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  1. title: A commentary of Wiio's laws
  2. url: https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html
  3. hash_url: cf5d1c3b5e636207d12235a42f191e26
  4. <h1>How all human communication fails, except by accident,
  5. <br/>
  6. <small>or a commentary of <span lang="fi">Wiio</span>'s laws</small></h1>
  7. <p class="summary"><span lang="fi">Wiio</span>'s laws
  8. are humoristically formulated
  9. serious observations about how <em>human communication usually fails except
  10. by accident</em>. This document comments on the applicability and
  11. consequences of the laws, especially as regards to communication on
  12. the Internet.</p>
  13. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Viestintä yleensä epäonnistuu,
  14. paitsi sattumalta.</i></p>
  15. <p>This is the fundamental one among <span lang="fi">Wiio</span>'s
  16. laws; others are
  17. corollaries from it, examples of it, or vaguely related notes. It
  18. is easy to see the relationship between it and
  19. <a href="http://dmawww.epfl.ch/roso.mosaic/dm/murphy.html" title="Murphy's laws and corollaries">Murphy's law(s)</a> (see also:
  20. <cite><a href="http://www.monitor.hr/matija/murphy/0001567/download/edition.htm">The Complete Edition of Murphy's Laws</a></cite>)
  21. and it
  22. easy to see as just a humorously pessimistic expression of feelings
  23. caused by some specific failures, strengthened by pessimistic
  24. people's tendency to remember failures better than successes.</p>
  25. <p class="important">Despite being entertaining, <span lang="fi">Wiio</span>'s laws are
  26. valid observations about <em>all</em> human communication. For any
  27. constructive approach to communication, we need to <em>admit</em>
  28. their truth and build upon them, instead of comfortably exercizing
  29. illusionary communication.</p>
  30. <p>Perhaps
  31. <a href="#who" title="About professor Osmo A. Wiio">prof. <span lang="fi">Wiio</span></a>
  32. did not mean quite this. That would just prove
  33. <a href="#3" title="There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message">law 3</a>.
  34. And if he did, that would provide an
  35. additional example of the very <a href="#1" title="Communication usually fails, except by accident">law 1</a>,
  36. since people who have read about the laws seem to take them
  37. as sarcastic humour <em>only</em>.
  38. </p>
  39. <p>The law is to be interpreted as relating to <em>human</em>
  40. communication. Communication between computers (and animals) works
  41. often quite well. Human communication uses <em>vaguely defined
  42. <strong>symbols</strong></em>. It has often been said, quite
  43. appropriately, that it is the <dfn>use of
  44. symbols</dfn>, i.e. the ability
  45. to define
  46. <a href="http://webserver.maclab.comp.uvic.ca/writersguide/Pages/RhetSymbol.html" title="What is a symbol (e.g. as opposite to a sign)">symbols</a>
  47. for permanent or casual use, that
  48. separates man from (other) animals. It is also the thing that makes
  49. human communication fail, as a rule.</p>
  50. <p>One reason to that is that by being conventional by their very essence,
  51. <em>symbols are prone to misunderstanding</em>. You use a word thinking it
  52. has a specific meaning by a convention; but the recipient of your message
  53. applies a different convention; what's worse, you usually have no way
  54. of knowing that.
  55. </p><p class="deem">A symbol is essentially a sign to which some meaning
  56. is <em>assigned by convention</em> rather than by any external
  57. similarity between the sign and its denotation.
  58. Thus, for example, a word like <i>lion</i> is a symbol: the word
  59. does not resemble a lion. An onomatopoetic word like <i>whizzle</i>
  60. is not a pure symbol in the same sense. And a <em>picture</em>,
  61. even a very stylicized picture, of a lion is not a symbol for a lion
  62. in the sense discussed here.
  63. A symbol like the word <i>lion</i> may sound very simple and unambiguous.
  64. But think about the various <em>connotations</em>. You perhaps meant just the lion,
  65. <i lang="la">Panthera leo</i>, as an animal species; the recipient may have
  66. taken it as a symbol of strength, or bravery, or danger, depending on
  67. his cultural and personal background. Perhaps the recipient has read
  68. the
  69. <a href="http://cslewis.drzeus.net/" title="Into the Wardrobe: The C. S. Lewis Web Site">Narnia</a>
  70. books with great enthusiasm; or perhaps a lion
  71. has killed a friend of his.
