13 ms·

The Church of Interruption

• rhizome 7y ago
  I don't agree that Strong Civility requires speaking only briefly. In fact, it makes me think someone who thinks that is just barely suppressing their interruption. "I'll wait until you finish...for a minute." No, taking turns speaking is its own reward, just like speeding a conversation along via interruptions is it's own reward.
  • jacobolus 7y ago
    It’s less about speaking briefly per se, and more about assuming that the other person understands what you are saying, and saying no more than necessary to convey the message. Some people will keep elaborating some point until told to stop, whereas others will assume the other person understood without any explicit evidence that is true. I have found that in practice whether speakers assume their listeners understand them is a separate question from whether they tend to interrupt or not, however. The most efficient and effective conversations in my experience are 1:1, with two speakers who both explicitly verify that the other person understands their meaning and is using the same definitions of words, and have some kind of efficient protocol for working backwards from a misunderstanding or gap in knowledge as soon as one pops up. There has to be enough trust involved that both interlocutors are willing to quickly and freely admit when they don’t know something or don’t understand an argument.
    • rhizome 7y ago
      It’s less about speaking briefly per se, and more about assuming that the other person understands what you are saying, and saying no more than necessary to convey the message. That's not what the article proposes: DOCTRINES OF THE CHURCH OF STRONG CIVILITY 1. Thou shalt not interrupt. 2. Thou shalt speak briefly. 3. Thou shalt use physical cues to indicate your understanding and desire to speak. == That said, what's wrong with listening to someone, asking questions if you require more understanding? Another way of looking at all this: what makes you think that what you have to say is so important that it can't wait for someone to even finish their sentence?
      • jacobolus 7y ago
        The point of “thou shalt speak briefly” is that the argument is kept to a minimum required for understanding, with the expectation that a listener who does not understand will ask for clarification. The speaker does not just keep talking on and on about the same thing, waiting to be interrupted. (Note that “briefly” can sometimes be a rather extended argument, if it happens to be irreducibly complicated. The point is that it isn’t over-elaborated, not that it must be short.) This works if people always ask for clarification when they don’t understand, but in my experience that’s pretty rare, and often a poor assumption; while this style is eminently polite, it sometimes leads to severe miscommunication when there was a fundamental difference in definitions or premises that neither person recognized.
        • rhizome 7y ago
          I could be wrong, but by my read none of that is supported by the text.
          • josephg 7y ago
            The text doesn't go into detail, but I think the GP is right. You can model this as cooperative vs preemptive multithreading. In a preemptive model, each process just does its thing until it gets interrupted by the scheduler, and then then that process does its thing until it gets interrupted in turn. This is the "church of interruption" model. Its the responsibility of the other (scheduler / person) to signal to you (via an interrupt) when your turn is over. But in the cooperative multitasking model, its the responsibility of the speaker to hand the baton back. It is vulnerable to a single person / process dominating the whole space by talking / running forever. And this is totally what happens when the two cultures meet - I have a friend who is 100% church of interruption. I came back from a retreat feeling calm and peaceful. We talked on the phone for a few hours the next day and I patiently waited for him to be done before I replied - which took about 3 hours. He was vaguely confused / annoyed at me for doing that. Apparently it simply didn't occur to him that if he wanted to know my thoughts he might need to ask me for them. In the cooperative multitasking world, the golden rule is that all programs should run for a short amount of time then yield back to the scheduler so it can run something else. Its not so cut and dry for humans - I think "speak briefly" is a lossy summary of the rule because it often makes sense for one person to do most of the talking in a conversation. But in the "strong civility" culture its the responsibility of the speaker to be aware of tracking that, and usually do so only with the blessing of the group. Taking all the air in the room is a faux pas.
    • Swizec 7y ago
      I had a team mate once who would go on and on and on explaining the same point over and over and elaborating a million different ways and it was extremely frustrating because not once would there ever be a break in his speech to give others the chance to ask questions (so he'd explain what we actually didn't understand) or to reply and move the conversation along. It was quite frustrating. Many of us resorted to talking over him until he noticed, stopped, and let us reply. Surprisingly impervious to interruption.
      • noobiemcfoob 7y ago
        I had a similar coworker. Worse still because they were a junior who couldn't yield the floor to anyone, regardless of seniority. Their eyes would become a little bewildered as anyone talked over them (read as 'everyone') and they never seemed to grasp what was happening. This piece gives me a better model for understanding them; just a lost soul deep in the church of civility to the point of affliction.
