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.
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]”)