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There's an assumption here that I find fascinating. That it is possible to speak clearly and directly. The process of producing speech is the result of the dir
by iandanforth 6y ago
There's an assumption here that I find fascinating. That it is possible to speak clearly and directly.
The process of producing speech is the result of the direct or slightly indirect activity of billions of neurons. That activity, in turn, is the result of inputs that take into account the strength of trillions of dendritic connections which encode (in a lossy fashion) the history of a persons experience.
Speech is compressive and lossy. You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech. You have a limited vocabulary whose meanings do not map one-to-one in the mind of any other person who hears you speak. So not only are there multiple limitations on the output side of the channel, there are limitations on the receiving side as well.
This is why effective communication is so hard! As the sender you don't have full introspective access to the contents of your brain, so you can't even know what the full message is you're trying to send. As the receiver you're operating on a highly compressed message without a fully shared codec.
So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.
- 9q9 6y ago7 3+4 2nd-smallest double Mersenne prime Number of continents
- ken 6y ago> You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech. Right, but that's not even the purpose of speech. Abstraction is a feature, not a flaw. Even with electronic systems where perfect and complete transfer is possible, we prefer simplified serialization of messages. > So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either. I half-disagree with you here. Given that language is so ambiguous, it's admirable to try to reduce unnecessary ambiguity, when your goal is to communicate a specific message.
- jkhdigital 6y agoI also have a mental model that sees the language-producing portion of the brain as a PR department of sorts, which is responsible for managing others’ perception of the whole operation. In other words, my words are not coming from the CEO, and in fact there is no CEO anyway.
- BurningFrog 6y agoEffective communication is hard. But this is not why. Dumping a complete terabyte state of your internal system state onto your listener would not be helpful, even if possible.