The Mandelbear's Musings

Public Service Announcement #3: If I ask you a question, it's because I don't know the answer, and I'm interested in hearing it. Period. The only exceptions are if I'm recording an interview with you, or drilling you for a test.

Public Service Announcement #4: I almost never ask "social questions". If I don't know you, or don't want to talk, I'll greet you with some variant of "hello". If I ask "How are you?" I'll take a social "OK", but I'll also be ready for a twenty-minute rant or a two-hour brain dump. Really.

If you think I've asked a question before, there are several possible explanations:

• I may simply have forgotten your answer. This happens a lot, especially with names, but it can happen with anything if I haven't had a chance to write it down.
• I may even have forgotten that I asked the question. That can happen especially if I was distracted when, or shortly after, I asked it.
• I may not have heard your answer the last time. I'm both a little hard of hearing, and very easily distracted. I'll try to use the phrase "excuse me" in this case. If it's very noisy or hard for me to concentrate, you may have to repeat the answer several times. Bear with me.
• I may have asked the question with different words, and not understood the answer. Or I understood the answer, but it was so different from what I expected that I'm not sure you understood the question. I'm using different and more careful wording in an attempt to get a more understandable, more believable, or more accurate answer. Usually I'll say so, and say which case I'm working on, but I might not always have time. Please try to believe that it's a different question, even if it sounds the same to you.
• You may have given me the same information in response to a different question entirely (in which case I might easily have missed it in my efforts to understand it as the answer to the question I did ask), or even without my asking.
• The situation may have changed to the point where I'm no longer certain the old answer applies. I'll try to use the word "still" in this case, as in "Are you still upset at me?"
• You may simply be mis-remembering, or remembering when I asked the same question in an earlier situation.

There are also cases where you think I should already know the answer. Perhaps you actually told me the answer a few minutes ago, and I got distracted and forgot it. Perhaps it's something that any human being with the ability to understand normal people's emotions ought to have known implicitly. Perhaps it was implied by something you said, and I simply didn't catch the implication. I'm stupid that way, OK?

The fact is, I didn't know. If I ask you a question, it's because at the moment I'm asking it I don't know the answer. If I ask for more detail, it's because I feel that it's important for me to find out. It's OK in that case to tell me to drop the subject, and I'll either drop it or tell you why I think I need to know, and drop it if you still want me to.

I would really appreciate it if you could be patient with this stupid old bear, and not get too upset because I asked you what sounds like the same question in different words a few minutes ago. Please try to listen to my exact words, and answer the question I actually asked rather than repeating the answer I didn't understand the last time, or answering the question you think I intended to ask. Feel free to correct me if you think I'm asking the wrong question, and feel free to ask me why I seem to be asking the same damned question, or to clarify my phrasing.

Please don't get upset because I don't seem to be listening to you. I'm listening as best I can, and trying as hard as I can to understand you. I wouldn't be asking you questions if I wasn't trying to understand you.

Above all, please believe me when I tell you I don't know. I wouldn't lie to you.

This is an expansion of a topic I raised in this post, where I wrote:

We never did get to do any wine-tasting (though the wine at the wedding was excellent, as one might expect, and made up for the lack). This occasioned an argument, too: I could hear the disappointment in Colleen's voice, but she said "no" when I first asked her whether she was disappointed. A lifetime of social conditioning will do that. But it's disastrous for someone like me who can't read people very well, and has to get accurate feedback when I try to confirm my guesses. I think the normal expectation is that somebody will understand the tone of voice and interpret the polite denial as a subtle request to leave the subject alone. I don't do subtle, and don't trust my ability to "read" people.

In other words, my ability to perceive moods and emotions in other people -- even in myself -- is highly unreliable and inaccurate; I need to calibrate it by getting feedback from people, to see whether my guesses are correct. My ability to understand implicit communication and hints is practically nonexistent. As I've often remarked here, I don't do subtle.

Most people -- "normal" people, as opposed to geeks like me -- appear to rely heavily on one another's ability to read emotions and recognize implied communication. This leads to a social convention whereby a short, polite answer to a question establishes a polite fiction that is often contradicted by an emotional undercurrent that people like me usually miss, leading to total lack of real communication.

So, in the preceeding exchange, we had Colleen giving what I'll call the "social answer" to my question, relying on my (nearly nonexistant) emotional perception to supply the "real answer". Which I still don't fully understand. I understood that she was disappointed, but have no idea what the implied message might have been. "I don't want to discuss it"? "I want to discuss it but only if you want to as well"? "I was disappointed but don't want to get into an argument"? All of the above? Something else? Probably. But I don't think Colleen herself knows, or could give me any help understanding it. It was hard enough calibrating my reading of her mood.

