Conversation

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.

David J Klein

@Kleinspaces

Apr 3

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.

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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)

5:52 PM · Apr 3, 2022Twitter for iPhone

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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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Speech (or any low-bandwidth transfer) is compression of the massive amounts of information in the brain, a la autoencoding/decoding. Brain-to-brain connectivity is going to transform communication at unspeakable scales.

Jess McMullin

@jessmcmullin

Apr 3

I suspect that compression is what turns data into information (so sampling upstream may just look like a lot of noise, though maybe you get other modalities like visual or aural - which are their own compression schemes)

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True if your miscommunication hang ups are about visualizing, vs framing, semantics, culture, values ( fascinating thought experiment - what happens if you share that 3D image with someone who does not have a “minds eye” - static? Painful? Novel?)

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So many times I’ve wished I could just plug someone else’s brain into mine!