world history are dead, what do they matter?", "they didn't have iphones, so how smart could they be?", or "this wikipedia about logical fallacies disproves Plato".
Whenever articles like this about communication crop up, I like to remind people of Wiio's Laws[0] - from 1978:
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.
Just to reiterate, these laws are over 40 years old, predating any kind of social media or internet-based communication - and they're still 100% valid.
5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
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.
But they are not before the TV, the Telegraph, the Film, the Printing Press or the Story.
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.
As another example, Amazon teams communicate product launch requirements via a future press releases including a FAQ (per description in the book "Working Backwards"). Its a communication intended for the masses with a built-in disambiguation addendum.
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.
Dan Luu is right that public messaging -- and company-wide internal messaging -- tends to be bone simple and incomplete.
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.
> They exist in quiet and sometimes quite intricate underground conversations.
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.
I was thinking the same thing. The VPs might be messaging "speed" company wide, but what are the saying to their direct reports? Do the directors hear a more nuanced message that balances reliability, and then try to implement a reasonable balance within their teams, or does the entire division single-track on speed and forget about everything else?
We live in an attention economy, both outside and inside companies. The rules that apply to B2C marketing largely apply inside companies as well.
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 sent an email and I’m important therefore everyone got the message”
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 met someone who did that all the time. Turns out it was a learned behavior from having gotten pushed aside for coming across as too nit-picky one too many times. They turned in to the kind of person that would let other people make mistakes and just watch - and believe it or not, it worked for them! In their environment, that was a bad lesson well-learned.
There is some merit to that approach though. For example, I moved IT support requests from a messaging system to an actual ticketing system. The number of requests actually dropped because if they aren't getting help instantly they'll actually try something rather than just giving up immediately and calling IT. Many many issues just went away because if you have to wait a bit all the braindead "click the button" or "turn on your monitor" issues go away.
There is a distinction between "I said it once, and I'm not obligated to say it again", and "I said it once, and therefore I can assume that everyone knows it". The difference is in whether you need everyone to know it (accountable for the result), or only need to CYA (accountable for your job).
This is more of a response to people not paying attention. If all this time is being spent on email and chat and meetings it gets frustrating continually covering the same ground where it is obvious not much attention was paid the first time.
These dynamics are why centralized release orgs or enfoced code review/merge blockers are so powerful. People ignore all the email till it is explaining why the thing they want right now can’t be given to the, unless they do steps a and b. Not sure there is a public health equivalent. If you are trying to move 100% of a dev org to stricter standards, say due to some new security discovery, you benefit from this centralized approach.
> 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.
Above in the thread there's a quote on Cicero which covers your issue
> "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
I'm not sure Cicero had to deal with the pedant making their tedious rebuttal directly under where he placed his message, undermining the credibility of said message.
Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance communications can be the following.
* 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.
> ...read your first bullet point, ignore the rest, and drop all the nuance?
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.
Perhaps those people have just read too many emails in the past that ended up being a waste of their time? Over time they learned to glance at things and predict what the rest of the email is going to say.
Think about those download websites where you have to find the download link in the middle of all the ads that are masquerading as download buttons. There's a lot of information on those pages, but people become really adept at spotting the real download button. The rest of the information gets ignored.
I think this is why some people insist on verbal communication when you're trying to teach them something. If they get a text guide then they will gloss over things and skip steps leading to failure. With verbal communication you're effectively there to keep them at least mildly focused so that they don't gloss over things.
> Perhaps those people have just read too many emails in the past that ended up being a waste of their time?
I am sure that's often the case but I still find it rude and dismissive.
In the end it doesn't really matter for me as long as I can get my point/request across in a sentence or two (and cover my ass with an "optional" details section).
You're absolutely right that voice or face-to-face is essential for certain communication.
> If they get a text guide then they will gloss over things and skip steps leading to failure.
I find this to be very true when learning new programming techniques. Most learning resources start from a significantly more basic starting point than most learners are at, so I'm liable to skip until I start seeing things I don't already know how to guess. The problem is that there are often important subtleties buried amidst the obvious knowledge.
Also I auto-filter bcc'ed e-mails and if your e-mail has a tracking pixel in it (e.g. from Superhuman or some such), it will get deprioritized because I don't believe in privacy invasion attempts. (Also, your tracking pixel will be blocked so it won't work anyway.)
I’m rapidly approaching the “email singularity” where it would take me more time to answer one email than the average time between incoming emails.
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).
This is so often said, and so bloody ridiculous a state of affairs for the information technology industry.
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.
You can’t solve a lack of executive function/decision making capacity (which is what we’re referring to) by making more work/queuing up bullshit work. It will result in everyone just ignoring anything that smells like coming from such a system.
Since (almost) no one wants to admit they don’t have enough decision making capacity or can’t prioritize using it for whatever you’re asking (at least now a days it seems, since someone will post them saying they don’t care on social media and they’ll get fired), you will often see defacto rate limiting or pushback in other ways.
Common ways you’ll see in real life:
- only responding to the one item they want to respond to.
- ever increasing delays in responses or ‘missed emails’ (when you try again they’ll respond)
- half responses which don’t actually address the problem or answer your question (but are easy to generate).
