Monday, December 19, 2016

Notes on Jumping To Conclusions


Printed text is supposed to be a representation of speech, but that is only half-true.  In no language are the written and spoken forms identical.  Some formal documents, such as proclamations or contracts, the gap between the written and spoken is large. Correspondence, memos, comic book, and playscripts come closer to everyday speech, but each has its own conventions. Even so, when we read something we assign a tone to it, because that is how our brain processes language.  WTF? Might be understood angrily, or might be understood humorously, but when we read it, we assign at least some spoken tone to it.
  
Curiously, it is hard to go back to hear a different tone in a text once your brain has assigned one.  Once you have read the breakup letter from your now ex-girlfriend, there will be sentences that will be difficult to reinterpret with a different emotional valence.  This occurs even over the phone, and because of changing environments, live conversations are not fully exempt from it. Correcting, overcorrecting, denying, and explaining are what young lovers seem to talk about all the time, particularly when things start going badly.

Decades ago, when memos became common, getting the tone right was often a problem.  People felt they were being ordered around rudely or not fully answered. Some writers picked up the proper music for the form, inserting “pls” or “?” or informalities to lighten the tone, but there is still ample room for offense even now, years later.  This process was repeated as voicemail, email, texting, and social media came on.  Each has its own problems.  Sometimes a simple re-explanation is enough when one seeks clarification.  “When I wrote ‘now’ it wasn’t because I thought you were slow or wouldn’t do it.  It’s because when I sent you there last week it didn’t start until afternoon.” Oh, okay fine.

Yet sometimes no amount of explanation suffices.  When the whole department receives an email there is sometimes discussion about what the tone or subtext is, and even reasonable explanations aren’t accepted.  “I don’t buy it.  I think she’s telling us we’d better shape up or heads will roll, and she has a few heads in mind already.” Or, the fourth paragraph of that letter from Tina doesn’t seem to admit of any other interpretation.  It says what it says, you think. Tina’s assertion that it doesn’t mean quite what you think it means seems merely evasive.
Those are the observations, and I’ll bet many of you can expand on them, give better examples or exceptions, or correct my impressions.  Go for it.  I am still assembling the data here. This is hardly a novel set of ideas, but I haven’t been intentional about thinking them through until now, so I may miss wildly.

More fascinating to me now that I have the basics down on the page are some questions which arise.

1.      1.  I am critical of others for jumping to conclusions on tone and finding it difficult to back off, but this is something I do as well.  Are these related? Are those who jump also those who find it hardest to jump back?  Are they more likely to be irritated by others jumping?
2.       
      2.  How much of our jumping to conclusions is jumping to the wrong tone?  People who expect that others generally talk down to them certainly hear that more frequently.  I wonder if that is even broader.  When we read a news story about a riot, are we hearing the sound of rioters’ voices, of policemen’s voices, of neighbors’ or children’s, or even people who will probably talking for the cameras later, way in the back of our heads and drawing conclusions from those voices before content?  Is voice the mechanism for prejudices? (Or were voices the original foundation of our leaping, even though they have long faded?)

3.     3.  I have said that jumping to conclusions is a common mistake of the intelligent.  They get rewarded frequently and punished seldom.  The quick of thought jump to correct conclusions about many small things all their lives.  Arbitrarily, 90%. When they miss, they can out-argue the other few present much of the time, even when they are wrong. Over 50% of the time anyway.  That doesn’t leave many times out of a hundred when they get have to swallow it. That’s been my theory until now, anyway.  This leaping goes wrong as questions become more difficult and ambiguous.  The smart person may leap correctly on only 75% of harder questions, and no better than 50% on ambiguous ones.  Yet they still automatically think of themselves as one who is quickly right 97% of the time and act accordingly. (Insert Taleb)  Perhaps that is not the mechanism, or not all of it.  Perhaps there are people who cannot reassign tone, intelligence having little to do with it.

      The moral of the story is Don't try and be funny on the internet.

11 comments:

Sam L. said...

I would expect sarcasm to have negative responses/effects, unless it's you and him/her who is/are being sarcastic about a third party. Smiley faces likely not helpful.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

More like facetiousness. As it failed so badly, emoticons could hardly have been worse.

BTW, facetiously is one of the two words in the English language that has the 5+ vowels in order.

Unknown said...

you must live quite abstemiously to note any English words with the 5+ vowels in order!

Sam L. said...

Well, AVI, I like to face tiousness head on.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@herfsi - story on that. Years ago I was driving in the car when a radio station asked what the two words were that had the vowels in order, call in to get a prize. I knew facetious but thought that was the only one. I figured it would be the same -ious form and started constructing the a and e to start it. You will notice that abstemious is darn close to the beginning of the alphabet, so I got lucky there. Still, I was very proud of myself and pulled over to a pay phone to call and claim my prize.

Unfortunately, what I won was a Barbra Streisand album.

Donna B. said...

Best laugh I've had all week... a Barbra Streisand album!!!
Thanks!

jaed said...

Heh.



Facts come into your mind, interpretations are made, and out of these bricks you build pieces of the world. If a fact turns out to be shaped differently than you'd thought, that means you have to tear something down and then rebuild it, dang nabbit. What a pain! How annoying to have to do that. It's easier to hang on to your square-shaped brick than have to re-architect, conceivably, a whole section of your inner world in order to accommodate the fact that it's actually round.

And this is worse for intelligent people because they build more stuff and build it faster. By the time the alternate interpretation occurs to them, they've got a whole castle already built on the foundation of the original interpretation. Naturally they are reluctant to tear it down and start over again, particularly if they aren't sure the second interpretation is correct either.

Related: "A beautiful theory, slain by a single inconvenient fact." Darn.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Excellent analogy.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

From Avi's wife
Number 3 is why I continue to try to finish your sentences when you pause too long despite many times of being jumped on for guessing wrong.

RichardJohnson said...

The moral of the story is Don't try and be funny on the internet.

Wouldn't that be better written as "Don't try to be funny?"

As an example of attempted "humor" on the Internet not going over very well, consider the storm that Chavez fan George Ciccariello-Maher created with his tweet about what he wanted for Christmas. Come to think of it, considering what he later tweeted about Haiti, there was very little "humor" in what he had initially tweeted, though he claimed that there was humor. Humorless doctrinaire lefties don't do humor very well, though people governed by doctrinaire leftists become rather adept at humor.

Estoy_Listo said...

I think intelligent people are less likely in general to consider alternative points of view. Why should they?