4 ms·

> "We also don’t know how well speakers tune their data-compression algorithms to the needs of individual listeners. Accurately predicting the information that

by amirmc 12y ago

> "We also don’t know how well speakers tune their data-compression algorithms to the needs of individual listeners. Accurately predicting the information that a listener can easily recover sometimes requires knowing a lot about his previous experience or knowledge. After all, one person’s redundancy can be another person’s anomaly..." I'm glad the article recognises this (and the example immediately following the quote is instructive). It's a natural habit to do this kind of 'data-compression' when you're working with the same people all the time but this is also the reason that communication is difficult across different groups and cultures. It requires you to make an effort to listen and check your own assumptions if you want to actually communicate effectively, rather than talking past each other (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what was decided).

cheatsheet 12y ago
> (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what what decided) Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity. Expect the unexpected, but within a clearly defined range of variability. I'm not talking specifically about software development btw; consider the surrealists or any other artistic or philosophical movement (or literature, music, mathematics etc). People have ideas together, walk away, and then have mental independence. Mental independence is good, because too much binding in thought = paranoia, nervous, control obsessed people. Too little and it seems like people don't care. It's a balance.
- amirmc 12y ago
  > "Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity." I think you've missed my point. I was mostly referring to things like meetings, where people typically are trying to reach an agreement (or decision) about something. If those people are from different cultures, then a mismatch can arise where people think they're talking about the same thing but only realise later that things have gone wrong. Even then, people tend towards recriminations, rather than root-causing and realising that their terms mean different things. Take the example from the end of the post itself (where 'skiing' meant different things to both people -- if they hadn't clarified, they'd have parted with vastly different views on what was discussed).
  - divegeek 12y ago
    I find it useful to keep in mind the notion that all knowledge is gained by a process of guesswork and criticism. When you listen to my voice or read my words, you must guess at what I mean to convey, because my words by themselves, even if not mumbled, are almost never sufficiently precise to carry my meaning. So instead, you have to build and discard internal explanatory models of my meaning, criticizing them by cross-checking them with other things I've said, and with your understanding of my understanding of the world. Meanwhile, I'm doing the same thing on the other side, hypothesizing the models that you're creating based on what I've said and trying to add more words to fill any gaps in what I presume that you're presuming that I mean. When we arrive at a point where you and I both believe that you hold a consistent mental model of what I wished to convey, then we believe that I have communicated to you. Stated that way, it's clear that communication is really, really hard -- even though we do all of that model building and evaluation without conscious effort in most cases. And it's also quite obvious why it's easier to communicate with people you know well, because both sides have a better mental model of the other's mental model. Both are _wrong_, always, but they're less wrong than similar situations between people with less shared context. This view also makes it abundantly clear that it's important to validate communication. If you restate to me in your own words what you believe I intended to convey, there's a good chance I'll catch any major discrepancies between what I intended and what you got. A good chance, but we can still end up believing that we're in agreement when we're not. In theory it is possible to define a language and communication techniques that do not depend on this iterative, contextualized method. This is essentially what we do in formal languages, such as those we use in mathematics or programming. But it is not how people communicate because it's actually far more efficient to rely on compression via shared context than it is to communicate with formal precision. Further, formal communication only obviates guesswork and criticism at the level of understanding which is directly expressed. I can read an assembler program and understand with perfect precision what the individual instructions do, but the leap to understanding the goal of the program again requires guesswork and criticism. As an aside, it's interesting to note that the process of guess-and-evaluate is essentially the same as the scientific method of hypothesize-and-test and even the same as the evolutionary method of vary-and-select. There's a compelling argument that all knowledge creation occurs via this process -- and communication is knowledge creation, even if it simply conveys an idea from one brain to another, because there's no direct transfer mechanism the receiver of the idea must create it based on observations of the words of the giver.

by amirmc 12y ago

cheatsheet 12y ago

> (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what what decided) Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity. Expect the unexpected, but within a clearly defined range of variability. I'm not talking specifically about software development btw; consider the surrealists or any other artistic or philosophical movement (or literature, music, mathematics etc). People have ideas together, walk away, and then have mental independence. Mental independence is good, because too much binding in thought = paranoia, nervous, control obsessed people. Too little and it seems like people don't care. It's a balance.

amirmc 12y ago
> "Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity." I think you've missed my point. I was mostly referring to things like meetings, where people typically are trying to reach an agreement (or decision) about something. If those people are from different cultures, then a mismatch can arise where people think they're talking about the same thing but only realise later that things have gone wrong. Even then, people tend towards recriminations, rather than root-causing and realising that their terms mean different things. Take the example from the end of the post itself (where 'skiing' meant different things to both people -- if they hadn't clarified, they'd have parted with vastly different views on what was discussed).
- divegeek 12y ago
  I find it useful to keep in mind the notion that all knowledge is gained by a process of guesswork and criticism. When you listen to my voice or read my words, you must guess at what I mean to convey, because my words by themselves, even if not mumbled, are almost never sufficiently precise to carry my meaning. So instead, you have to build and discard internal explanatory models of my meaning, criticizing them by cross-checking them with other things I've said, and with your understanding of my understanding of the world. Meanwhile, I'm doing the same thing on the other side, hypothesizing the models that you're creating based on what I've said and trying to add more words to fill any gaps in what I presume that you're presuming that I mean. When we arrive at a point where you and I both believe that you hold a consistent mental model of what I wished to convey, then we believe that I have communicated to you. Stated that way, it's clear that communication is really, really hard -- even though we do all of that model building and evaluation without conscious effort in most cases. And it's also quite obvious why it's easier to communicate with people you know well, because both sides have a better mental model of the other's mental model. Both are _wrong_, always, but they're less wrong than similar situations between people with less shared context. This view also makes it abundantly clear that it's important to validate communication. If you restate to me in your own words what you believe I intended to convey, there's a good chance I'll catch any major discrepancies between what I intended and what you got. A good chance, but we can still end up believing that we're in agreement when we're not. In theory it is possible to define a language and communication techniques that do not depend on this iterative, contextualized method. This is essentially what we do in formal languages, such as those we use in mathematics or programming. But it is not how people communicate because it's actually far more efficient to rely on compression via shared context than it is to communicate with formal precision. Further, formal communication only obviates guesswork and criticism at the level of understanding which is directly expressed. I can read an assembler program and understand with perfect precision what the individual instructions do, but the leap to understanding the goal of the program again requires guesswork and criticism. As an aside, it's interesting to note that the process of guess-and-evaluate is essentially the same as the scientific method of hypothesize-and-test and even the same as the evolutionary method of vary-and-select. There's a compelling argument that all knowledge creation occurs via this process -- and communication is knowledge creation, even if it simply conveys an idea from one brain to another, because there's no direct transfer mechanism the receiver of the idea must create it based on observations of the words of the giver.