  72. </p>
  73. <p>Let us list some <em>examples</em> of why human communication fails:
  74. </p><ul>
  75. <li> <strong>Language differences</strong>. On the Internet, for example,
  76. <a href="lingua-franca.html">the <i>lingua franca</i> is badly
  77. written and poorly understood English</a>.
  78. Some people use it as their native language; other learned some of it
  79. from various sources. In any case, whatever you say will be interpreted in
  80. a myriad of ways, whether you use idiomatic English or not.
  81. </li><li> <strong>Cultural differences</strong>. Whatever you assume about the recipients
  82. of your message, the wider the audience, the more of them will fail to
  83. meet your assumptions.
  84. On the Internet, this
  85. virtually guarantees you will be misunderstood.
  86. What you intend to say as a neutral matter of fact
  87. will be interpreted
  88. (by different people)
  89. as a detestable political opinion, a horrendous blasphemy, and
  90. a lovely piece of poetry.
  91. </li><li> <strong>Personal differences</strong>. Any assumption about the prior knowledge on the
  92. subject matter fails for any reasonably large audience.
  93. Whatever you try to explain about the genetics of colors will be
  94. incomprehensible to most people, since they have a very vague idea of
  95. what "genes" are
  96. (in <em>written</em> communication you might just manage to distinguish
  97. them from Jeans),
  98. and "dominance" is just Greek or sex to them.
  99. </li><li> Just having some <strong>data lost</strong>. The listener does not pay attention
  100. at a critical moment, and he misses something indispensable. In the worst,
  101. and usual, case he does not know he missed it.
  102. </li></ul>
  103. <p>
  104. Remember that <strong>the laws of statistics are against you</strong>: even if the
  105. probabilities of failures were small when taken individually (they aren't),
  106. for success you would need a situation where <em>none</em> of them happens.
  107. A single misunderstanding in any essential area destroys the message.
  108. If you know some arithmetics, you can see that the odds are really against you.
  109. Just take a simple example where communication can fail for twenty different
  110. reasons (which is a huge underestimate). Assuming that the probability of failure
  111. is just 0.1 for each of them (unrealistically optimistic), calculations show
  112. that you'll succeed with the probability (1-0.1) to the power 20,
  113. which is about 12%.</p>
  114. <p>Things are actually much worse. The discussion above is based on
  115. a <em>simplistic model of communication</em> which is very popular,
  116. and often taken as self-evident.
  117. That model could be characterized as <dfn>teaching by feeding</dfn>:
  118. there's a teacher (someone who communicates) and a pupil (a recipient
  119. of communication), and communication is a process of <em>transferring</em>
  120. some information from the teacher's mind in the pupil's mind.
  121. At the extreme, this means making the pupil <em>memorize</em> what
  122. the teacher says or a text in a book.
  123. The difficulty of communication would then consist basically just of
  124. the <em>noise</em> in the line of communication.
  125. </p>
  126. <p><a name="chain">In reality,
  127. <strong>communication is much more complicated and diffuse.</strong></a>
  128. Consider a <em>simple</em> case where someone (<var>A</var>)
  129. is explaining to someone else (<var>B</var>)
  130. how to find a particular place; and assume that they speak the same
  131. language and nothing in the environment disturbs the communication;
  132. and assume that <var>A</var> really knows the way.
  133. To communicate, <var>A</var> must <strong>convert</strong> his knowledge,
  134. which is something invisible and intangible in his <em>mind</em>, into
  135. words, drawings, gestures, or whatever means he is about to use.
  136. It is the visible and audible data that gets "transferred"
  137. (<em>if</em> it gets - remember that this is a simplified case).
  138. Then <var>B</var> tries to process that data and construct a mental model
  139. of what he has to do to reach the place.
