> "We also don’t know how well speakers tune their data-compression algorithms to the needs of individual listeners. Accurately predicting the information that a listener can easily recover sometimes requires knowing a lot about his previous experience or knowledge. After all, one person’s redundancy can be another person’s anomaly..."
I'm glad the article recognises this (and the example immediately following the quote is instructive). It's a natural habit to do this kind of 'data-compression' when you're working with the same people all the time but this is also the reason that communication is difficult across different groups and cultures. It requires you to make an effort to listen and check your own assumptions if you want to actually communicate effectively, rather than talking past each other (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what was decided).
I'm glad the article recognises this (and the example immediately following the quote is instructive). It's a natural habit to do this kind of 'data-compression' when you're working with the same people all the time but this is also the reason that communication is difficult across different groups and cultures. It requires you to make an effort to listen and check your own assumptions if you want to actually communicate effectively, rather than talking past each other (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what was decided).