- redirection to another - hard to reach - authority even if not appropriate (as they aren’t spending the time to figure out what your actual question is)
- straw manning your question/request as something else they already have an answer to and then answering that.
- adding your question/request to a backlog they aren’t responsible for and then ignoring it forever since it’s now ‘on the list’
- making up increasingly more complicated paperwork/procedure hoops with increasingly less pleasant user experiences
And many more. For non-decision making backlogs/overloads, there are also the
- ‘decades long queue’ method of shedding load like the old eastern bloc (and some healthcare systems)
- ‘you need a permit’ (but there is no actual perform form)
-‘we only work during (impossible hours here)’ etc.
It all boils down to they can’t care enough to get you want you want, so you either have to make them care (which will be met with generally well earned hostility), or find a way to get them to care (which may be impossible). In many countries, getting someone to care requires a bribe.
I'd read every comment on the page, but when I got down to your bullet points, don't know why but my eyes glazed over and I stopped reading anything, and just started scrolling quickly down the page. Then I realized the irony of this happening in a thread about ignoring bullet points!
Sometimes the other party will happily oblige with your request, but only after a totally vacuous phone call that serves absolutely no purpose other than (i) signalling how much effort the other party is spending on you (ii) punishing you with synchronous communication so as to limit your potential request rate.
Wonderful! On reflection a bit on these, I also wonder if it’s a type of demand for payment from the other party too - a ‘give me an ego boost/social capital payment, and I’ll pay attention to your request’ type thing. A bribe with your time and discomfort maybe?
You've sort of hit on the missing interface in both email and (in my experience) pull requests: I need a system to keep track of the list of things I want to send, but keep it private to me so as it's dealt with by the other party, the next item goes out.
(for PRs its the joy of having a sequence of dependent changes, and needing to make sure people review them step by step even though the whole packet is done).
It's easier to consider this question with empathy: imagine times where you replied to emails partially, answering some (one), but not all questions. Ask yourself why you did a partial reply. Then, when you ask questions of others, apply those learnings.
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.
imagine times where you replied to emails partially
It will be hard for someone that always replies to the first thing only to empathize with this but: This has literally never happened to me. As in, I have never replied partially to something in an email. You will get an answer to each of your items. Granted, you may not get the answer you were looking for but I will answer each and every one, even if it's just a "I will have to look into this one and get back to you" so that the other 6 items can get answered right away.
Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not the other way around?
I don't think this is practically much different then answering one thing. If you give one answer and 3 "I'll get back to you on that"'s-- this creates a promise of a future asynchronous answer, which is only as good as your word. People often have too many tasks, so to get those remaining items on your queue, they'll have to ask you again.
As the recipient, it's more challenging to receive the future promise of an answer with no SLA.
I would be to differ. To me, there is a large difference between just ignoring 6 out of 7 questions I asked you or you telling me that you do not know the answer right now but will get back to me.
I agree that if there's no explicitly stated SLA and no implicit SLA given the relationship history between the two of us (e.g. I might know you're usually going to get back to me within 24 hours on such items), then this is practically the same.
I do not operate under such circumstances though. If I tell you that I will get back to you, then I will get back to you within a reasonable time frame and you will know from our previous interactions that I'm good for it in most cases and that it's totally OK for you to ask again after a day because I might have forgotten. I'm not perfect.
Since this was an example answer only, it is also possible that for one of your 7 questions the answer will simply be that I cannot get that answer to you within any reasonable amount of time at this point because of other priorities I have and that you should find someone else or I might point you towards someone else. In any case, you will have all of your 7 points answered. I won't just ignore them.
The difference is as a sender I would know that you parsed each of my questions, understood them and decided to either not answer them now or just never answer them. Replying to one is ambiguous, if it was actually important it just leads to having to follow up again, restating everything that wasn't acknowledged.
I also never said that I will answer your questions right away. Just that I will answer all 7 of them once I do reply. The opportunity cost of looking at my email inbox might be way too high at a particular moment and so I might not even see your message for a full day to begin with. Same w/ a slack message. I might not see your particular message for some time or I might see it and decide that it's not a message I can deal with on the side while in a meeting and mark it for later consumption e.g. for when the meeting ends early etc.
FWIW I've so far never seen anyone try to 'use' my thoroughness to create a denial of service attack against me. If that ever did happen, I would definitely change my stance. But it won't be to answer the first question each time. It would be to stop talking to them. Like I ignore any "Hi, can I ask you a question?" messages. Even some directors have tried that and just gotten ignored (first time someone does it, I will let them know they can just ask away. Second time they get ignored until they learn).
Have you ever faced a volume of questions that you could not reasonably answer to the degree of thoroughness you prefer? How did you deal with it? I mean, you mention at least one tactic in the sibling thread, but what I don’t understand is your apparent unwillingness to attenuate your thoroughness based on circumstances. Probably I am taking you too literally, but am curious, is your position absolute?
(I too appreciate thoroughness, but also believe that for some things in business “worse is better”. IE 90% thoroughness might cost 1/10th as much as 99% thoroughness, it’s certainly possible to over-index on the quality of the answers one provides)
You asked
> Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not the other way around?
