Communication: Standing Where the Other Stands

This is the last of three posts on the pillars of research, after taste and execution. You have judged a good idea and built a real thing. It is sitting on your hard drive, true and working and invisible. Communication is the pillar that decides whether it ever becomes part of anyone else’s thinking—and it’s the one students neglect most, because it feels like packaging applied to the real work after the real work is done. That’s exactly backwards, and showing you why is most of this post.

The title is the whole method, borrowed from a Chinese phrase I keep returning to: 易地而处—stand where the other stands; put yourself in their place. Every rule below is a special case of it. Writing, speaking, and the daily honesty of working with people all come down to the same move: stop modeling your own head and start modeling theirs.

Writing is not reporting. Writing is thinking.

Start with the deepest misconception, because it changes how you should work, not just how you should write. Most people think the sequence is: have the idea, do the research, then write it up. Write-up—as if writing were transcription, the clerical step at the end.

It isn’t. Writing is how you find out whether you actually have an idea. You know the feeling of a thought that seems complete and powerful in your head—and then you sit down to write it and it dissolves into mush, because it was never as finished as it felt. Ideas can feel complete; it’s only when you try to put them into words that you discover they’re not. And the flip side, the real payoff: half the ideas that end up in a piece are ones you thought of while writing it. Writing doesn’t just expose the holes; it generates the patches. Leslie Lamport’s version is the one I quote to students: if you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

Simon Peyton Jones turns this into a method, and it’s the single most useful piece of advice I can give a new researcher. The naive model is idea → do research → write paper. His model is idea → write the paper → do the research. Start writing the paper almost immediately, while the work is still half-formed, because “writing the paper is how you develop the idea in the first place.” The paper isn’t the report of the research. The paper is an instrument for doing the research—it forces you to be clear, it crystallizes what you don’t understand, and it shows you, early and cheaply, which parts are actually hard. Don’t wait until you “have something to write up.” Write to find out if you do.

Writing, mechanically

Once you accept writing as thinking, the craft rules follow from 易地而处—from relentlessly taking the reader’s side.

Your reader doesn’t care what you know. Writing isn’t about communicating your ideas to your readers; it’s about changing their ideas. The reader is not asking “why do you think that?”—they’re asking “why should I think that?” They don’t owe you a reading; you owe them a reason to keep going. Every sentence is spending their patience, and you’d better be buying something with it.

One idea. Peyton Jones again: a paper should have a single “ping”—one clear, sharp point. “You want to infect the mind of your reader with your idea, like a virus.” A virus carries one payload. If your paper has five contributions, your reader will remember none of them; if it has one, sharp and well-aimed, they’ll carry it out of the room. Decide what the one thing is. You may not know at the start—but you must know by the end.

Don’t make them walk your path. The single most common flaw in student drafts: recounting the project in the order it happened. “Do not recapitulate your personal journey of discovery,” Peyton Jones says. “This route may be soaked with your blood, but that is not interesting to the reader.” They don’t want the maze you wandered—they want the straight road to the idea, the one you can only draw after you’ve escaped. Your suffering is not structure.

And a concrete process, the one I actually use: flow → bullets → prose → paper. First the flow—the logical skeleton, the argument’s shape, before any sentences. Then bullets fleshing each beat. Only then prose. Only then polish. The mistake is starting at prose—writing beautiful paragraphs about points that, it turns out, are in the wrong order or shouldn’t exist. Get the skeleton right while it’s cheap to move bones around. Sentences are expensive to write and emotionally expensive to delete, so don’t write them until the structure is settled.

Talks: you have two minutes and one job

A paper and a talk are different instruments and people keep confusing them. A paper is for the record, read alone, re-readable. A talk is live, linear, un-rewindable, and the audience is exhausted and skeptical and checking their phone. 易地而处: design for that person, not for an attentive reader who doesn’t exist.

The purpose of a talk is not to convey your results. Peyton Jones is blunt: the goal is “to give your audience an intuitive feel for your idea” and “to make them eager to read your paper”—not to present every detail, and emphatically not “to impress your audience with your brainpower.” His budget for a conference talk is worth memorizing: “Motivation (20%) + your key idea (80%). Nothing else.” You cannot transmit the paper in twenty minutes. Don’t try. Make them want the paper.