        • switchbak 7y ago
          Aren't you saying they're someone who won't yield until they've said their peace? That doesn't sound like the church of civility to me, but more like the rarer "interrupts, but doesn't want to be interrupted" (Barker) style. Combined with their lack of experience, I can imagine that would be frustrating to be around.
  • drewcoo 7y ago
    I find it really rude when people are obviously just waiting their turn to say their prepared statement. It means they're not really listening to the other person, thus it's not really a conversation. Should someone keep score when that happens?
    • trhway 7y ago
      So when those people are supposed to express their position? Prepared statement is another way to say that some thinking was put into it vs. just blurting out the first thing that comes into mind. So, the former is rude while the latter is respectful?
      • wtallis 7y ago
        A prepared statement may or may not be well thought out, but even if it is, ignoring the current context and not directly addressing the other party's arguments or concerns means you're hijacking the thread of conversation and implicitly dismissing the other party's statements.
        • trhway 7y ago
          if you wanna the other participants to drop everything in their heads, drop their arguments and concerns and start addressing yours you better put some work into it to make the arguments and concerns relevant and engaging. Not doing it or failing to do it and crying out "rude! highjacking!" instead is kind of rude and disrespectful to the other participants i think. I wonder whether/when we would see meeting software including "karma" feature so people could just "-1" and move forward without wasting time/effort, though "-1"ing say your manager, even if anonymously ... :)
  • cbanek 7y ago
    I find myself speaking briefly, only because I'm expecting to get interrupted. It happens every time. Some people have said I'm very Zen by how quickly I can get a point across in few words. I tell them "it's the only way." I leave out the part about being constantly interrupted. Being a Zen woman in tech, I figured that went without saying. If I have something complex, I have to write it out, if only to prove my work/logic. At least text tends to last longer, spread wider, and be more useful than any conversation.
• jay_kyburz 7y ago
  I'm an interrupter, and so are many of my colleagues, but there are a few people in the office who are not, and they don't enjoy our meetings.
  • rhizome 7y ago
    Maybe because it's a fundamentally confrontational way to interact, and that having one's livelihood tied to abilities to climb out of a crab bucket might seem unfair and excessive.
    • jeremysalwen 7y ago
      Maybe you shouldn't be projecting moral judgements on cultural differences.
      • rhizome 7y ago
        The way people talk in work meetings is not culture.
    • jacobolus 7y ago
      One person’s “confrontation” is another person’s “collaboration”. From the other point of view, never interrupting is a fundamentally standoffish way to interact.
      • noobiemcfoob 7y ago
        You've never heard of parents that might shout down any misplaced utterance, have you?
        • jacobolus 7y ago
          I don’t understand what you are getting at. Can you elaborate?
          • 7y ago
• rgoulter 7y ago
  This also supports that: if person A has the expectation "they'll interrupt/reply once they understand" and B has the expectation "let the speaker finish", this leads to A rambling. (A has no indication that things were understood).
  • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    I think in a lot of situations there needs to be one of the parties that steers the conversation a bit - interrupt themselves or the other party if they're going on a tangent. It takes some time and practice but it will pay off in the end.
• dustinls 7y ago
  This falls apart when you have an interrupter who thinks they know everything, but really doesn't have a clue. They don't let you explain critical detail about something because 'they got it they got it' and when they inevitably screw up its your fault for not explaining it right.
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Or interrupters who interrupt not to complete your thought, but to say whatever they don't want to wait their turn to say.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • Bekwnn 7y ago
      That seems to fall under "Barkers"
      • mannykannot 7y ago
        The distinction between interrupters and barkers is more of a slippery slope than a sharp divide.
        • entropicdrifter 7y ago
          You could say that about the distinctions between most groups of humans. There's almost always overlap/normal distribution
  • daveFNbuck 7y ago
    This doesn't fall apart, as they're providing feedback about exactly how they're misunderstanding you.
  • jacobolus 7y ago
    > thinks they know everything, but really doesn't have a clue This is a somewhat separate problem from whether someone is an interrupter or not, though conversational style can have an influence on when miscommunication is likely to happen. > They don't let you explain critical detail about something because 'they got it they got it' Well-meaning non-interrupters who “think they know everything but really don’t have a clue” can just as easily miss critical details, when the speaker wrongly assumes they understand something but never stops to verify that. At least the interrupter typically makes their ignorance obvious, giving others a chance to prepare some response/workaround. * * * In my experience it is entirely possible for both interrupters and non-interrupters to be (or not be) empathetic, perceptive, conscientious, detail-oriented, knowledgeable, humble, presumptuous, judgmental, aggressive, ...
