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56 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

If you invest a little time on the slide you will understand it and may even see it as a thing of beauty. But Masters’ audience was obviously expecting something different and, presented with this level of complexity, went into shutdown. Perhaps they wanted a simpler presentation, a high-level summary, a few bullet points. Of course, there is no simple presentation on Afghanistan. The lesson is that context, timing and expectation are often as important to good communication as the elegance of the content, and that information is a complex thing.
If you want a lighthearted poke at PowerPoint here is Peter Norvig’s PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address.

Understanding
Next time you are in a business meeting, count the number of times the word ‘understand’ is used. If you ask the people around you what it means you’ll stump many of them. That’s because understanding has two very different meanings. Most people don’t separate these meanings but the distinction is important. Understanding means to decode information, to comprehend – but, more importantly, it also means to absorb and internalize information. That feeling you have when you ‘get it’.
If I say, “I understand” I mean I have taken in the question you asked and decoded it into ideas so I can provide an answer. This can be quite a mechanical process and computers routinely understand natural language and answer questions – Apple’s digital assistant Siri being a case in point.
When I say, “I understand a problem” or “understand a culture” I mean something far less tangible. Somehow the information I have gathered over my life is formed into a matrix within my brain that allows me to ponder and run scenarios. I can predict the effects of my actions before I do them, and often anticipate your responses. That’s clearly a very useful evolutionary adaption, but is there more to it than that? Roger Penrose and David Deutsch think understanding allows us to transfer non-symbolic information from one brain to another. We don’t run programs in our brains, nor do we store precise information such as lists and tables. We have, therefore, had to evolve a creative approach to communicating skills and understanding each other. One of the most closely studied areas in the field of communication is when it breaks down in the lead up to a disaster.

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