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Living in a country that doesn't speak my first language, I use the dictionary all the time during meetings and presentations. I hate it when people tell me tha

Living in a country that doesn't speak my first language, I use the dictionary all the time during meetings and presentations. I hate it when people tell me that’s rude.. Okay I'll just sit here and not understand what was said to keep up appearances?

bondarchuk 2y ago
Presumably that specific reason would not apply to high-level politicians in their own country, and if it did they would have a real-time translator.
- Lanolderen 2y ago
  In other wording, if someone is speaking about a subject I'm not entirely familiar with, I'd likely be googling different details to get a more real picture than the one presented by the person proposing changes. Incentives and all that. An issue with political discourse in parliaments is that it's a meeting with a lot of important people so you can't really ask for clarifications again and again as you would in a 5 person meeting at work if you don't understand something you feel might be important. Partially because if everyone started asking for clarifications the topics won't get anywhere and partially because it's politics so you have to appear competent at all times.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    If you're constantly looking up things on your phone about what a speaker just said, you'll miss the thing being said right now. Humans cannot multitask. Anyone that says they can are lying or are misguided at best. So instead of missing one thing, you've put yourself in a position to miss even more rather than looking up something afterwards.
    - LocalH 2y ago
      > Humans cannot multitask. Anyone that says they can are lying or are misguided at best. I don't believe this to be axiomatically true. I don't believe it's an intrinsic ability, but I believe it's very possible for humans to task-switch at a level that appears like multitasking (and when you think about it, the only multitasking modern computers do is the threading that multiple CPU cores enable, when it comes to a single core there is only one task running at a time, ever). In certain situations, I've found my brain able to do almost fractal searches through a target space. Or at least to simultaneously search for the answer to more than one question (take the game Hangman and its variants, when looking at a partial word my brain is certainly not searching for a single letter at a time).
- Ldorigo 2y ago
  Actually, Belgium has two (main) official languages so roughly 50% of the people present are now hearing their native language.
rrr_oh_man 2y ago
Don't let the special case invalidate a good heuristic.
Tijdreiziger 2y ago
What if you use a physical (paper) dictionary? Perhaps people will respond to it better.

bondarchuk 2y ago

Presumably that specific reason would not apply to high-level politicians in their own country, and if it did they would have a real-time translator.

Lanolderen 2y ago
In other wording, if someone is speaking about a subject I'm not entirely familiar with, I'd likely be googling different details to get a more real picture than the one presented by the person proposing changes. Incentives and all that. An issue with political discourse in parliaments is that it's a meeting with a lot of important people so you can't really ask for clarifications again and again as you would in a 5 person meeting at work if you don't understand something you feel might be important. Partially because if everyone started asking for clarifications the topics won't get anywhere and partially because it's politics so you have to appear competent at all times.
- dylan604 2y ago
  If you're constantly looking up things on your phone about what a speaker just said, you'll miss the thing being said right now. Humans cannot multitask. Anyone that says they can are lying or are misguided at best. So instead of missing one thing, you've put yourself in a position to miss even more rather than looking up something afterwards.
  - LocalH 2y ago
    > Humans cannot multitask. Anyone that says they can are lying or are misguided at best. I don't believe this to be axiomatically true. I don't believe it's an intrinsic ability, but I believe it's very possible for humans to task-switch at a level that appears like multitasking (and when you think about it, the only multitasking modern computers do is the threading that multiple CPU cores enable, when it comes to a single core there is only one task running at a time, ever). In certain situations, I've found my brain able to do almost fractal searches through a target space. Or at least to simultaneously search for the answer to more than one question (take the game Hangman and its variants, when looking at a partial word my brain is certainly not searching for a single letter at a time).
Ldorigo 2y ago
Actually, Belgium has two (main) official languages so roughly 50% of the people present are now hearing their native language.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago

Don't let the special case invalidate a good heuristic.

Tijdreiziger 2y ago

What if you use a physical (paper) dictionary? Perhaps people will respond to it better.