• zzmp 7y ago
  This is beautifully written.
  • noobiemcfoob 7y ago
    The use of dialogue to illustrate the point was great.
    • fenomas 7y ago
      One suspects the author is a big fan of Gödel Escher Bach.
• GitRHero 7y ago
  Wow, what a trip to see this name at the top of HN. The author was a good friend of mine in high school, and one of my favorite people I've ever known. If you're reading this, Sam, I hope you're doing well.
  • soneca 7y ago
    Made me curious: was he an interruptor in high school?
• vemv 7y ago
  Pro tip: as you speak, after each message (sentence, couple of sentences) make sure your interlocutor understood that part - verbally or not. It's not the same as using short sentences - personally I don't expect/allow to be interrupted (my friends know me for that). By ensuring your messages are understood, you also make sure you are having an actual conversation, and not a mutual brain dump (which tends to lead to having a strawman POV of each other's point).
• andrewstuart 7y ago
  I feel like I'm getting worse at communicating as I get older. My former partner kept telling me I don't listen. Which resulted in my thinking "What, what does that even mean?". To this day I am still trying to learn how to listen. I am also very much aware I am an interrupter. I know how bad this is and even so it is still hard to stop. I also interrupt when I am excited and enthusiastic and when I like the person I am talking to. I think the two are connected. One is less inclined to interrupt if one is actually truly listening. Interrupters aren't having a conversation with you. They are having a conversation with themselves and not listening, just waiting to talk.
  • noobiemcfoob 7y ago
    "You're not listening" depends on the context. In a calm conversation...well I've never heard it in a calm conversation. In a heated conversation, it can be you misunderstand or just as likely they're poorly communicating and growing resentful at not being understood. On your point on interrupters not listening: a big point of this article is that a skillful interruption moves a conversation along by allowing swift communication of understanding, so time isn't wasted repeating shared knowledge. A poor interrupter, a Barker, is as you describe - just throwing their own mess out there. If your interruptions cause irritation, it is because they aren't properly tuned or else you're dealing with someone from the Church of Strong Civility.
  • jacobolus 7y ago
    “You’re not listening” often means something like “I am feeling some strong emotion (anger, frustration, sadness, ...) but you are not validating my feelings, and that lack of validation itself feels like rejection.” Even something as simple as echoing back someone’s statements, or saying “it seems like you are feeling angry because ...” can make a large difference. Once you have shown that you understand and can name or describe the person’s feelings it is often much easier to discuss possible solutions to practical problems. But if you jump straight to offering practical advice, that is often unwelcome. (Of course, it might sometimes literally mean “you’re not listening”, which probably needs a different remedy.) Let me recommend the book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk even if you never talk to kids.
  • deleted 7y ago
• novok 7y ago
  Sounds like 2 cultures, and the adaptive person realizes who they are speaking to, and adapts to that culture to have better conversations. I was raised as a 'civil' person, but learned that in some groups, you get a better result & energy as an interrupter. Another dynamic is high overt conflict & emotions vs low overt conflict & emotions cultures. High overt will seem like they are arguing passionately about something and they will never see each other again, and 10 minutes later are having tea like it's no big deal, because the emotion level isn't really a big deal to them. The same emotional display in a non-overt culture and you can be fairly certain that the conflict is a a fairly big deal, and 10 minutes later, it won't recover.
  • jacobush 7y ago
    Haha, true. And I've had it where we would only dare do this over "safe" topics, like some branching strategy or library implementation detail or whatever. But we would never do the high-overt thing about politics or family life or something "real". :)
  • nemo1618 7y ago
    And bad things happen when the high/low wires get crossed. A high-overt arguing with a low-overt often leads to confusion and resentment, because the exchange was no big deal to the high-overt, but a hostile act to the low-overt.
    • wool_gather 7y ago
      Yeah, this can unfortunately happen with almost any communication style mismatch. The best advice anyone can follow is just, start from an assumption of good faith. I've seen it most bafflingly in a tech help forum I used to frequent: folks coming for help would get really miffed at requests for clarification/expansion from the people who were trying to help. Probably some of those requests should have been worded better -- less terse, a little more "friendly"? -- but I never really understood the starting point of "anything other than an answer to my post is rude" that seemed to come up over and over.
• quickthrower2 7y ago
  Some people keep talking for a long time unless interrupted. They might even go in an infinite loop, reconfirming what they already said! For such people, while normally meek I force myself to interrupt!
