#3 The Burden Of Knowledge And Giant Blue Aliens
And also a flat Earth joke
An excerpt from the March 2021 Direct Mail Newsletter
"You're not the only one cursed with knowledge.”
-Thanos to Tony Stark
Ever feel like the better you get at what you do, the crazier you seem? There is a reason for it, and I learned it from Aliens. About 7 years ago, as I was walking out of my office, I called my staff together and said
“As per usual, I’ll be back right around four o’ clock. Do me a favor and sit down between now and then and write out YOUR ideal avatar.”
And then I walked out the door. As I made my way through the parking lot, my business partner, Trevor, said "I don’t think you know what you just asked them to do”. I shrugged it off, not really understanding what he was trying to say.
What happened next changed EVERYTHING for me.
But first, another excerpt from my daily newsletter to lay the foundation:
I was watching Godzilla vs. Kong last night and told myself aFlat Earth joke that I thought was 10/10 hilarious. I ALMOST posted it publicly but I thought better of it.
Here's why:
Ever write something down for a blog, email, or social media post and think, "Man, this is the best thing that I've ever written," only to post or send and get crickets in response?
Mysterious.
But not really.
One of my (newly) favorite and most cited doctoral dissertations is called “The Rocky Road From Actions to Intentions” and it explains why this happens. And, like all the useful things floating around out there, it's not new. Elizabeth Newton of Stanford wrote it in 1990. [Start on page 33 if you get your hands on it]
Dr. Newton paired up two research subjects across from one another at a table, one person would tap out a well-known song on the desk, with their finger and the other had to guess what it was. The tappers guessed that the party on the other side would get it right between 40% and 50% of the time.
They got it right less than 2% of the time.
What does this tell us? It tells us that we grossly overestimate how well we communicate… But why?
Because, in the case of the experiment above, the tapper can hear in their head all of the accompaniment for the song - instruments, lyrics, etc. without fully understanding and accepting that the other person doesn't have access to any of that accompanying information.
The tapper hears sweet, sweet music.
The listener hears some fucked-up version of morse code.
Think about this the next time you're making a video or writing an article or an email and think you are making "sweet, sweet music" to the other party.
[Or, more hilariously, next time someone is speaking gibberish to you, imagine how sweet they think the music they are making is. For example, I'm over here giggling at how clever I think I am - you likely aren’t feeling the same]
It gets worse.
They did the experiment again. This time they did the tapping first and then, afterwards, asked the tapper the probability that the person across the desk would be able to guess the song. The result?
Nearly exactly the same.
Which means we also grossly overestimate how well we have communicated, even after the communication has taken place.
It gets. Even. Worse.
Fast forward to Justin Kruger at NYU in 2005 who, in the Journal of Personal Social Psychology, helped explain why email and social media are so grossly ineffective.
The experiment was simple: participants got a list of topics and were to create two sentences for each: one normal and one sarcastic. Then they would send the sentences to subjects in another group who were designated with the task of reading the sentence and determining whether it was normal or sarcastic.
Again, failure across the board.
So, they repeated the experiment, but with VOICE messages this time and, predictably, the predictors did much much better.
Here is the surprising part:
The sentence writers predicted and believed there would be no difference between how people interpreted the written sentences and the spoken sentences. They just assumed that their sarcasm would come through in text the same as it does in voice.
This means at some level I THINK you're going to read this email very closely to how you would hear it if I dropped it in the private channel as a voice. I would be wrong in thinking that you will interpret my text as a voice message or my voice messages as if we were sitting in the same room together. Wrong again.
I mean, my Flat Earth joke was pretty hilarious.As hilarious as it is in my head, it's only entertaining to me because of the exact visuals at the exact time in the sequence that I saw them. To write that down and expect ANYONE else to get would be juvenile at best.
Here is the problem: The more you know about something, the more people will turn to you to help.
Makes sense, right?
But the more you know about something, the greater number of accompaniments you have in your head. The richer your experience with a particular subject, the greater the gap grows between what you think you are saying and what you are actually saying.
So, what's the point?
People much smarter than me concluded that text communication is almost always misunderstood because of the "inherent difficulty of moving beyond your own subjective experience and understanding and imagining how the other party will interpret the information without your privileged perspective."
Doing business over Messenger?
Supporting your staff via email?
Working with vendors over SMS?
Trying to solve a problem for yourself or someone else with the written word?
It's likely that sweet music in the head of one party is gibberish in the mind of another. Where one hears a sweet melody the other simply hears: tap tap tap
Something to think about.
This is the burden of knowledge. I call it the “base-knowledge disconnect”; when your base knowledge (what you consider obvious) still exceeds the capacity that the listener has to connect with the idea.
It also explains what happened when I got back to the office. My entire team had either drawn or written out the description(s) of their ideal avatar. They were each unique, with names, job descriptions and preferences, and they all had one thing in common…
…They Were All Giant, Blue Aliens
If it were early 2009, my request may have seemed like complete gibberish, given that “avatar” didn’t really mean anything to non-marketers before then. By late 2009, thanks to James Cameron, “Avatar” had taken on a new meaning to the general population:
giant blue alien.
Is it crazy to create an urgent task for your entire team that involves taking the afternoon to detail their perfect avatar?
Depends on who you ask.
You may be thinking that that is a perfectly valid request. I certainly thought it was.
Communication can be used to serve many purposes. My priority is to be useful. I can tell you that giving information, making requests, or communicating without giving the other party the accompaniments they need to complete the tune you’re playing in your head is NOT useful.
We must make a decision; do we want to make valid points, do we want to be right or do we want to be useful?
And if we want to be useful, we must provide the context to communicate effectively.
And no, it’s not appropriate to call the listener (or reader) “stupid” for not understanding you. Let’s not forget that you, too, are a the listener or reader in other areas or domains.
Again, something to think about.
Nic
PS. I just moved the newsletter to sub stack to allow for the option to do some of the things I have been thinking about doing. I am currently working on becoming a better communicator through written word (see above). I love paragraph for web3 stuff, but sub stack gives me more options.
PPS. Part of my “become a better writer” kick was rewriting Bumpers. I dropped it as low as Amazon would let me, so it’s like $4 for a physical copy. Or you can get a free digital copy here.