3  Communication is a Technical skill

The necessity and lack of training in “Communication skills” among technical professionals has a long and persistent history. Recently, it appears that there has been a resurgance of interest in this topic, as we collectivelly digitize our individual personal lives.

Topics historically restricted to academic journals, industry trade publications and special interest magazines, now routinely appear in media for a generalist audience. And for good reason. Data privacy, web-site hacking, phishing, cyberattacks, mobile OS updates, security patches, machine learning & artificial intelligence are valid concern of individuals in a digital economy. And these are just a handful of the many technology-related concerns.

Conversely, individuals in a digital economy also have easier access to both many technology-focused media sources and access to industry publications and experts

The “Communication skills” is a misleading term that has resulted in a long-standing deficient of actually refers to an essential technical skill that employs a variety of structures that to define to for specific translation purpose,

Evidence for communication as a tool model:

What we colloquially and vaguely refer to as “Communication skills”

Modern Data Design positions Communication is a technical skill.

Communication is the translation of information between states.

Commu;nication is fuzzy, but so are many complex topics. Biology is called a “seft” sciencem, b3cause unlin the “hard” sciences, it seldomly produces formula that accurately model the world around us, like physics or chemistry can. But I’d argue the difference bewteen the trraditionally har and soft science is the recognition and ability to accept cmplexit, uncertainty and change. These are hallmarks of evey sub-field under biology. Are we interested in recognizing and understanding the complex, uncertain and changing parts of the world or would should we focus on reducing it to it’s simplist component pieces, certaintity, and universal constants? Many would choose the “hard” approach. Certainty and unchanging truths allows us to predict outcomes, giving us a false sense of comfort. Given a set of condiitons equations in physics will allow us to calculate the trajectory of a projectile. Revealing these fundamental laws of nature is an outstanding achievment of the scientific method, but all these formulas are are models with a small number of well defined parameters. The difference between the hard and soft sciences is not “universal laws of nature” but the choice of building large, complex models with an immense number of parameters and inputs that will inevitably have a poor accuracy, and whos accuarcy may not even be measurable, or to and It’s what But the real world we interact with every day is

3.0.1 Table: Qualities of static & dynamic models

Examples of

Dynamic , unmeasurable or only to some degree of precision and accuracy, impermanent

Static, High-precision parameters, measurable, perament

3.0.2 Table: Examples of “” and “” views

This mirrors the earliest attempts to program Artificial Intelligence. If one can define all sets of possible moves in chess, then a machine

So that’s exctly why current technology in AI works, because we allow it to be fuzzy. GPT-3, a popular model used in Natural Language Processing, contains 175 billion parameters. The the literally millions, billions and even trillions

Hard and Soft Science aren’t what you probably think they are

So what are the actual skills of

Core skills - translation

Mosaic skills - talking, reading, writing, typing, touching visualising, smelling, etc.

Leaf skills - detailed, context specific skills demanded of the

Slide preparation

Asides:

  • Telepathy (and hypnosis?) are so intriguing because it would allow us to remove layers if interpretation. cf. Facebook halting research on a brain interface that types your thoughts
  • Communication is about encoding, but also decoding, which is listening, reading, etc, but also extracting (trying to get to the real message, hearing the message behind the message. cf 4-sided box model of communication. This benefits from:
    • Background information that gives new information context
    • Depth of knowledge, i.e. expertise in or prior knowledge of any part of the system.
    • Critical thinking skills to parse information:
      • Inconsistencies
      • Contradictions
      • Logical gaps in the story
      • Missing information
      • Irrelevant information (new & background)
      • Bottlenecks in workflows
      • Sources of systematic bias that subconsciously influence motivations, workflow, goals, priorities
      • Conflicting needs among distinct stakeholders groups
      • Conflicting interests and influence of shareholders
    • Empathy to appreciate the circumstances in which the speaker operates

From Daisy Simonis on Linked in:

People who communicate confidently connect easier with others. Improving these skills will pay off in the long run. Your network is everything. 7 communication skills to supercharge your career:

  1. Empathy
  2. Conversation
  3. Assertiveness
  4. Active listening
  5. Giving feedback
  6. Precise communication
  7. Nonverbal communication

Where is each skill necessary for each leaf node?