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    That's good because the cultural norm of automatically repeating comes from the expectation that the other person will interrupt once they have something to say. Actually, repeaters might have it right - not even once in memory has someone who failed to understand me said "I don't get it," after I finished talking, everyone just nods and says "mm-hmm." It would not be irrational to assume the listener didn't get it until being presented with evidence otherwise.
  • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    Yup, and it's absolutely fine to do so - however, you also need them to understand what they're doing themselves, give them some advice on how to communicate more effectively. As another commenter pointed out, some people talk a lot because they're nervous, because they are afraid if they stop talking they won't get another say in a matter. They need coaching, reassurance, etc as well.
    • quickthrower2 7y ago
      Absolutely. I should also mention I don’t get angry with them, I appreciate they have a different style of communication.
  • wool_gather 7y ago
    I think, paradoxically, that this is actually a failure mode of "the meek" -- rambling when nervous, basically. Or at least of a person who is missing cues from their interlocutor about the status of the conversation.
• mirimir 7y ago
  I'm an interrupter, by nature. And I also have a tendency to talk when I'm nervous. As TFA says, I'm fine with other interrupters. We have great conversations. We start finishing each others thoughts. But otherwise, not so great. Probably the best insight that I got from group therapy was being told that I needed to learn when to shut up. So I've learned to be adaptive. And when I'm nervous, I've learned to draw people out.
  • phs318u 7y ago
    > the best insight that I got from group therapy was being told that I needed to learn when to shut up. A respected manager that I really looked up to once gave me very similar advice. “When you have the answer, know the solution, can understand the problem, can see other’s mistakes? Just shut up.” Fifteen years later, I have...improved somewhat.
  • WhompingWindows 7y ago
    Do you ever stop thinking about what you're about to say and instead focus on how your audience is reacting to what you just said? I find watching peoples' faces and any cues that reveal their emotion helps me gauge whether or not I'm having a "not so great" conversation, which allows me to be less interrupt-y and more of a listener.
    • mirimir 7y ago
      Yes, I do that constantly. I tried direct sales for a while, and one of my long-term jobs involved public speaking. So I've had some training. Also, and maybe this will seem strange, I often feel like I'm just pretending to be a "normal person".
• niyaven 7y ago
  I believe that there is also cultural factor. Some are famous for interrupting often (in France for instance), whilst for others it is the opposite. It can also be related to the language, e.g. in German or Japanese the verb is at the end of the sentence. Because of that, one need at least to wait for the person to finish the sentence to understand it. That being said, you surely find German interrupters, and French adepts of the Strong Civility, but maybe in different proportions.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• knzhou 7y ago
  Beyond just interrupting or not, there are norms in conservational turn taking that vary between languages, cultures, and individuals, which are well studied by linguists. One example is the use of pauses. To me, in casual conversation, pausing for half a second cedes the floor, and pausing for two seconds means we're done with a topic. But I had a friend who would always pause for two seconds before saying anything at all. Neither of us interrupted, but there were still constant collisions.
• forgingahead 7y ago
  Sounds like every bloody "interviewer" in the West now -- interrupting people whilst they're speaking, loudly assuming the worst possible characterisation of what was said (or flatly misrepresenting what was said), and going off on a tangent to promote their own agenda/viewpoint to anyone unfortunate enough trying to follow along.
• joosters 7y ago
  The article talks about interrupters, but I think it confuses two types of them: People who interrupt to say their piece, and people who interrupt to complete the other person’s sentence. Both are annoying, but people who complete others’ sentences are IMO worse: it’s a way of showing that you don’t care what the other person thinks, especially when the interrupter guesses wrong and the speaker has to out-talk them in order to get their actual words in.
  • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    That's definitely a distinction to make. The person completing the sentence will feel - or emit the feeling - that they get what you mean already but the speaker is being too slow. In a case like that it's important for the speaker to be assertive and raise their hand, mention the other person's behaviour and finish the sentence themselves. Like a sharp callout of the other person's behaviour, a meta-statement about what is happening. Just pointing it out is already enough for a lot of people. That will cost some extra energy though, because you're not just talking about subject x, but you're also mindful of your own and others' behaviour in a conversation.