  140. It would be very naïve to assume that this process is simply the
  141. reversal of the process that took place when <var>A</var> formulated
  142. the message.</p>
  143. <p class="important">This can be presented diagrammatically as follows:<br/>
  144. <strong>idea in <var>A</var>'s mind --&gt; a formulated message (e.g. sentence)
  145. --&gt; transfer mechanism (e.g. speech and hearing)
  146. --&gt; idea in <var>B</var>'s mind</strong><br/>
  147. Each transformation (depicted as "--&gt;") brings its own contribution
  148. to the probability of a failure.
  149. </p>
  150. <p><a name="transl">When communication takes place through
  151. a <strong>translation</strong></a>, serious additional complications
  152. are caused. Quite often translations are made incompetently or
  153. sloppily in a haste. But even the most competent and careful
  154. translator is an additional component of <a href="#chain">the chain</a>
  155. and inevitably distorts the message more or less.
  156. Professional translators often demonstrate
  157. <a href="#3" title="There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message">law 3</a> well. In fact, they might even think they <em>should</em>
  158. "improve" the message instead of doing that by accident or by
  159. necessity (e.g. the necessity of adding interpretation to the message
  160. due to lack of sufficiently indefinite words in the target language).
  161. </p>
  162. <p>So it's not just a matter of <em>components</em> of a message
  163. being in great danger of getting corrupted - words misheard,
  164. gestures misinterpreted, sentence constructs misparsed and so on.
  165. In our simple example, even if <var>B</var> gets all components of
  166. the message correctly, he needs to merge them with the information
  167. he already has. If the instructions begin with "go to the bus station",
  168. he needs to know how to get there first.
  169. In the worst case, he thinks he knows that well but doesn't.
  170. If the message contains an instruction to drive straight ahead,
  171. <var>B</var> will be really puzzled when the road bifurcates
  172. in a Y-like manner. (It was always clear to <var>A</var> what driving
  173. straight ahead means there.)
  174. All messages are
  175. unavoidably <em>incomplete</em>:
  176. in order to be of finite length,
  177. they must presume some prior
  178. knowledge in the recipient's side.
  179. (In fact, even if your message told everything, it wouldn't help;
  180. the recipient forgets what has read as he reads forward.)
  181. Presuming means guessing, more or less.
  182. By accident, you might guess right.
  183. </p>
  184. <p>But it's not just the "teacher" that guesses wrong and omits
  185. indispensable details. Quite often, and very regularly e.g. in
  186. people's cries for help on
  187. <a href="usenet/index.html" title="Material about Usenet (&quot;newsgroups&quot;) by Jukka Korpela">Usenet</a>, the person who needs information formulates his question
  188. so that no meaningful answer is possible. "Please help me, my computer
  189. is broken!"
  190. And the questioner often <em>implies a specific approach</em> to
  191. solving his ultimate problem and asks how to solve a <em>technical</em>
  192. problem; it usually happens that the technical problem is unsolvable
  193. (the approach leads to a dead end), but how can anyone help when
  194. the real question hasn't even been asked?
  195. </p>
  196. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Jos viestintä voi epäonnistua,
  197. niin se epäonnistuu.</i></p>
  198. <p>The factors that can make human communication fail might not be
  199. very serious, when each of them is taken in isolation. However,
  200. there are so many risks and they can <em>interact</em> in so many
  201. ways that it is statistically almost certain that
  202. communication fails.
  203. </p>
  204. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Jos viestintä ei voi epäonnistua,
  205. niin se kuitenkin tavallisimmin epäonnistuu.</i></p>
  206. <p>Even if you pay great attention to make your communication
  207. unambiguous, effective, and understandable,
  208. there will still be too many risks you haven't taken care of.
