As far as explicit claims go: My current belief is something like:
If you actually want to communicate an implicit idea to someone else, you either need
1) to figure out how to make the implicit explicit, or
2) you need to figure out the skill of communicating implicit things implicitly… which I think actually can be done. But I don’t know how to do it and it seems hella hard. (Circling seems to work via imparting some classes of implicit things implicitly, but depends on being in-person)
My point is not at all to limit oneself to explicit things, but to learn how to make implicit things explicit (or, otherwise communicable). This is important because the default state often seems to be failing to communicate at all.
(But it does seem like an important, related point that trying to push for this ends up very similar sounding, from the outside, like ‘only explicit evidence is admissable’, which is a fair thing to have a instinctive resistance to)
But, the fact that this is real hard is because the underlying communication is real hard. And I think there’s some kind of grieving necessary to accept the fact that “man, why can’t they just understand my implicit things that seem real obvious to me?” and, I dunno, they just can’t. :/
Agreed it’s a learned skill and it’s hard. I think it’s also just necessary. I notice that the best conversations I have about difficult to describe things definitely don’t involve making everything explicit, and they involve a lot of ‘do you understand what I’m saying?’ and ‘tell me if this resonates’ and ‘I’m thinking out loud, but maybe’.
And then I have insights that I find helpful, and I can’t figure out how to write them up, because they’d need to be explicit, and they aren’t, so damn. Or even, I try to have a conversation with someone else (in some recent cases, you) and share these types of things, and it feels like I have zero idea how to get into a frame where any of it will make any sense or carry any weight, even when the other person is willing to listen by even what would normally be strong standards.
Sometimes this turns into a post or sequence that ends up explaining some of the thing? I dunno.
As far as explicit claims go: My current belief is something like:
If you actually want to communicate an implicit idea to someone else, you either need
1) to figure out how to make the implicit explicit, or
2) you need to figure out the skill of communicating implicit things implicitly… which I think actually can be done. But I don’t know how to do it and it seems hella hard. (Circling seems to work via imparting some classes of implicit things implicitly, but depends on being in-person)
My point is not at all to limit oneself to explicit things, but to learn how to make implicit things explicit (or, otherwise communicable). This is important because the default state often seems to be failing to communicate at all.
(But it does seem like an important, related point that trying to push for this ends up very similar sounding, from the outside, like ‘only explicit evidence is admissable’, which is a fair thing to have a instinctive resistance to)
But, the fact that this is real hard is because the underlying communication is real hard. And I think there’s some kind of grieving necessary to accept the fact that “man, why can’t they just understand my implicit things that seem real obvious to me?” and, I dunno, they just can’t. :/
Agreed it’s a learned skill and it’s hard. I think it’s also just necessary. I notice that the best conversations I have about difficult to describe things definitely don’t involve making everything explicit, and they involve a lot of ‘do you understand what I’m saying?’ and ‘tell me if this resonates’ and ‘I’m thinking out loud, but maybe’.
And then I have insights that I find helpful, and I can’t figure out how to write them up, because they’d need to be explicit, and they aren’t, so damn. Or even, I try to have a conversation with someone else (in some recent cases, you) and share these types of things, and it feels like I have zero idea how to get into a frame where any of it will make any sense or carry any weight, even when the other person is willing to listen by even what would normally be strong standards.
Sometimes this turns into a post or sequence that ends up explaining some of the thing? I dunno.
FWIW, upcoming posts I have in the queue are:
Noticing Frame Differences
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge
Backpropagating Facts into Aesthetics
Keeping Frames Explicit
(Possibly, in light of this conversation, adding a post called something like “Be secretly explicit [on the margin]”)