“Answers questions thoroughly” is a behavior, not part of a person’s identity. If someone gives you a partial answer, that may be optimal behavior for the circumstances, you don’t know, that’s where the empathy comes in. Of course empathy should be mutual, but you can’t be blocked on that to obtain a favorable business outcome. Empathy is a tool in your toolbox.
Yes I have had that problem and still have it from time to time. Like you said, I mentioned one way to deal with it in the sibling thread. What has also happened in some cases is that I had to de-prioritize other things that I had on my plate because the questions were more important at that time.
Maybe it's not entirely clear what I mean with thoroughness here. I am talking about not just ignoring someone's questions. It doesn't mean that if you "ask" me to answer 7 questions that will each take a day of work to answer that I will be "thorough and do those 7 things immediately to get you your answer". I will simply ensure that I read all your 7 questions and tell you that each will take me about a day to answer as it would require certain checks and that I do not have the time for that at the moment. However, if your questions are so urgent vs. the other things I have on my plate, you are welcome to talk to my boss/my product owner/etc on getting your items prioritized higher. I have a finite amount of time per day that I do work and while the exact amount can vary from time to time I will not start working 80 hour weeks or start ignoring your questions.
If you put a list of bulleted, single-sentence questions and clearly state at the top something like “please answer the below questions” you will get your answers. Just have to make it really explicit and obvious that you expect each one answered
Managers, or really anybody higher then you in the hierarchy, will still ignore the rest of the questions. Remember there's no consequences that they can perceive for only sending you a third of an answer.
A major factor in this is a lack of willingness to take the time to understand something, possibly rooted in a meta-failure: not understanding that it takes time to understand things! There's various motivating forces that impel us to race along to the next thing instead of taking a little bit to absorb something, think about it, or discuss it.
I’m not trying to out myself as an unnuanced consumer of communication, but I literally did just that reading the parent comment. I wonder what is the percentage of the HN audience that did that
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.
IMO, there's two things that make this harder than it should be:
1. People tend to skim and a question could be lost even in a two-sentence paragraph.
2. Email's structure means people tend to reply "at the tip" and branching conversations are difficult to understand.
Contributing to this latter problem are:
a. SMTP (to/cc are too flexible, each message is it's own "thing")
b. POP (deep conversations are just a stack of messages some people may not have the "original" and can't easily reply higher up the tree without breaking client threading)
c. Email client visualization of message threads are generally bad. I haven't seen a single client do this well. Outlook can, but out of the box has a very "flat" view.
---
So, people tend to read at the bottom and if someone missed something early in a thread you have no chance of getting it addressed a few messages in.
IMO something more akin to newsgroups or even reddit/HN tree-view threads could be a better fit for business discussions, but I haven't seen anybody try it.
I agree, but I don’t think is necessarily the “first” bullet point or question that gets attention. It’s the one the reader cares most (positively or negatively), or it’s easier to understand/answer.
I've definitely been that person to ask four bulleted questions in an e-mail and then send a reply asking where the answers for the other three are after I get a response that only addresses one of them.
I started to follow this approach [1] 5 years ago and it is amazing how much clearer my own thoughts in communication have become.
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.
The quote is from Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte", "I made this one [the letter] longer, since I didn't have the leisure to make it shorter".
In the spirit of generosity, I'll assume that was a very sly joke, and not an ironic misunderstanding of the point of the comment and the original post. Nice, I see what you did there!
I don't think it's a joke, it's a correction of attribution. The quote seems to have been attributed to a lot of people, but earliest mention of similar message is indeed from Blaise Pascal, see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
Quote Investigator is a gem. There's another page[1] on a similar quote:
> If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.
~ Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in The Operative Miller 23
Appropriately, this doesn’t address the essence of the tweets. With two goals, people will use one as an excuse for the other. They’re receiving the communication. Lists and graphics won’t change that.
Isn't OKRs and other systems supposed to solve this?
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.
I've frequently seen bullet points being treated exactly the way the author describes AND being treated: A reader will seize on a particular bullet and treat it in isolation, as if the other points didn't exist, nuance shredded. They're still useful but unmagical.
I wouldn't dream of sending an email of more than a few sentences without breaking into sections. In longer messages I will also use highlighter to emphasize 1-3 key sentences and move supporting details to an appendix, footnotes, or links.
But there are some people you can't get through to, no matter what.
Somewhat agree. If something is so long that it requires bolding or graphic design to bring out the main point, then it's probably better off shortening it or adding a TL;DR at the top.
Those are good, but the big overarching rules are:
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.
Discrete sections, bullet points, infographics, and a touch of graphic design: that's PowerPoint. The advice I always get for PowerPoint is to delete everything in the slightly smaller font that "nobody reads anyway," so I think you're still limited to the amount of nuance you can fit into a few bullet points, unless those infographics are doing an awful lot of work.
When ever I am working on some large project that involves others, I spend a lot of time searching for the slogans that capture the weighted average of the nuanced meaning. Simple and almost all applicable.
This is why there must be separate private and public conversations. A comment that is appropriate for exploring nuances in a small group is inappropriate for wider communication to a large audience. Social media's blurring between small group conversations and publicly broadcasted conversations removes this distinction.