• jamesblonde 7y ago
  I am an interrupter living in a land of strong civility. Self-awareness will bring you a bit of the way to fitting in, but I am always known as an interrupter. Tbh, i haven't changed entirely, because we have a startup, and my opinion is that strong civility is not always the most effective communication pattern when stuff needs to get done now. Strong civility works great where you have longer term plans and people who stick to them and resources. Startups don't have much of that.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• sgentle 7y ago
  I've noticed a pretty heinous conversational pattern develop out of interruption sometimes. In theory, the best way to conduct a church-of-interruption exchange of ideas is big-endian: you begin by summarising your idea and only then flesh out the details. That way if your conclusion is understood you find out as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, if your conversational partner tends to interrupt incorrectly or in bad faith, the better strategy is little-endian: you craft your idea in such a way that it can't be understood until you've finished talking, and is thus uninterruptible. In extreme cases, you can even make the sentence not parse until the final word. Big-endian: "I don't like sand. It's coarse, rough, irritating and it gets everywhere." Little-endian: "You know what's coarse, rough, irritating and gets everywhere? Sand. I don't like it." Little-endian (parser pipeline stall edition): "What I don't like, because it's coarse, rough, irritating, and gets everywhere, is sand."
  • Osiris 7y ago
    That's an interesting approach. For me, the issue with that, is that I'm more of a "stream of consciousness" conversationalist, where I say things as they come to mind and rarely have time to parse them in the way you suggest. Maybe it's a matter of practice.
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      I find this most irritating. It is much more polite to the listener if you do your homework first and then start talking. It vastly increases the chances of being able to capture and hold and audience's attention.
    • quanticle 7y ago
      I find stream of consciousness rambling to be extremely irritating. Normally, I'm very much against interrupting, but I have been known to butt in to stream of consciousness speech, saying, "Okay, and what's your point?"
      • logfromblammo 7y ago
        In my experience, that doesn't help. They don't know what their point is yet; they're just gratuitously holding conversational priority, so they can say what it is the instant they figure it out. Once I detect stream-of-consciousness, I do a warning signal, like a frown or a yawn, then I make a visual cue that I'm exiting the conversation. The Church of Interruption and Barker conversational style just doesn't work for me. I expect to be able to speak complete thoughts and listen to complete thoughts--thoughts that have a timely conclusion.
• alex_young 7y ago
  I'm more interested in the Cult of Listening. First you listen and really try to understand not only the what but why from the person you're having a conversation with. Then you paraphrase what you heard back to make sure you understand and that they can hear it back and agree. If you do these two things you'll find that most people are actually pretty reasonable and you can in turn have a reasoned and listened to response and, shockingly, a real conversation.
  • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    That's a really important skill to have really; in software development there's a huge ego culture going on, people having their own opinions and clinging to them. But the path to maturity and / or seniority involves opening up to other people's opinions, truly understanding them instead of just pushing your own through. Active listening (which is what you're describing there) is a huge part of it. You can't argue with someone if you're not willing to listen in the first place.
• dpc_pw 7y ago
  When talking, I feel like a CPU waiting for DRAM reads all the time. "Gee... why is this going so slow?!" Anything that can speed things up is appreciated. Talk fast, interrupt me, let me interrupt, fill the gaps, ask what you don't understand, point what I got wrong, and lets complete this data transmission as soon as possible.
  • draugadrotten 7y ago
    Interrupting when talking is simply the human equivalent of XON/XOFF flow control in RS232. Some humans are not capable of such software flow control and need the human RTS / CTS handshake which is probably body language. And then other humans simply don't have flow control enabled. At all.
    • dpc_pw 7y ago
      I love this metaphor. :)
• otikik 7y ago
  I'm a Meek and one of the strategies I have developed for dealing with more interrupt-based communicators is to rely on an asynchronous, written medium. Be it slack, a shared google drive doc, whatever. "Hey, can we have a meeting to discuss X" will often be answered by "here's my written opinion on X and the different options I see. If you still think we need to meet, here's my availability". If this doesn't remove the meeting completely, it allows you to prepare and state your opinion in advance. Some people don't like it. It's easier to do when you are remote with a significant time difference.
  • DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I'm prone to interrupting people. It's worse if I'm not feeling heard, if I really feel they are missing a lot of important information and for a few other reasons. I have found email and other forms of written communication wonderful for effectively sidestepping the worst problems. I can lay everything out that I think matters in an order that communicates effectively. It's much easier to do something like that in writing than in conversation, especially when there are time constraints and you don't know them that well or otherwise don't have the best rapport.
  • bartread 7y ago
    This is a valid approach, but it does have a problem: it can lead to long back and forth messaging/email exchanges, including lengthy messages. I don't, generally, have time to write long messages, nor (often) to read them, so as soon as I see this happening I've started to point out the behaviour and set up a short meeting to resolve whatever the issues are.
