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> this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message Do they, though? Maybe
by bmm6o 8y ago
> this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message
Do they, though? Maybe I participate in conversations differently, but trying to unravel how A interpreted B's comment is not something I would do.
- 40acres 8y agoI think you (and everyone else) does this implicitly. It makes sense for a survival perspective to be able to assess how people react to certain comments & actions in conversation. If other people support a comment it's a signal that you can reiterate the comment or build upon it.
- bmm6o 8y agoThere's a difference between observing how a comment was generally received and remembering exactly how each person reacted. I'm not saying nobody does the latter, but I don't.
- bmm6o 8y agoAnd the other way, one can notice how a person reacts to a comment without necessary needing to remember the source of it. Both of these are going to scale linearly (obviously). I might pick up on something like "A seems to respond to B uniformly negatively" and make a note of that, but remembering one notable thing doesn't require me to "allocate" memory for all of the other non-memorable things. I'm not literally building and labeling a graph, like some commenters are implying. Or if you insist, it's a sparse data structure.
- hortonew 8y agoIt's all I do. It's the only way I can understand if my next comment will offend or work as a joke or if I'm posing an interesting topic. It's what makes conversations so draining to an introvert I feel. The more people, the more I have to figure out what I can say to be ok with the group at hand.
- Folcon 8y agoThat's fascinating, thinking about this, I've realised that I only do this when I'm in a conversation with new people or for whatever reason am specifically considering the interplay of what's being said. Otherwise I have a broad set of heuristics I apply which I adjust as needed. I never considered that a tendency to do this might have an impact on introversion/extroversion. Something to mull over, thanks!
- bmm6o 8y agoAs I posted below, there is a difference between observing how different people react to a particular comment (O(n)) and observing how different people react to a particular comment based on who it's from (O(n^2)). I'm mostly trying to question the idea that there's anything quadratic in the number of participants going on here. Are you sure you're saying that the work you do is quadratic?