Absolutely correct, this is also why Senate and Congress meetings out be secret and not public
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
In the IT industry this scenario is fantastically common:
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"
I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them. It's not the scale that makes the nuanced communication not work, it's the scale that makes you notice it. You could have the same communications with smaller groups and you'd have the same results, you just wouldn't be as likely to get negative feedback indicating it.
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 think you're half-right about the critical thinking skills, but the other half is shared context. The bigger the group the less shared context they will have. This gap doesn't necessarily scale linearly, but it also doesn't scale for free unless you're in a cult.
This is my (actually quite scary) experience too. I think if we one day crack artificial general intelligence we’ll come to the sad and scary realization that most people are just really good at hiding their lack of understanding and reasoning ability.
> I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them.
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.
The major difference is the synchronicity in communication. When you write code you can sit and ponder. When someone asks you a question in a conversation, you cant just walk away, think about it, and come back 15 minutes later. It's like speed chess vs hours per side. If you have to respond instantly, you move may be good, but you might find a better one given more time.
Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college, and while they lack the clarifying reality of equations and axiom systems, the practitioners of such fields are quite good at dissecting statements and pulling out the subtleties of human language based communication. A group of upper level literature students would I think pick up on more nuance than a group of CompSci students. They are also exposed to a lot more nuance in their regular reading and work.
> Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college....
Or the most potent disciplines: epistemology and logic. I believe epistemology and logic when combined with decomposition (something programmers usually have excellent capabilities in) make it fairly easy to determine where the weakest links in any given argument lie. A big problem though (in addition to the fact that we don't teach this sort of thinking): the human mind seems to have evolved to have an extremely strong aversion to exercising these skills on certain topics (something barely taught at all in western curriculum of any kind, the closest being psychology, which doesn't get a lot of respect from most people).
The whole depending on a proposition for your salary, yeah. And clear and precise arguing can certainly be put into service for obfuscating relatively simple truths. But the skill is useful.
It was several years after I left university before I gained a real appreciation for a course that was made mandatory at the time: History of Science.
At the time I was forced to take the course, it felt pointless to me, but after reading Thomas Kuhn’s book (SoSR) several years later, I can look back and connect the dots.
Learning about the history of science was meant to punctuate a widely held myth, that our civilization has been progressing linearly and cumulatively. Kuhn found that the way textbooks are written create the illusion in the mind of the student that scientific advances have been linear and cumulative, rather than being interrupted by paradigm shifts, as old approaches are abandoned in favor of new ones.
Nuance comes down to being able to view an issue from multiple perspectives, that in a lot of situations, there is often more than one (correct) answer.
I never took history of science, but read and enjoyed many many essays about the simple description of scientific discoveries, notably by Asimov F&SF essays and Stephen Jay Gould on deep time and geology and so on. Even the development of the gas law and the basics of atomic theory in chemistry is so fascinating.
This kind of doublespeak/mixed messaging with nuanced private conversations but dead-simple (or worse, spun) public statements is a double-edged sword.
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.
I think 'communicate' is the wrong word when you address large group of people. You can't meaningfully communicate in that case.
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.
Napoleon was said to favor a tactic wherein he would bring in a lowly lieutenant to hear his orders, and repeat them back in their own words.
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.
Flat orgs are very popular right now, but isn’t it a huge benefit of a hierarchical organization with subparts that rather than the President of Azure getting on a VTC and telling the whole division that the goal is velocity he can explain to his reports (a small group) that they need velocity with reliability and they can explain to their reports (more small groups) and so on and so forth?
Yes, nuanced comms don’t scale so why isn’t the answer—-don’t require scaled comms?
One reason is that non-scaled comms suffer from “telephone game”. If you do it like you’re saying, then go down 3-4 levels in the hierarchy and check what people are hearing, it will have mutated away from anything you originally said.
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.
Mission command [1] might be useful here. The main idea is you state the mission and your expanded intent and each subordinate command does the same thing all the way down the chain.
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.
This is how OKRs and Salesforce's V2MOM are supposed to work... the CEO does his, then the EVPs do theirs showing how they will contribute to the CEOs, etc.
In practice this is almost never done at scale because having them sequentially ordered means that they must be done pretty quickly and there are too many political turf battles to let them be done quicklty.
I wonder if you could checksum the telephone game by having a 2-level comms. That way the VP could validate that the Director didn't make a mistake when communicating to the EMs.
Eg,
n-level comms are where a CEO communicates to the entire org
1-level comms are where CEO->CTO->VP->Directors->EMs->ICs
The term of art for this practice is “skip-level 1:1s”. It’s not ubiquitous but many think it’s a good idea, particularly when stepping into a new role/org. Obviously it can end up being a lot of meetings so it’s typically on a quarterly or less cadence.
Because of the branching factor it’s not feasible to do this for every bit of comms.
Yes, this glue is important. E.g., the VP dropping by the EM's staff meeting to give a tailored version of the message and do some Q&A, and the VP doing skip-level 1:1 meetings to get the perspective as seen by the EMs. If you build kind of a mesh of redundant communications, you can better course-correct (which also means correcting the original message after observing its actual effect on the team).