    • atq2119 7y ago
      Maybe those short meetings loose some of the nuance of the longer written discussion and lead to worse decisions. I'm reminded of Amazon's supposed culture of well-written memos ahead of meetings.
    • mannykannot 7y ago
      There is no guarantee that a short meeting will resolve something that has already been the subject of a long discussion, though I will grant that long discussions are often the result of at least one party not paying attention to what the other is saying, and only the intervention of a third party can break that deadlock. Having one party who only reads the subject line before replying will sabotage any attempt at resolving an issue through email.
• noway421 7y ago
  Most annoying to me, from the top of my head, is when you are trying to find a word to say, and your interlocutor finishes your sentence with a word which is sort of fits in, but not the one you had in mind. I'm not sure I'm all that against interrupters, and I think I can handle them and can sort of be one myself, but it is surely exhausting.
• lbj 7y ago
  I'll be honest, I disengage from interrupters almost immediately. They consistently miss the point in their eager to hear their own shallow thoughts. Its boring.
  • alecmg 7y ago
    But at least they show early that they missed the point and let you catch it early and explain better. Instead of politely listening and after you finish ask what does the first thing (vital to understanding the whole speech) even mean.
    • fogetti 7y ago
      So basically they are forcing the speaker to explain the same thing as they would have continued anyway, plus they even force the same speakers to fix the interrupters' mistakes in their thinking. Why is that good?
      • lbj 7y ago
        You're exactly on point, and your 1:1 exchange here demonstrates the principle of shallow thoughts perfectly.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
• jyriand 7y ago
  I often feel the urge to interrupt, just to get thing moving faster, but I don't want to be the smart-ass who is always interrupting with "I know, I know". So often times I pretend that the presented information is new to me and give the other person a chance to shine. It's not always easy and here and there I blurt out "I know", because I feel that they must be thinking that I'm dumb, or because I don't want to give them the pleasure of being the first person who enlightened me about this thing. But there is some upside to playing dumb: after he has finished talking, you can comment about the subject with some unexpected wisdom, as if you just came up with it. I don't mind if people interrupt me, as long as they stick to the subject at hand. But I hate when someone just cut's me off mid sentence and starts talking about some totally unconnected stuff. I usually see the interruption coming. They nod impatiently and I see that their mouth is already preparing the sentence, waiting for a brief pause in my flow, not hearing a single word I'm saying.
• psim1 7y ago
  “...if I don’t signal my understanding in the same way you do – you’ll just keep talking, imagining I don’t get it.” I like to hear someone's thought and then digest on it. If my partner in conversation just keeps on re-explaining his or her thoughts, thinking is halted. I have to keep on filtering what is said, even if it's basically the same thing repeated, to make sure I didn't miss something. The end result is that my partner speaks three or four times as much as he or she needs to, and I am left understanding less than if the thought was said to me once with a little time to think afterward.
• kerkeslager 7y ago
  This is a very compassionate take. I generally find that anything sufficiently complex can't be communicated with constant interruption, which limits communicating with interrupters to the point that I don't care to do it. I like to think I can handle myself in social situations where there's an interrupter present, but if someone interrupts me frequently I'll usually not go out of my way to interact with that person. There are many cases where the attributes I find most intolerable in others are actually the attributes I find most intolerable in myself, and this is one. What it comes down to for me is that as a kid I was praised a lot for my intelligence so I subconsciously see intelligence as my social value, so my tendency is to always be trying to show how intelligent I am as a social proof. Among the many frustrating habits that come out of this is interrupting to show I've understood something quickly. I've gotten a lot better about this over the years, but still catch myself doing it sometimes. So I appreciate the author's compassionate view.
• paulsutter 7y ago
  I’ve noticed this can happen in Slack. I see someone is typing - and because I assume it’s a full duplex channel, I start typing too while I wait for their answer. And they stop typing. When I delete what I began to type, they resume.
• PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Excited conversations between geeks tend to ramble a lot with a lot of interruptions, and while everyone's having fun, many conversational threads get abandoned as people get drawn into the new topic and forget what they were planning to say. I invented conversation queues for me and my friends. Whenever someone is inspired to tangent onto a new topic, they interrupt only long enough to point at me and say a word or two, which I write down. The next time there's a lull in conversation, I announce the next topic in the queue and cross it off, and the person who inserted it gets to expound. It seems to work really well, and the list can get quite long with a few hours over coffee or beer.
• imhelpingu 7y ago
  Or everyone could just stop being a little bitch about everything 24/7.