  209. Moreover, your measures are at best functional most of the time,
  210. which means that the combined probability for your communication
  211. to fail in at least <em>one</em> one of the ways in which it could fail
  212. is higher than you dare to imagine.</p>
  213. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Jos viestintä näyttää onnistuvan
  214. toivotulla tavalla, niin kyseessä on väärinkäsitys.</i></p>
  215. <p>When communication seems to be simple, easy and successful, it's probably
  216. a total failure. The recipient looks happy and thankful, because
  217. he understood your message <em>his</em> way, which is what he likes, and
  218. very different from what you were actually saying.</p>
  219. <p>An old <a href="usenet/index.html" title="Material about Usenet">Usenet</a> saying tells us that to every complex
  220. question, there is an answer which is simple, understandable, and pleasant,
  221. and plain wrong. People love to accept simple answers; only later do they
  222. realize they were wrong. More harmfully, many wrong answers have the nasty
  223. feature of "working" at first sight. It's much more harmful to get such an
  224. answer than to get an answer which turns out to be bogus the first time
  225. you try it.</p>
  226. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Jos itse olet sanomaasi
  227. tyytyväinen, niin viestintä varmasti epäonnistuu.</i></p>
  228. <p>Being content with the formulation of your message is a sure
  229. sign of having formulated it for <em>yourself</em>.</p>
  230. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Jos sanoma voidaan tulkita eri
  231. tavoin, niin se tulkitaan tavalla, josta on eniten
  232. vahinkoa.</i></p>
  233. <p>This Murphyistic remark is a warning about the very real possibility
  234. that ambiguities will be resolved in just the way you did not mean.
  235. Notice that this does not mean the worst misunderstanding you can
  236. imagine; rather, something worse - an interpretation you could
  237. not have imagined when you formulated your message.</p>
  238. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">On olemassa aina joku, joka
  239. tietää sinua itseäsi paremmin, mitä olet sanomallasi
  240. tarkoittanut.</i></p>
  241. <p>People who understand you can be a real nuisance.
  242. It might take some time before you see that they completely failed
  243. to see what you meant, but that does not prevent them for propagating
  244. their ideas as yours.</p>
  245. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Mitä enemmän viestitään, sitä
  246. huonommin viestintä onnistuu.</i></p>
  247. <p>There's a widespread superstition that the more you communicate the
  248. better. In reality, increasing the amount of communication
  249. most probably just causes more misunderstandings.</p>
  250. <p>There are people who keep repeating that there can't be too much
  251. information. Whether that's literally true is debatable. What what they
  252. <em>mean</em> (cf. to <a href="#3" title="There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message">law 3</a>) is just plain wrong. There can be, and there is, too large
  253. a <em>volume of messaging</em>. Data does not equal information.</p>
  254. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Mitä enemmän viestitään, sitä
  255. nopeammin väärinkäsitykset lisääntyvät.</i></p>
  256. <p>In addition to reformulating <a href="#4">law 4</a>, this
  257. refers to the fact that
  258. <em>repetition strengthens false ideas</em>. When people see the same
  259. message repeated over and over again, they usually start believing it.
  260. Even if your message happened to be true, they misunderstood it, so
  261. what they actually believe is not what you meant. And since the message
  262. has been presented so strongly, they tell it to their friends,
  263. who propagate it further, etc.
  264. Naturally,
  265. in that process, it gets distorted more and more.</p>
  266. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Joukkoviestinnässä ei ole
  267. tärkeätä se, miten asiat ovat, vaan miten asiat näyttävät
  268. olevan.</i></p>
  269. <p>This law is just remotely related to
  270. <a href="#1">the basic law</a>. It is however more and more important:
  271. mass communication creates a world of its own, and people orient themselves
  272. in that virtual world rather than the real one. After all, reality is
  273. boring.
  274. </p>
  275. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Uutisen tärkeys on kääntäen
  276. verrannollinen etäisyyden neliöön.</i></p>
  277. <p>Even more remote to our main topic, this simply states that events
  278. close to us look much more important to us than remote events.
  279. When there is an aircraft accident, its importance in Finnish newspapers
  280. basically depends on whether there were any Finns on board, not on the
  281. number of people that died.</p>
  282. <p>It is however relevant to <a href="#1">law 1</a> in the sense
  283. that it <em>illustrates</em> one of the reasons why communication fails.
