social.noyu.me

redundancy is not the same thing as waste!

high-context vs low-context communicative style is probably what someone would call it. i just made those terms up but i am certain there are a bunch of essays about it if i looked for them

the optimal number of things i tell someone that they already know and agree with me on is not zero

https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01HJ0Z0XVTCWMTFDF6BA0XCA08

related: i have what might be considered a deficit in my theory of mind, where if i try to interrogate “does the person i'm talking to already know this”, i generally find this question hard to answer, so i tend to assume little shared knowledge and just ask. it's not arrogance!!

a few years ago i gave a talk at a conference (the video has vanished from youtube and i don't have it archived, sadly) where i referred to a very well-known figure in that space and then said “…who some of you might have heard of?”, genuinely uncertain. the audience laughed

as far as i can tell, people thought i was joking, which is good, because i wasn't joking and it's actually mildly embarrassing. that guy? he was the keynote speaker for next year's conference (which i also attended), if i recall correctly. anyway, i don't regret it at all :)

anyway if you ever talk to me and i ask some question about what you already know that makes you think i think you're stupid, i don't think that, and i refuse to think about anyone in those terms in any case. see it more like https://xkcd.com/1053/. i love curiosity

@hikari plus it's a great way to begin _any_ story or explanation, and quickly negotiate context

"have you ever fried an egg?" (perhaps somebody hasn't!)
"you know the hold-open latch at the gas pump?" (apparently New York doesn't! did you know _that_?)
"have you ever threaded a 35mm movie projector?" (crap, i'm showing my age)

@hikari True! Error-correction mechanisms exist for a reason!