思考与写作habitatchronicles.com
你无法单靠告诉别人任何事（2004）
You can't tell people anything (2004)
2018 — 2021，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这篇文章的核心观点是：你没法只靠“告诉”就把一件事真正传达给别人。作者认为，人需要先有某种直接经验作为“触点”，才能在脑子里为你说的事情找到安放的位置；缺少这层语境，再清楚的解释也落不到实处。文章由此讨论沟通、教学与产品设计中共通的困境。
为什么经久不衰：它用很短的篇幅说清了“为什么讲道理常常没用”这个反复困扰沟通、教育和产品的问题，二十年后读来依然贴切。
HN 评论精选
用“点头效应”描述沟通中误解如何被沉默地累积和掩盖。
我把这叫做“点头效应”，它在技术讨论里尤其严重。我的结论是：90%的情况下，90%的人听不懂所讲内容的90%。你几乎必须先已经完全听懂，才能跟得上，除非对方说的是显而易见的事。维持“沟通正在发生”这一幻觉的，就是那个有害的小小点头——没人愿意每隔30秒打断讲者去追问每个术语。于是误解不断累积。现在除非点头极其积极，我已默认对方其实跟不上了。
d23查看英文原文
I also call this the head nod effect. It's particularly a problem in technical discussions. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of the time 90% of people don't understand what 90% of what's being said. You essentially have to start from a point of already understanding entirely what the person is saying to be able to keep up, unless they're just saying something completely trivial. The glue that keeps the illusion that communication is happening alive is that pernicious little head nod. No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon and ill-explained thing that comes out of their mouths. So the slight misunderstandings snowball until you're really getting a fraction of whatever the speaker is trying to communicate. At this point, unless the head nod is aggressively positive, I have come to assume it actually means they have stopped following fully. I then have the decision as the speaker whether to ask for questions or just slow down a bit or stop altogether and see if they naturally show their curiosity. > What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The beautiful irony is that I simultaneously understand what the author means by this and I find it completely incomprehensible. Well, it's not that bad, but I guess it's just that the concept has morphed into such a complex shape of neurons in my head that doesn't seem to quite fit the words this author is saying, so it doesn't jive quite right. I think I know what they mean, but maybe I don't.
把文章观点重构为“别急着给答案，先让人拥有问题”，并以教学和培训为例。
我常把这想成“很难向人解释一个他们并不存在的问题的解法”。这也是整个教育体系结构上的一大问题：它总是在告诉人们他们还没有的问题的答案。数学和科学里，先抛出问题、让学生在没有答案时自己琢磨，效果往往好得多，因为那样答案才记得牢。我做的 git 培训也是先带你经历每个用户都会遇到的问题，再给解法。
jerf查看英文原文
I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have. I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains know when it's a fake problem.) But a lot of times in math and science I think we'd be much better off leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because then the answers would stick. I've mentioned on HN before the git training curriculum I have made for my workplace... it's an interactive tutorial, and rather than just walking you through solutions, it's really more a guided tour of the problems that every git user encounters, then the solutions. We do merge conflicts, detached head (easy for git experts to forget how confusing that state is!), getting confused about why the things I used "git add" on now doesn't show diffs, etc. It seems to work reasonably well.
听讲解会制造“懂了”的错觉，真正的理解只能来自亲手试错。
我读研时当过物理助教，很擅长讲解法，复习课时总能吸引一大群人来听。我也试着让学生自己先想思路，他们却要求“你就直接告诉我们吧”。看别人把解法讲得很好是有危险的，因为它给你一种非常真实的“懂了”的感觉，却没有真正的理解。要真懂，你得从头自己做一遍，才会明白为什么这个思路成立、别的思路行不通，也才会对未来的问题产生直觉——但过程中你又会陷在细节里，反而觉得自己没弄懂。
scottmsul查看英文原文
I was a physics TA in grad school. I was very good at explaining solutions to problems, so of course during exam reviews I would get big crowds to watch the explanations. I was also somewhat aware of this principle, so during a review I was trying to get students to come up with approaches or ideas while solving a problem, and they demanded "why don't you just tell us!" It was pretty frustrating. Watching someone explain solutions well can be dangerous, since it gives you the very real feeling of understanding, without actual understanding. To actually understand, you have to try a problem from scratch. Then you will understand why the solution/approach is what it is, and why other approaches fail, which will give you intuition about which approaches work on future problems. But counter-intuitively, you will get lost in the weeds during the process, which makes you feel like you don't understand!
共鸣于“让成品代替解释”这一动机，说明为何很多创作者渴望独立行事。
文中那句“我的目标是实现财务自由，好负担得起去做点工作——主要是能先把事情做出来而不必先解释，让成品本身成为解释”，正是我自己人生目标的绝佳表述，我一直说不清楚这种感受。说到底，我只想把时间花在 AI 研究或攻克癌症上，但想按自己的方式来。
throwaway713查看英文原文
> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement. This is an excellent explanation that mirrors my own life goals, but I have struggled to put the sentiment into words this well. At the end of the day, I just want to spend (waste?) all of my time doing AI research or working on a cure for cancer, but I want to do it my own way.
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