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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 con

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.
  - pryce 7y ago
    It's only implied, but surely the idea is that "CSC" oriented people expect conversations to swap speaker-listener roles through the current speaker yielding rather than through an assertion by the current listener.

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.
- pryce 7y ago
  It's only implied, but surely the idea is that "CSC" oriented people expect conversations to swap speaker-listener roles through the current speaker yielding rather than through an assertion by the current listener.