An additional benefit of 2-level comms is that you get send some slightly-irrelevant information, but it's clear you aren't expected to read it. This gives you a passive awareness of some of the other stuff that's going on in the organisation, and who you can ask about it.
It's kind of interesting that there's some kind of conservation rule at work there. The amount of effort you have to expend must scale with the number of bits you want to convey correctly _and_ the number of people you successfully convey it to. Delegating to other people will corrupt the message. Large 1-to-N blasts can only convey a few bits before people stop reading or get confused. To perfectly communicate all of the information to all of the people, you'd have to go express it to them individually.
I haven't been in the military myself, and I'd be curious to hear perspective from someone who's been in both environments. I think in the military there is a methodology where at each level you break up your goal into fairly independent sub-goals, communicate those sub-goals to sub-teams with an accompanying expectation of autonomy in execution, and allow them to do the same for their sub-teams. In a civilian situation, one doesn't normally have that level of clarity available, either in the goals or in the org structure. And I suspect the military culture is also less effective when it is dealing with a goal that isn't clearly defined.
Looking back, I work(ed) in a lot of environments where leadership tried to be nuanced. Or at least tried to communicate two or three equally important things.
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.
You can remove "at scale" and it's still true. You can possibly even remove "nuanced" as well. Try writing an email to just one person. If you put two questions in it you will only get an answer to one of them (if you're lucky).
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).
But if those two things (velocity and reliability) are at opposing ends of an engineering spectrum, then different teams will make different decisions about how best to trade one off for the other, and then the org as a whole is unfocused.
The problem is the thinking that there is some fixed bucket of speed and a fixed bucket of robustness ingredients and a fixed bucket of product output. That the only way to get any reliability is to displace some speed, or that if you want to move ahead at all you have to throw reliability out entirely.
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.
Patrick Lencioni said this in The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.
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.
While I won't disagree with the argument, I think the conclusion is flawed. If one must focus on velocity, and reliability is in opposition to velocity, then how much should one focus on one versus the other? It is not well defined, but that is ok. Since we are speaking to humans, not robots, reliability is not therefore completely disregarded--it becomes implicit, and deprioritized, but it is obviously still present to some lesser degree.
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.
> A number of companies I know of have put velocity & reliability/safety/etc. into their values and it's failed every time.
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.
I love your counter examples. In moving beyond the famous Shannon-Weaver model of communication[1], the one with the "signal," "noise," "channel" that network folks love, researchers settled on the importance of "feedback." I would say that these popular stories that become part of "mainstream culture" spread through comedy, song, news, bars, and repeated viewings on television to reinforce and strengthen the "mainstream" understanding of what these things mean and whether nuance is important when talking about them.
I would highly recommend Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. He draws heavily on Neumann, Jung, and dozens of other giants to explore information and culture.
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.
Also people completely dissing other groups as being a bunch of incompetent wannabes because the speaker does not appreciate the full details of their actual work conditions. I tend to join new orgs every two or three years, but in the same large companies, and so many times I have joined an “underperforming” group to help them with a “turn around” only to find the group an intelligent and heroic group dealing with crazy conditions, with fixes they all well knew but which required a persistent long term effort, that management wouldn’t agree to.
>Meanwhile, the only message VPs communicated was the need for high velocity. When I asked why there was no communication about the thing considered the highest risk to the business, the answer was if they sent out a mixed message that included reliability, nothing would get done.
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.
I don’t disagree, but an important distinction relative to the OP is that political communication is in an overtly adversarial environment. It’s a whole other ballgame.
I suspect "overtly adversarial environment" applies to a large chunk of all communication. Perhaps even most. People will willfully interpret any communication to suit their own agendas.
I think interpret was accurate already. I will definitely interpret something differently from someone else without either of us necessarily being guilty of active perversion.
Then you're "interpreting differently" = misinterpret. Everyone interprets everything to understand it at all but you misinterpret it when you understand it differently than intended. And maybe you disinterpret when you do so intentionally.
I don't think nuance was the issue for Romney and the "flipping" issue.
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.
I keep most of my points extremely simple and avoid complex language unless I'm with a group of people whom I trust to understand subtlety. If you look at the history of my comments, you can see people often completely misunderstand what I say, often attributing the opposite opinion to the one I hold (or stated; I often don't state my personal opinion).
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.
Of course, the real skill is in delivering a simplified message. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When you appreciate the nuance, how do you decide what to strip away?
Most HNers don't even read the article they comment on. In this case only a dozen tweets. But I still don't think half of them read through it given the comments I see.
Twitter threads are really awful to read through and, in this case, funny since it is a thread about communication.
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.
the times that I've observed nuanced comms break down at scale, it is usually because genuine conversation is not possible, for a variety of reasons ranging from the number of people who would need to be involved in said conversations to political games of power. so then it becomes the job of a million layers of middle management playing telephone to translate
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)
Look at how many details this guy (Carl Sagan) conveyed in his 15' speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI in a way that potentially everyone understood. I wonder if every explanation was like his, if nuance wouldn't be well communicated, even to large groups.