Patrick Winston taught a famous talk at MIT for forty years, and two of his rules I pass on constantly. Start with a promise—in the first minute, tell them exactly what they’ll know or be able to do by the end; give them a reason to stay. And don’t open with a joke—they’re still settling in, still adjusting to your voice, not ready for it; you’ll get the laugh later when you’ve earned the room. (He also held that there is “a special circle in hell for those who use laser pointers”—a conviction I have come to share.)

The deepest enemy of a good talk has a name: the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, you cannot imagine not knowing it, and so you skip the very steps your audience needs. There’s a much-loved illustration: people tap out a famous song on a table—just the rhythm—and badly overestimate how many listeners can name it, because inside their own heads they hear the whole song, melody and all, while the listeners get only the bare taps. That gap—between the song in your head and the bare taps the audience actually receives—is every talk you’ve sat through and not understood. Your expertise is the tapping. Fight it by, again, 易地而处: sit in your own audience’s chair and ask what they actually have in their heads right now, which is almost nothing of what’s in yours.

One underrated, concrete thing: delivery, including your voice. Students obsess over slides and ignore how they sound, but a talk is heard. I’ll add the necessary caveat, since it’s everywhere: the famous “93% of communication is nonverbal” statistic is a myth—a real study, badly generalized, that only ever applied to mismatched emotional signals. Don’t believe the number. Do believe the underlying point: how you say it carries real weight, and a monotone will bury a good idea. Practice out loud. Hear yourself.

The quiet kind: talking to the people you work with

The flashy communication is papers and talks. The kind that determines whether your projects live or die is the daily one—how you talk to your collaborators and your advisor. Two principles.

Be honest, fast, especially when it’s bad. When something goes wrong—a result doesn’t replicate, you’ve fallen behind, you broke the build—the instinct is to hide it until you’ve fixed it. That instinct is the single most expensive habit in research. Tell me immediately. Yes, we might be frustrated for a moment; that passes, and a problem surfaced early is cheap while a problem hidden for a month can be fatal. Toyota built the best manufacturing system in the world partly on one idea: any worker on the line can pull a cord and stop everything the instant they see a defect—and when they pull it, a leader comes to help, not to punish. Pulling the cord is the heroism, not the failure. Build that cord into how we work. Pull it early.

This only functions on a foundation with a name: psychological safety—the shared sense that the team is safe for taking interpersonal risks, that you can admit a mistake or ask a dumb question without being punished for it. When teams are studied for what makes them effective, this keeps coming out near the top, ahead of raw talent or experience. That’s most of what I mean when I tell a student I’m on your side. I’m not the examiner waiting for you to slip. We are pointed at the same problem, and the work goes faster if you can tell me the truth without bracing for impact. The aim is candor with care: challenge people directly precisely because you’re on their side. Care without challenge is useless flattery; challenge without care is just cruelty. Both at once is how good groups actually talk.

Talk outward, too. Three rings, all worth your time. Talk to people outside your field—including, now, to AI, which is an endlessly patient outsider to every field at once; explaining your problem to something that doesn’t share your assumptions is one of the fastest ways to find them. Talk to people in your broad community, systems people generally, who share your language. And talk to the handful working your exact problem—track at least one line of work closely enough that, when people in the area think of it, they think of you. That last one is how a research identity actually forms: not by announcing it, but by being reliably present in one conversation until it becomes yours.

The pillar, and the point of all three

Communication is the pillar that makes the other two count. Taste with no communication is private good judgment nobody benefits from. Execution with no communication is a working system nobody adopts. The work becomes real—enters the shared body of what the field knows—only when it crosses from your head into others’. And every technique for making that crossing reduces to the same move: 易地而处, leave your own head and stand in theirs.

Which is, when you zoom out, what all three pillars have been about—the promise I made at the very start of this series, now come due. Taste is modeling the field well enough to know what it needs. Execution is modeling the machine well enough to make it obey. Communication is modeling other people well enough to reach them. Research is, in the end, three kinds of empathy—for the problem, for the system, and for the people—three different targets, one underlying skill: getting outside your own head and being right about what’s there instead.

That’s why I opened with a Tang-dynasty teacher and I’m closing with a Tang-dynasty phrase, and why they turn out to be the same idea. 传道, 授业, 解惑—transmit the Way, impart the skills, resolve doubts—are three faces of 易地而处, standing where the other stands: the field, the machine, the person across the table. It’s the Way I’m trying to transmit, and it can’t really be transmitted on a page. The rest is doing it next to someone, year after year, until it’s yours.