I may never get any good at all at understanding -- or even detecting -- implied messages, but my ability to read emotions is improving, largely because I'm getting a little better at calibrating my readings.

The trick, for me, is recognizing when I'm getting a "social answer", and framing a question or two that will elicit the "real answer". So,

"Are you disappointed?"

"Not really."

"I thought I heard disappointment in your voice. Are you disappointed?"

"Of course I was disappointed. You told me..."

Similarly, take a common social greeting:

"How are you doing?"

"OK."

"You look a little down."

"Well, ... "

What follows the "Well,..." could be anything from "I just haven't had my coffee yet" to "My mother died yesterday" -- the social convention appears to be to give a noncommittal answer and let the other party follow it up if they really care about the person and want the real answer. Or something. I'm still not really sure; all I know is that I have to follow up if I want to get the real answer.

As I say, I'm getting better at this. In other cases I'll try to paraphrase a response that seems to be ambiguous, or request further information when the response seems incomplete. I think that most people find this annoying and perhaps even offensive, but I can't help that -- I need my calibration, my feedback, or I won't understand what they were trying to tell me.

It would be unrealistic and totally unfair of me to ask people to give me a real answer to an ordinary social question. The social answer is what almost all of the people they communicate with are expecting. The social convention serves them well; I'm guessing that it lets the conversation drop before getting into realm of real emotions unless both parties are prepared to go deeper. Basically, it's up to me to figure out when, and whether, I need to follow up.

Similarly, I'm far enough outside most people's normal range of experience that they're almost certain to misunderstand me -- they misinterpret my tone of voice, or look for an implied message that isn't there, and find something I didn't say. They don't follow up, of course. It's up to me to notice when they're misinterpreting what I said, and try to correct it. Often it's too late: I've made them angry or distressed, and they've stopped listening to me. Other times I simply don't notice, and they go off thinking I said something totally different from whatever I actually said.

Public Service Announcement #1: When I say something to you, there is no implied message or hidden meaning. The words I used said precisely what I meant to say, at least if I was at all careful about framing them. If you don't believe me, or don't understand me, or think there was some implied message, ask me.

Public Service Announcement #2: I don't do subtle. If you want to tell me something, use words and say it explicitly and in detail. Don't rely on my ability to pick up hints and hidden assumptions -- I don't have that ability.

It's been a weekend of conversation, puntuated occasionally by snuggle, sleep, food, and a little music. Many things left undone, though the few important items, plane tickets to OVFF and a second room for Loscon, finally got taken care of. On the whole, I'd rather spend time talking with friends than almost anything else.

Mostly talk with M.S., up from Southern Cal for a funeral and staying with us for friendship and lack of drama. A good little walk in the Rose Garden yesterday, and two lovely mornings of bacon, eggs, coffee, and conversation. Mostly about relationships, hers and mine. I showed her the Royal Amethyst rose and explained that, yes, it's OK to talk about Amy. Grieving isn't about forgetting the past but about coming to terms with it, and remembering is my way of doing that.

A brief interlude yesterday to take the Y.D. to an interview for possible travel next summer, and rowanf's 25th anniversary party in the afternoon. They'd requested music and poetry on the theme of love in lieu of gifts; I sang The River, of course, and got some good reactions. Longish talk with spikeiowa afterward.

This morning, M gave me a voice lesson -- extremely useful. More on that later, perhaps. A drive with the Cat in the afternoon -- the conversation continues. I love my friends, and I love talking with them. I love my Cat the best of all, and even when we have little to say, the silence between us is alive with conversation.

OK, I realize that you are almost certainly not sitting around wondering why on Earth you would want to spend your time talking to a shy, elderly computer geek with delusions of wisdom. And you probably aren't wondering exactly what a reference to Cordwainer Smith is doing in my user profile, either. But just in case you did want to know, here's a little background information that might help, as well as illuminate the possibly obscure relationship between the two.

A long time ago in a Usenet group called alt.callahans, before I became the Mandelbear, I originally referred myself as "the Medium-Sized Teddybear". It was a deliberate reference to a character, the Middle-Sized Bear, in the story Mark Elf by Cordwainer Smith. You'll find the relevant chapter, "Conversation with the Middle-Sized Bear", here.

Back in late 1990, I quoted the relevant section in a post, and I will do so again here, though you'll find it well worth your while to read the entire chapter, if not the whole story.

Back half a decade ago I quoted that same passage in this post, with a bit of the Usenet post for context.

