db@helium.East.Sun.COM (David Brownell) (01/23/91)
In article <20995@crg5.UUCP> szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo) writes: > Where the end product does not contain either emotions or sound/video > -- the large majority of technical work -- groupware that communicates > emotions, and for the most part sound/video capability, is not useful. I think this captures the essence of why I disagree with Nick about the role of "emotions" in the workplace. Clearly, he's not worked in an environment that's anything like those I've been in . It's only a rare minority of allegedly technical situations that don't have some person who's got some personal/emotional stake in an outcome. Those situations may not be pleasant, and it may piss the hell out of me to need to deal with someone's fear of new ideas or their irrational attachment to something that blocks progress in a direction I want to move in ... but it's a lot better to know about those things and be able to work with them than to not know about them and hence be unable to get an acceptible outcome. If our communication's been restricted to exclude those important nuances, that might increase technical content, but will (guaranteed!) reduce its overall effectiveness thereby. I'd like to dedicate this new thread to discussions like how just because people have chosen technical specialties says nothing about how truly logical and rational they are ... or maybe about how it's critical to design so-called "groupware" systems to facilitate real flesh-and-blood people who are irrational and emotional and aren't about to change just to make some bloody programmer happy! (:-) - Dave One of the Million monkeys ... see, here's my keyboard!
szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo) (01/24/91)
In article <4015@eastapps.East.Sun.COM> db@east.sun.com (David Brownell) writes: >... I disagree with Nick about the >role of "emotions" in the workplace. Clearly, he's not worked in an >environment that's anything like those I've been in . It's only a rare >minority of allegedly technical situations that don't have some person >who's got some personal/emotional stake in an outcome. I don't think I have ever worked in a situation where people did *not* have personal and emotional stakes in the outcome. It simply does not follow, however, that communicating those emotions will increase the quality of the technical outcome. Furthermore, if one did need to communicate emotions, the bandwidth of computer and even video communications is several orders of magnitude below face-to-face contact and spoken language, and personal contact will be much preferable to emotional groupware in nearly all instances. >Those situations may not be pleasant, and it may piss the hell out of >me to need to deal with someone's fear of new ideas or their irrational >attachment to something that blocks progress in a direction I want to >move in ... but it's a lot better to know about those things and be able >to work with them than to not know about them and hence be unable to get >an acceptible outcome. This assumes two things: * That your definition of "progress" is in fact the correct one and that all you need to do is emotionally convince your fellows that you are right. * That people with the correct technical solution are more emotionally convincing than those with the incorrect solution. I see no relation, unless it is negative, between the ability to emotionally persuade and the correctness of one's technical solutions. If the communication sticks to the technical task, instead of spending brain and communications bandwidth on emotional persuasion, the technical outcome will likely be superior. >If our communication's been restricted to exclude >those important nuances, that might increase technical content, but >will (guaranteed!) reduce its overall effectiveness thereby. I reach quite the opposite conclusion. The "nuances" soak up bandwidth. They do not contribute to the communication of the technical information or resolution of the technical problems. If emotional nuances and deciphering of the nuances are excluded, the technical solution will be superior. -- Nick Szabo szabo@sequent.com Embrace Change... Keep the Values... Hold Dear the Laughter...
db@helium.East.Sun.COM (David Brownell) (01/25/91)
> >If our communication's been restricted to exclude > >those important nuances, that might increase technical content, but > >will (guaranteed!) reduce its overall effectiveness thereby. > I reach quite the opposite conclusion. The "nuances" soak up bandwidth. > They do not contribute to the communication of the technical information > or resolution of the technical problems. If emotional nuances and > deciphering of the nuances are excluded, the technical solution will > be superior. You're saying the nuances are unimportant ... but as explained in the problem scenario, it was impossible to get to the task issue without addressing the non-task ones first, and the only way to find that out was to have those "nuances". A ** VERY COMMON SITUATION ** in all kinds of environments; people are people. So long as the situation is viewed as only "technical" there may in fact be no "technical solution" at all. In fact, if there were some better bandwidth devoted to nonverbal content on USENET I might be able to find out why it's being hard to achieve a reality check here; maybe I'd find my leg is just being pulled. In any case, enough of this waste of ASCII characters. One of the Million monkeys ... see, here's my keyboard!