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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that everyone else was so comically bad at literally any kind of communication. I'm starting to feel like the general advice lawyers give of say nothing is a terrible advice, when you have such a public facing company. It's like what you need in that situation is a communication coach first and a lawyer second.

But as an engineer that also never learned this kind of narrative control, I too am struggling at where I can learn this from. Any hints are appreciated actually.

Sam Altman on the other hand has decades more experience is that playing field.

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This sounds like snark but it’s not intended to be: do you really need sources to learn narrative control? Perceiving how narratives work seems to be a skill that almost all humans are very good at naturally. I acknowledge that shaping narratives is a different skill set (especially the parts that require putting yourself in a position to shape narratives effectively), but in my opinion if you’re already asking the question you already have all the foundational knowledge and awareness you need to start exercising those muscles as well.

I get the point, but the reality is that this goes way beyond business communication. And yes, given enough time almost anyone can learn almost anything, but we're also human with limited time and it simply makes no sense trying to learn everything from scratch. You gotta know when to ask people that are experts in their respective fields.

Not exactly what you asked but I think the same approach would work: I set the intention to gain insight into how stories work. This intention alone was sufficient to massively increase my abilities in this area, because during "idle time" my brain would mull over / analyze stories I'd heard recently.

So I think for PR or whatever the same thing would work, simply deciding to become skilled in this area and you will naturally begin to pick up the patterns already present in your reality.

When did I say it didn’t go way beyond business communication? That’s largely my point: this is a basic human skill in the modern world that I would think existing for 20-30 years would give you plenty of experience in navigating stories told by others as well as using your own narratives to steer outcomes.

Have you ever heard someone described as tone deaf?

The narrative that works in your head is not necessarily a narrative that works publicly.

Sure but that’s a matter of testing assumptions and updating them per new info.

Some people can roll their tongue like a tube and some can't. Some people can wiggle their ears and some people can't.

And some people can't really understand or perceive other people's intentions and motivations... and some people can do it but not in real time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test

Some people are good at following other people's eye gaze, some are not.

And then there is Machiavellian intelligence, which roughly scales with (real) intelligence -- but some people aren't good at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellian_intelligence

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