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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Not to mention that we humans lack perfect attention, so who knows how much was actually heard and processed in the first place 😅
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Have personally witnessed 100% communication loss with both parties smiling and nodding.
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It's absolutely context dependent and people dependent. The same person can experience 0% communication loss or 100% loss, depending on who they're talking with, the social, intellectual, educational, emotional, cultural, biological differences.
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conversation can seem like different sports...
if one person is playing truth-seeking and one is playing persuasion, losses seem >80%
equivocation is rampant
:)
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While first point of contact may not be as efficient, humans tend to follow up for a better understanding. Initially the loss may be approx 30% but towards the end humans have evolved to maximise info gathering and reduce loss <5%
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"You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
mit.edu/people/dpolica
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This is one of my favorite short stories!!
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One fun back of the envelope might be to compare bandwidth of brain to bandwidth of speech.
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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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