Upgoer Five

[drwex]

I blame Chanaleh, and my dedication to Feynman's philosophy that if we cannot explain something simply then we haven't adequately explained it.

To wit, I took my own verbose explanation of What It Is That I Do (from 2006, holy cow I've been on LJ a long time) and ran it through the upgoer five text editor. The result is this:

I make stuff from which people get whole answers that they like. I make situations in which conversations can take place between people and the things people use. These conversations are about what people do and the conversations happen over a long time. I deal with how people get confused, with how people feel, and with what people have done in the past because this matters to what they do now.

I could not do what I do without an understanding of thought, memory, attention, and seeing. I use simple things, I watch carefully, and I try to care for other people when I make these situations. I use what I have made to deal with problems in business and problems with stuff everyone else uses. When I do my job well, things that are busy seem easy; things that seem too big to deal with feel smaller.

I'm surprised that the vocabulary includes polysyllabic words like "conversation" but I couldn't find a good word in there to use in place of "exchange". I used a thesaurus to help me on the first pass, which was just word substitution, then I did a second pass of sentence restructuring and simplification. I then did a final pass in which I rearranged the sentences themselves in order to improve the flow.

If I was trying to be really simple, I think, I would stop after the first paragraph but that felt like cheating, given the original text I was working from. I started out being frustrated by this exercise but in the end I found it quite interesting and useful. Also, I realize that I don't have a "wiitid" tag in my LJ, though clearly I ought to have one.

Comments

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

I thought that was a fun idea, and tried it myself yesterday: " I find out things about people who went to school here. I find out how much money they make, and how they make their money. I find out what kind of things they like to do. I find out about their families. I find out about their jobs, and about the places where they work. I learn about where they give money to help do good in the world. I find out about what has happened when they have talked to people from our school in the past. After I find these things out, I write them down, and give them to people who go and ask them for money to help make the school better. That way, they know what kinds of things the people might like about the school, or might want to make better."

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting. The non-technical version makes you sound like a group facilitator.

[drwex]

That is a fair bit of what I am. I took a course in meeting facilitation very early in my working career and it influenced me a good deal.

At one point I was tempted to include the following line in my resume:

"Held Socratic dialog to remove all instances of 'uhh' from the requirements."

It's what in fact I did but I doubt anyone would hire me because of it :)