Thank you! However, this research does not seem to imply that researchers ONLY read the abstracts. When I do a search on Google Scholar, I may download 30 PDFs, for example. Then I would go through the abstracts and sort away those that: did not claim any empirical evaluation of their results, who did something way outside of the topic I am looking for, or did something I already know about well. But once I do that, I will read the remaining ones from start to finish. The papers you linked indeed seem to confirm that a lousy abstract increases the chances of your paper hitting the bin early but I would never allow myself to derive conclusions about the relevant papers just from the abstract. Related guide: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape...
Edit: On top of that, the second study you linked talks about "Altmetric attention scores of the RAs were used to measure the online attention they received". This indicates to me that they studied public interest from the non-academics and not among the academics. Of course, articles submitted to the scientific journal are primarily aimed at the academics in that field. This abstract is an example of how I would bin the article without reading it because it seems to study something I am not interested in. But again, I would not dare comment on its results because I have not read it.
The use of 7–9 year training periods (5 years PhD + 2–4 years postdoc) means a journal article's author and their scientific readership have a lot of shared knowledge and culture, which probably increases the reliability of communication. I agree that pre-publication feedback from peers also helps.
This is a really great thread and really resonated with my personal journey, although at a smaller scale. I’ve transitioned within a large enterprise from leading a deep & broad engineering team with about 50 people to a vertically integrated ops/technology team with about 800 people.
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.
It seems "group communication can't be nuanced" doesn't capture the situation he's describing at Azure. My hunch would be management saw reliability levels as a given, something that daily orders wouldn't change whereas velocity was something that daily order could change.
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).
> But that's because, if I write a blog post and 5% of HN readers get it and 95% miss the point, I view that as a good outcome since was useful for 5% of people and, if you want to convey nuanced information to everyone, I think that's impossible and I don't want to lose the nuance
And lots of people will only ever hear what you said second hand. After all nuance has been intentionally stripped out and the message has been spun to serve the aims of the person interpreting it. “Journalists” do this all the time, but I’ve also seen this happen in the workplace.
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.
I don't think the nuance is lost. It's just that the audience has their own agenda. They might be fully aware of the "AND" and or "BUTS", but will focus on what they want that message to really be.
There must be multiple levels to this. At Apple, at least for a time, there was the overriding idea that "It should Just Work." That was supposed to translate to every part of Apple products. So clicking on stuff in the Finder should just work and AirPort WiFi should just work and so on. What exactly working meant was totally context dependent, but the additional detail that minimal effort and oversight should be required was broadly understood and teams that made products that failed that test were repremanded and reorganized if their products were not outright cancelled.
Reminds me of politics. Try having a nuanced public policy discussion. What's especially bad about that is it makes people identify more strongly with their respective sides and double down on more extremest ideas.
This is something that I'm learning to appreciate. My recent HN traffic spike (Woe of WebSocket) had many people missing the point.
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.
This is very distressing to me. When I try to communicate using examples or analogies, people often get stuck on a particular example and try to solve that example.
>when I joined Azure, I asked people what the biggest risk to Azure was and the dominant answer was that if we had more global outages, major customers would lose trust in us and we'd lose them forever, permanently crippling the business
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.
>> I get the point he's making. But still, if he didn't like the lack of nuance why not find somewhere to work other than Microsoft?
> 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?
I'm charging that he didn't in fact "get the point he's making".
He didn't make a nuanced reaction that recognizes two different truths, he stated one thing and then stated the opposite.
"I'm a generous person but I just want everything for myself." is not an example of nuance. It's an example of one or the other statement simply being untrue.
Now that you say it, I have to admit it's possible, but I guess I'm just not as generous of spirit and did not land on that interpretation myself. I'm going with "no way". :)
regarding the apparently competing values of reliability and velocity, try propagating these goals through different mediums. code quality can absolutely be ingrained into the culture. things like TDD, when/what to integration test, and encouraging PR reviewers to enforce these requirements. you can literally just run an in-house course/training for everyone and the aggressively follow through.
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.
This has always been kind of obvious to me. If you utter a sentence that requires any amount of interpretation to understand, then more people = more possible interpretations.
Nuanced takes more effort to process. Nuanced often comes ofc as having a smell (i.e., not a good one). When most everyone else is nuanced then simple and direct sticks out.
This is why memes are so powerful .. you can communicate a 2- or 3- part thought with a well designed meme so that eg 50 % will get it rather than just 5%
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.
Does that explain the level of nuance around public health policy?
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?
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 approach used by most famous religious books (bhagavadgita, etc.) is statements with many layers of meanings. For example, such a book might say "do to others what you want others do to yourself" and a well-meaning simpleton gets only the surface level meaning, while a more advanced reader sees the more profound meaning, which might've offended simpletons. So everyone gets exactly as much as useful for them. Metaphors are used for the same reason.
That's a really interesting point, but there's no practical way to do this i.e. to embed multiple layers of meaning into Public Communications.
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..
If Dan is right (and I think he is), have a stiff drink nearby and then think about how his point applies to something complicated that is life and death, such as conveying information to the public about a rampant virus.
I agree with your point, but it's got me thinking about how the early mask guidance was so wrong.
