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What % communication loss is there between two people in a verbal conversation? Between unclear word choices, differences in the preloaded constructs in each party’s head, and differing emotions and incentives it feels like it averages to north of 20%? Curious what others think.

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James Cham

@jamescham

Apr 3

One fun back of the envelope might be to compare bandwidth of brain to bandwidth of speech.

David J Klein

@Kleinspaces

Apr 3

Speech information bandwidth has been estimated at 39bps and seems to be remarkably consistent across languages. The bottleneck is thought to be more on the speech production side. Shivon is referring so something different though relating to misinterpretation.

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and

The speech production bottleneck is not in the articulatory motor mechanisms but in transforming thoughts to speech. Some theories posit that that process is a fundamental component of thought itself, and so the bottleneck would not be overcome by a direct brain link.

5:25 PM · Apr 3, 2022Twitter for iPhone

Replying to

and

To Shivon’s point though there is so much ambiguity in conveying mental models — non-overlapping priors limiting the information flow. Further, these are upper bounds rarely met because of situational attentional affects.

David J Klein

@Kleinspaces

Apr 3

(I feel like about 30% of what I’m trying to convey is lost.)

Replying to

and

Perhaps! Though that presumes that the output you want is still using the technology of “language”. Don’t think that one would be beholden to linguistic technology with a direct interface (eg why wouldn’t I share the 3D visuals i can see in my head or directly convey emotions)

Shivon Zilis

@shivon

Apr 3

I often find myself frustrated because I can “see” the thing I want to convey with whatever biological GPU we have in our brains, but I have to compress that rich visual into language.

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