  284. No matter what you say, people who receive your message will interpret
  285. and emphasize in their own <em>reference framework</em>.</p>
  286. <p>Finnish original: <i lang="fi">Mitä tärkeämmästä tilanteesta on
  287. kysymys, sitä todennäköisemmin unohdat olennaisen asian, jonka
  288. muistit hetki sitten.</i></p>
  289. <p>Similarly to <a href="#6">law 6</a>, this illustrates one
  290. of the causes of failures in communication.
  291. It applies both to senders and recipients.
  292. The recipient tends to forget relevant things, such as items which
  293. have been emphatically presented in the message as necessary requirements
  294. for understanding the rest of it.
  295. And the sender, upon receiving a request for clarification, such as a question
  296. during a lecture, will certainly be able to formulate an adequate, easy to
  297. understand answer - <em>afterwards</em>, when the situation is over.
  298. </p><hr title="Corollaries"/>
  299. <h2><a name="cor1">Korpela's First Corollary:</a>
  300. If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through</h2>
  301. <p>Lack of negative feedback is often presented as indicating that
  302. communication was successful.
  303. <span lang="fr">Au contraire</span>, it really means you failed
  304. miserably.</p>
  305. <p>Since communication always fails, anyone who <em>does</em> understand
  306. part of your message will miss the other parts. If he is motivated enough,
  307. and understood well enough the part he understood,
  308. he'll write back to you. Whether he barks at you or politely asks for
  309. clarification is up to his education and character; for you, there should
  310. be little difference.</p>
  311. <p>Human communication works through dialogues. If something that <em>looks</em>
  312. like one-directional communication, such as a book or a Web page or a newspaper
  313. article, miraculously works, it's because the author participated in
  314. dialogues elsewhere. He had discussed the topic with numerous people before
  315. he wrote the "one-directional" message.</p>
  316. <p>So feedback is not just getting some nice comments "keep up the good
  317. work". Rather, <em>feedback as a genuinely interactive process is a
  318. necessary part of human communication</em>. Feedback has emotional effects, too;
  319. just getting <em>any</em> feedback is usually nice; but the <em>content</em>
  320. matters too.</p>
  321. <p>By statistical certainty, if you get sufficient feedback, there will
  322. be negative feedback too. Even if your message is perfect, some people will
  323. tell you it's crap. In fact, <em>especially if</em> it is perfect,
  324. some people
  325. will say - often with harsh words -
  326. it's no good, because there are clueless people who envy you.</p>
  327. <p>Thus, lack of negative feedback indicates that few if any people really
  328. cared about your message.</p>
  329. <p>The Web used to contain a large amount of unorganized and unclassified data.
  330. Now it contains a <em>huge</em> amount of unorganized and unclassified
  331. data
  332. and a jungle of "search engines", "catalogues" or "virtual libraries", and "portals".
  333. </p><p>
  334. The various searching tools have an immense impact. At best, they
  335. are very clever and useful.
  336. <a href="http://www.askjeeves.com">Ask Jeeves</a>, and you might
  337. get an immediate answer to your question which you wrote in plain English.
  338. Occasionally, it might even be a <em>correct</em> and utilizable answer.
  339. </p><p>
  340. It still remains a fact that when you are looking for information on the Web,
  341. you'll find either nothing (when your search criteria are tight) or
  342. a useless list of zillions of addresses (when your search criteria are generic).
  343. Except by accident, that is.
  344. </p><p>
  345. The practical implication is that when searching for information, you
  346. need to be <em>flexible and flighty</em>.
  347. Learn to use a few searching tools well - that
  348. means knowing well the search language of one or two search engines and using
  349. some well-maintained catalogues - but keep your eyes
  350. open. Sometimes you need to learn to use new tools, and frequently you find
  351. crucial information just by accident.
  352. Searching for information on <var>X</var>,
  353. you stumble across an essential resource on <var>Y</var>, which is among
  354. your central interests too, but not the one you're thinking about now.
  355. It might take some time to study it with some care - perhaps it's just
  356. a resource to be added to your link list, but it might be much more important,
  357. something that needs top priority in your dealing with <var>Y</var>.
  358. <strong>Switch the context!</strong>
  359. At the very minimum, store a pointer to information you've found, even if
  360. that means doing something related to your hobbies during your working hours,
  361. or, gasp, the opposite.
