Comment by david-gpu
6 hours ago
I used to select my words very carefully and feel frustration when people misinterpreted them or did not understand the precise angle behind that choice. Reading other people's communication would often be confusing because they were not nearly as precise in their language.
At some point I realized that if I didn't want to be permanently frustrated, I had to adapt to the broad reality of how humans communicate. I introduced more context and redundancy into my writing, I learned to use analogies to make it easier for others to get the big picture. Most importantly, I stopped expecting every word I read to mean exactly what I thought it meant, and instead tried to get an idea of what they were trying to say, rather than fixating on what they were actually saying.
Years later I figured that I was autistic, and that it had played a big role in my difficulties trying to understand and be understood by normies.
I'm usually precise in my wording and choose specific words for a reason and am also sometimes annoyed by people ignoring the preciseness.
However I also sometimes cannot find the correct precise words to describe what I mean in unambiguous, but also concise words, so I sometimes choose much less precise words for lack of a better alternative. Oftentimes I denote that when I find it important, but it happens way too often to do that every time.
Also words simply aren't completely precise. A word might be perfectly fitting for what I want to say with it in a situation, but someone else understands it as something slightly different and they are not wrong about it. Words often simply do not have one exact shared meaning.
Natural language is imprecise and it is fundamentally a lossy compression function. One that uses a shared dictionary that is not identical for both encoder and decoder. You simply need some amount of error correction in encoding and decoding.
In the same way that the "worse" a speaker is at communicating the more likely something gets lost, the same is true the "worse" the audience is at listening or paying attention or understanding. Both ends make the connection. This will be easy to read as calling the audience dumb, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the ability to understand involves trying and the audience has some control over successful communication much like the speaker does. They can sit with the idea for a second longer before responding, learn and pickup (or ask about) whatever gap they have if they’re not up to speed, or in many cases just listen without distraction.
Conversations have various power dynamics where one person may have more of the burden, but it is far from always a speaker pitching something to someone who isn't inclined to it. Peers leave hallway chats regularly having “aligned” on two different things. Lots of things we’re talking about are actually complex and simple communication will effectively be miscommunication.
I think we’ve moved too far to broadly attributing confusion to weak speaking. It can certainly help to keep polishing and reworking your words to overcome worse and worse listening habits. That can take one very far, but it doesn’t change that we’re making the bar higher and higher and therefore more messages/ideas dissipate into air.
I resonate strongly with this comment chain. At this stage in life I don’t think I’ve essentially figured out how to adapt and don’t see much point in getting diagnosed. But it is interesting seeing comments that feel like I could have written them myself.
> At some point I realized that if I didn't want to be permanently frustrated, I had to adapt to the broad reality of how humans communicate.
See you say that, yet I'm perpetually frustrated because so many humans communicate so fucking poorly, which AI is both making a bit better (no more word salad riddled with typos, ill-understood terms, what have you) but is also making worse (people now put even less effort into communication, which is genuinely an achievement).
I was told all through my school years that I would need to write well to be taken seriously in business, and my entire career has been rife with aging old fools overseeing me who could barely fucking type, let alone write.