Oddly enough, I really can become the Middle-Sized Bear: comfortable and comforting to be around. Not all the time, of course, but often enough to occasionally make a difference for somebody. I'm not entirely sure what it is that I do, or how I do it. It may have something to do with being comfortable with silence. In any event, there it is.

This is the third of a series of three River posts about communication and conversation: the first was "Talking long distance", and the second was "Talking with you" I'm afraid my mindspace has been rather taken up recently with things like New Song Energy and getting ready for ConChord, so these are coming out a lot more slowly than I originally intended. Onward!

The last couple of days, a lot of my time has disappeared into watching old CSI episodes with Colleen (she's borrowing the DVDs from our younger daughter). Colleen can get things done while watching TV. I can't.

If there is anything at all with words anywhere in my auditory or visual environment, I will pay attention to it. If there are more than just one thing involving words, my attention will get split at random. I can't multitask.

In particular, I can't divide my attention between reading, listening, writing, talking, and thinking. And I have to think for a moment before I either write or speak.

The only thing that reliably blocks words coming into my ears is reading; if I'm reading something -- a book or a computer screen -- I will not hear you talking! I can't ignore anything else.

This is a phenomenon that cflute calls "crosstalk". As you can see from the start of the Wikipedia article, it's an accurate description of it:

In electronics, the term crosstalk (XT) refers to any phenomenon by which a signal transmitted on one circuit or channel of a transmission system creates an undesired effect in another circuit or channel.

I only have one channel for processing words. It's used for reading, understanding speech, writing, talking, and thinking. I think mainly in words -- it's called subvocalization.

I believe I've mentioned a couple of times that I have to compose what I'm saying before I say or write it. I subvocalize when I'm doing this, and I also subvocalize when I'm reading, which makes it hard to skim. Basically, if I'm hearing or reading words, I won't be able to hear the internal voice that I use to compose words. Literally, I can't think. I discovered, quite recently, that even talking to myself blocks thinking; I always used to talk to myself when I was out walking. It was always pretty aimless.

I've been writing more songs recently, and I'm pretty sure that this is, at least in part, due to the fact that I've learned to shut up and listen to my muse instead of my own voice. I've also learned to turn the radio off in the car: I can think in the car because driving in familiar territory is almost entirely a matter of visual and kinesthetic input, and those don't interfere with the verbal channel. (If I don't have all the landmarks memorized, I'll need to read a map or talk to a navigator. That is verbal.)

In electronics, crosstalk can be prevented by shielding. I don't have any shields. Whatever's coming in on the highest bandwdith channel -- visual or audio, in that order -- is going to dominate my attention. I can turn my eyes away from a book or computer, but I can't turn off my ears.

I've already written about my difficulty carrying on a conversation if there are distractions. If I concentrate, I can usually manage to carry on a conversation with one or two people in a noisy party, but my attention is sure to be caught now and then by a snippet of another conversation; I'll miss things, and sometimes stop in the middle of a sentence or even a song. And it's hard. At some point it's easier for me to leave in search of someplace quiet. Even with only a half-dozen people in our living room on a Wednesday night, an animated conversation can easily drive me into the office, especially if it's on a topic I'm not interested in. They'll still have fun without me, and you know where to find me if you want quiet talk about geekery or music.

Similarly, conversation blocks writing. I really enjoy having a laptop in the living room where I can talk with Colleen, but I can't use it for writing anything more than very short LJ comments or email replies: conversation blocks the channel I use for writing. I can use IM, but I'm going to respond a lot more slowly than I would in a quiet environment.

Crosstalk comes into play whenever there are multiple inputs. I noticed this with cflute on our recent trip to Seattle: we were engaged in a particularly tricky and strenuous bit of carpet-moving, and when more than one person was talking Callie would raise her hand and wait for silence when she wanted to say something. It didn't always work, because we mostly had our eyes on the carpet, but it seems like a good strategy when you do have eye contact. A loud "Excuse me" might work when you don't. The equivalent in a filk circle is hitting a loud chord on the guitar, or standing up to sing a cappella.

To summarize: read / listen / write / talk / think. Pick exactly one.

This is the second of a series of three River posts about communication and conversation: the first was "Talking long distance", and the third will be titled "Crosstalk". This one is about conversation: one-on-one and very small groups. It also applies to similar situations, like filk circles and song-swapping sessions.

I really have three major problems with conversations. The first is paying attention.

I don't multitask. I'll go into this in more detail when I discuss crosstalk; for now it's probably enough to know that to call me "easily distracted" is an understatement on the same order as calling a plasma torch "rather warm". If there's anything involving words where I can see it or hear it -- a book, another conversation, filk on the CD player, a video on TV -- I'm going to have a lot of trouble paying attention to the person I'm trying to have a conversation with.