  362. Remember that in searching for information, which is a peculiar form of
  363. human communication, <em>accidents are your friends</em>, and perhaps the
  364. only friends you've got.</p>
  365. <p>Teaching is far more difficult than people think. At worst,
  366. teaching is regarded as an one-directional transfer of information
  367. to a recipient, much like feeding an animal or sending data to
  368. a computer for storing. By the Laws, it will fail. Even if
  369. the recipient receives something, it will be misunderstood.</p>
  370. <p>At best, there's a continuous feedback cycle between the teacher and
  371. the student. The latter sends back information that shows how he actually
  372. understood the content. Although this communication generally fails, too, it
  373. has sufficiently many odds of accidentally working. Moreover, it can be
  374. a self-repairing process. When the student shows the teacher what he
  375. has done, this will often indicate some fundamental misunderstandings.
  376. Ideally, the teacher should try and help the user see what went wrong.</p>
  377. <p>In non-interactive teaching, the situation is far more difficult.
  378. The best the instructor can do is to provide guidance to
  379. <em>self-testing</em>, via exercises and quizzes, or via material
  380. that indirectly induces self-testing. In some cases, the student will
  381. immediately see whether his exercise succeeds. Sometimes answers to
  382. test questions need to be provided. And sometimes it is sufficient to
  383. give the student just some ideas on how to try what he thinks he
  384. has learned.</p>
  385. <p>What should happen, then, is that when the student notices that
  386. he does not pass a self-test, he gets back to the instructional
  387. material, and tries to see what went wrong. At this phase,
  388. additional material might prove out to be useful. Mostly any
  389. "extra reading" is just ignored. But when the student realizes
  390. that he fundamentally misunderstood something, he might be willing
  391. to take extra trouble to read "secondary" material, which has now
  392. become potentially primary to him. After all, if the main material
  393. was not successful, it's probably time to study a presentation of
  394. the same topic in some other format and style.</p>
  395. <p>The important thing is to realize that even the best explanations
  396. and illustrations will be misunderstood. The student needs a way
  397. of testing his understanding against some criteria. At best,
  398. this means <em>doing</em> something and seeing whether it works.</p>
  399. <hr title="The constructive summary"/>
  400. <p class="summary">As a constructive summary, we can just
  401. state that you cannot communicate successfully. You can only
  402. <strong>increase
  403. the odds of accidental success</strong> by paying serious attention to
  404. the problems discussed here.</p>
  405. <hr title="About Osmo A. Wiio"/>
  406. <p><a name="who">Professor <dfn lang="fi">Osmo
  407. <abbr title="Antero"><span title="Antero">
  408. A.</span></abbr> Wiio</dfn> (born 1928) is a famous Finnish
  409. researcher of human communication.</a>
  410. He has studied, among other
  411. things, readability of texts, organizations and communication
  412. within them, and the general theory of communication. In addition
  413. to his academic career, he has authored books, articles, and radio
  414. and TV programs on technology, the future, society, and politics.
  415. He formulated "<span lang="fi">Wiio</span>'s laws"
  416. when he was a member of parliament
  417. (1975--79)
  418. and published them in
  419. <cite lang="fi">Wiion lait - ja vähän muidenkin</cite>
  420. (<span lang="fi">Wiio's</span> laws - and some others'; in Finnish).
  421. (<span lang="sv">Weilin</span>+<span lang="fi">Göös</span>,
  422. 1978, <span lang="fi">Espoo</span>; ISBN 951-35-1657-1).
  423. </p>
  424. <hr title="Links"/>
  425. <p>Related documents by other people:
  426. </p>
  427. <p>
  428. See also
  429. <a title="The Dilbert site, with a daily strip and a lot more" href="http://www.dilbert.com">the <cite>Dilbert</cite>
  430. comics</a>, which often illustrate strikingly the ways in which
  431. human communication fails, especially when related to hi tech.
  432. In particular, communication between Dilbert and his boss
  433. is guaranteed to fail, since the boss has no idea of the content
  434. of the activities he "manages".
  435. </p>