unexplainable

the things that are hard to explain in words

andrea added 1y

"How to clarify a concept you can't articulate:

1. Change mediums. Draw it. Photograph it. Sing it.
2. Change levels. Explain what is one level up (bigger picture) or one level down (finer details).
3. Change fields. What would this concept look like in different fields?"

(James Clear newsletter)

sari added 8mo

"We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else. Perhaps once in a

sari added 2mo

“The next _____” “[existing thing] (eg Uber) for x” Almost always wrong and uninteresting Build something that can’t be easily analogized

Patrick OShaughnessy

twitter.com

sari added 1y

build something you can't easily put into words

Since the beginning of time, the answer to “What do you do?” could be answered with one word.

Finance. Sales. Education.

But today, most jobs exist in liminal spaces: Kind of like this but also not quite that.

It may have been fair to think that any explanation longer than a one-word, universally understood, job title was just an attempt to l

Alex Tan • #059 Environment Design

sari added 1y

Analogies are a poverty of language

andrea added 1y

alex added 6mo

Reaching wide audiences requires all-terrain language, and the urgency of the present moment, amplified by chronological feeds, doesn’t allow for much stylistic variety. Efficiency is key — compressing as much information as possible to the least amount of words is the ideal of all communication.

While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... See more

andrea added 1y

“It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”

― Anthony Doerr

alex added 1y

“words do not matter, because meaning is often felt, not said.”

sari added 5mo