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".
> 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"
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:
To be clear, I'm not arguing that health care orgs should have recommended masks early in the pandemic. What I am saying is their adamant declarations of "masks don't work for the public", which note is an affirmative declaration, were false, and never had any supporting evidence. My question is about whether this "simpler, un-nuanced" explanation in fact complicated things in the longer run.
Yes, I know. We're basically in agreement on the broader points, but I don't agree with your second sentence, and you seem to have the opposite bias in terms of how to act under uncertainty:
> What I am saying is their adamant declarations of "masks don't work for the public", which note is an affirmative declaration, were false, and never had any supporting evidence.
There's no such thing as an affirmative declaration of the null hypothesis. You either have proof that something works, or you do not. If you do not have evidence that X works, or the evidence is ambiguous, your conclusion is the null hypothesis (that X doesn't work)...but that doesn't mean that you have to scream it from the rooftops. You can just say "we don't know; the evidence is poor."
The only accurate thing you can say in the "mask debate" is that strong declarations both ways are wrong. The original declarations were wrong, and the declarations now are also wrong. If you look at the data you can't judge either way (with the exception of cloth masks, which are looking quite poor), and so we must equivocate.
The only way you can possibly go on this issue and still be correct is to use nuance. And if you do that, then it's a question of how you use medical evidence to advocate for interventions.
> If you do not have evidence that X works, or the evidence is ambiguous, your conclusion is the null hypothesis (that X doesn't work)
No??? This is what having a prior is for. In this case, the prior was the mechanistic model which told you with reasonable confidence that masks would work in the slices of worlds where the primary mode of transmission was one mitigated by mask-wearing. We do not in fact live in a state of helplessness absent a double-blind peer-reviewed RCT; you will actively come to incorrect conclusions if you refuse to use your existing models & knowledge of the world to draw conclusions about the likelihoods of various outcomes.
> No??? This is what having a prior is for. In this case, the prior was the mechanistic model which told you with reasonable confidence that masks would work in the slices of worlds where the primary mode of transmission was one mitigated by mask-wearing.
Yes. I'm incorporating a prior. Read what I wrote at the top of the thread: every medical intervention that has ever failed a trial has had a biologically plausible justification for doing the trial. Nearly all trials fail.
In the history of medicine, literally every failed medication, surgery, treatment or intervention has had an explanation that seemed plausible at the time. Just as we're seeing with masks, the vast majority of interventions have little to no effect. Many make things worse. From bloodletting to thalidomide to failed cancer drugs, medicine is littered with examples of people who "knew" that their preferred treatment would work based on "priors" or "plausible mechanisms", and ended up doing great harm.
As a bayesian and someone who is knowledgable of science and medicine, my prior probability of any medical intervention working is almost zero.
> my prior probability of any medical intervention working is almost zero
Yes, this is reasonable, in the general case, absent a specific example to examine. However, masks do in fact work to prevent the spread of certain kinds of disease, based on both obvious mechanistic reasoning and on actual experimental evidence to that effect. Making the affirmative claim that masks would not work against covid (at the time) would have been ignoring or denying the non-trivial possibility that they would work quite well (or work poorly, but working poorly is still working on the margin).
> There's no such thing as an affirmative declaration of the null hypothesis.
I strongly disagree, epistemologically speaking. You can run repeated tests and then conclude an intervention is successful. You can also run repeated tests and conclude an intervention is not successful - as you put it, no better than the null hypothesis. Or, finally, you can have just not run tests at all. There is a difference between the second and third states, and health authorities implied the second state when the third state was far more accurate.
> You can also run repeated tests and conclude an intervention is not successful - as you put it, no better than the null hypothesis.
I don't disagree. You test to reject the null hypothesis. If you do not reject, you must accept. Eventually, hopefully, you give up on the failed alternative hypothesis and move on.
> Or, finally, you can have just not run tests at all. There is a difference between the second and third states, and health authorities implied the second state when the third state was far more accurate.
Among other things, we are suffering from a "righteousness" arms race - whatever opinion or tendency we have, we have to find a righteous and moral reason for that feeling, because someone will find a moral reason for the opposite view.
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.
To me it was eye-opening to see just how bad people were at understanding what they were told in the clear, simplified language of public statements regarding COVID.
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.
> 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.
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:
(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?
"there's no reason for the general public to be walking around with a mask".
Nothing in that statement says that masks don't work. It also doesn't say there will never be a reason for the general public to walk around wearing masks. It is in the present tense and a single sentence.
In a shortage, you want the masks focused where the infections are coming in, the hospitals. The virus was not widespread at that point, so you are wasting resources by spreading your mask supply so thin.
His statement seems like an acceptable balance of simplicity and the truth. I also remember him couching it with "at this time" though I don't know if that was a common thing he said.
> 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 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?
Twitter is famous for limiting the length of texts, forcing people to boil down the message to its essence and leave nuance behind.
But this is Dan Luu's point exactly. When forced to communicate at scale -- such as public health directive messaging -- there's no choice. Nuance doesn't work, only the simplest, blunt messages "get through".
Fauci, like many others, were concerned about panic-buying of masks. It's not that they don't work at all, they obviously do, and Fauci knew this. However, they don't work anywhere near as effectively in the hands of the untrained public (chin straps! pulling masks aside to sneeze! INCREASED touching of the face to adjust masks!), so it's taking masks away from people that can use them effectively.
Option 1) Tell the full message, mention that masks do work to a degree.
Outcome 1) People panic buy, and the overall effect is to make the pandemic worse because health professionals can't get enough PPE.
Option 2) Straight up tell people not to buy masks.
Outcome 2) People shrug their shoulders, don't buy masks, and the overall outcome is better, especially for the overburdened health system.
Which would you choose?
Nuance -- resulting in dead doctors and nurses, crippling the health system OR the clear but inaccurate statement -- that saves the country?
This is why it cracks me up to see responses precisely like yours, foaming at the mouth in anger.
You're angry at people that did what you would have done, if sitting in their position and faced with the same choices.
You act like those were the only two options and outcomes. That's a failure of imagination at best, and a false dichotomy.
Some countries were able to issue effective mask wearing guidance - without lying to people, or causing mass mask hoarding. So let's not pretend that wasn't achievable.
Let's also not act like we tried other outcomes first; incentives to mask production, disincentives to mask hoarding, etc.
Multiple trusted organisations lied to Americans, not just for practical purposes but also for political and personal reasons. "Trust the science" now means, obey the science that we didn't censor / fail to investigate / lock behind data protection. It's really not justified, however thick you take people for, and however limited your imagination.
Lying to elicit a certain desired response is not acceptable, no matter the justification for it. It ultimately erodes trust in our institutions, and that trust is the fundamental basis for the functioning of our society.
Our institutions need to be both truthful, and also accountable. This means being able to freely debate the facts without censorship. And for the decisions and communications of our organisations and leaders to be examined, debated, and judged. We cannot have a society where people are knowingly and deliberately misinformed, and debate of the matters is suppressed. That's 1930s Germany levels of gaslighting and suppression. The West is supposed to be Free, and this is not free or democratic.
The problem with the communications over the last two years is they have been values statements masquerading as science. If not everybody agrees with those values, you will have conflict.
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.
Multiple people are pointing out that posting this thread on Twitter is probably a mistake and can't figure out why he would do it: Dan (currently) works at Twitter.
I don't want to get political here, but strictly speaking on communication, Donald Trump was one of the best political communicators in recent history for the ideas he wanted to emphasize to a large audience.
He kept his concepts very simple, he didn't use complex language that might confuse or alienate his audience, he used funny and memorable nicknames to keep your attention, he kept things visual with a lot of props and showmanship, and his key slogans like "build the wall" let people visualize any outcome they wanted. A bad communicator who tried to use nuance with the immigration stuff might have said something like "We're going to deploy a network of physical barriers in denser urban areas and utilize digital surveillance and personnel in more rural areas to reduce illegal immigration along the border." Technically more accurate, but that doesn't paint the same kind of mental picture that can easily be conveyed by "build the wall" in a speech or debate.
The fact that there was (and is) such a market for these over-simplified ideas, though, has implications beyond Trump himself. I can think of a few (not mutually exclusive) possibilities:
* People have always wanted politics to be conveyed in this way, but previous politicians either didn't have the skills or the desire to pander to that style of messaging.
* People's capacity for processing nuance has been saturated by all the complexity of modern life, or by our decreasing attention spans (which is perhaps caused by a culture of instant gratification and companies mass-producing engines which turn dopamine into ad revenue).
* People still have capacity for nuance generally, but don't think it is worth investing that capacity on something like politics, either due to the feeling that current problems are too hard to solve, or that the system doesn't reflect their interests anyway.
* Political polarization and the game theory of plurality voting means that politics has devolved into two tribes that see everything as a zero-sum game, so applying nuance is seen as a dangerous weakness.
Personally I can't help thinking that the thesis of Future Shock[0] seems to match the reality around us quite well.
I tend to ignore "official news" and got most of my Donald Trump speeches as highlights and clips filtered through my largely left-wing circle of friends and family. From what I saw, he was a complete buffoon.
Then one day my fiancee's father was watching a long-form "debate" or something that included Trump. I was astonished at how personable and clear his communication style was, and understood why so many people were so taken by his campaign's ideas and rhetoric.
Jokes aside it's not that nuance doesn't work at scale. It's that many people whose experience is mainly with short-range communication fail to realize or underappreciate that you need different techniques to communicate nuance from a large distance than they are accustomed to using up close. Think about painting.
Why "wonder" when you could just look it up? When people are so intellectually lazy these days, it's no "wonder" that nuances get lost! (Though maybe you were just going for a joke. Poe's law is a bitch, y'know.)
Fine, sometimes I can be bothered to go to Wikipedia:
> Propaganda is a modern Latin word, ablative singular feminine of the gerundive form of propagare, meaning 'to spread' or 'to propagate', thus propaganda means for that which is to be propagated.[4] Originally this word derived from a new administrative body of the Catholic Church (congregation) created in 1622 as part of the Counter-Reformation, called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), or informally simply Propaganda.[3][5] Its activity was aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries.[3]
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