If I was already paying attention to something else, you're going to have trouble getting my attention in the first place. This is especially true if I'm reading. A book, magazine, or computer will grab my attention to the point where I simply don't notice anything else in my environment. If you think I'm listening to you, and there are words where I can see them, I'm probably paying more attention to them than to you. There's a good reason why I don't read while I'm walking, and a couple of dented lampposts scattered around Norwalk, Connecticut where I grew up.

If there's anything else going on, in other words, you're going to have trouble getting my attention in the first place, and even more trouble holding it. On the other hand, I'm not usually very shy about moving the conversation off to someplace quiet, if that seems to be appropriate. It's one of the very few things I'm not shy about, these days.

A closely related problem is that my train of thought is easily derailed. If I get distracted or interrupted while I'm thinking, I'll have to backtrack and try to reconstruct what I was about to say. It might take a while. One of the worst things you can do when talking to me is try to complete a sentence for me -- your guess is almost invariably going to be wrong, and it's likely to blow what I was really about to say clean out of my head for a while. Please don't.

If I get interrupted while I'm talking it's also possible that I'll just raise my voice to talk over what I perceive as an increased noise level. As I've pointed out upstream, this is usually perceived as shouting.

There's a related problem here, too; because I don't multitask, if I'm abusing my turn by ranting or blathering I'm hard to shut up. I know that this is a problem, and won't be offended if you simply tell me to "shut up!" Really. Putting your hand up also works, but only if I'm where I can see you.

My second problem is that I'm not very aggressive about taking a turn.

As a result, I have trouble talking with more than one person. If there are two other people nearby, I'm likely to let them talk to one another, unless I have something I think I need to bring into the conversation or they make an effort to include me by asking me questions. This is pretty rare except where the topic of conversation is some area where I have actual expertise, such as computers or music, and so have something to say that people are sufficiently interested in to ask me about.

Song circles are slightly different; in a sufficiently-small circle, say five or six people, there's likely to be a tendency to go around the circle taking turns, even if the occasional follower gets inserted into the flow. I can do that. I can even strum my guitar to get attention, if there aren't too many people. When the circle gets bigger, though, you'll either find me off in a corner listening, or out in the hallway swapping songs with a handful of friends.

This is also related to attention; I simply can't follow multiple conversations, or pay attention to anything if I'm busy strategizing how to get a turn or what I want to say next.

One thing I generally don't do, though, is wave people away when I'm talking to somebody, unless the conversation is very personal, or very deep and intense, or I know that the person I'm talking to wants to keep it private. I'll just let friends drift in, and eventually drop back into listening mode or drift away. And even with a private conversation, some people have priority: my family, for example, or anyone with an urgent message or that I urgently need to speak to.

Knowing what happens to me in a crowd, though, it might be better if I waved people away more often. Or get better at moving the conversation to someplace more private.

My third problem is that I'm shy, especially with people I don't know. This means that I have trouble starting a conversation in the first place.

These days I'll usually try to talk to the person next to me in an airplane, at a table during a conference, standing in line... Context often provides an opening: "how's the con going for you?" is always a good one. But if they don't keep it going, I'll just go back to whatever I brought to read. If all the other person does is answer my question, I won't be ready with a followup.

My usual mode of operation at parties or other gatherings, if I can't find someone to talk to, is to hang out on the edges of a small group and hope somebody notices me. This rarely works, for obvious reasons. Not sure what to do about that.

This is, however, probably the only area where I actually have some hope for improvement. I can change my behavior, even though it might be frightening or painful, if I know what I ought to change it to. As I've indicated above, I've already gotten better about trying to talk to the people next to me, and I'll take suggestions on other possible techniques. I can't change my problems with crosstalk and attention, and I really don't want to become the kind of person who can seize control of (i.e. hog) a conversation. I'd like to get better at dealing with the hogs I occasionally encounter on panels at cons, but I'm not sure how to go about that, either.

A related, though perhaps less serious, problem is not knowing when a conversation is over. Have I mentioned that I don't read body language very well? I have trouble telling whether there's something else you wanted to say. And often I'll say something to Colleen while I'm on my way to do something unrelated, and get completely derailed if she actually says something in reply. It just doesn't occur to me sometimes that I might have started a conversation by accident.

A slightly more general problem that I've mentioned in connection with phone conversations is that my memory for anything that I've heard, as opposed to read, is practically nonexistant. That book you told me I ought to read? That subject you asked me never to talk about in your presence? That greeting you wanted me to pass on to Colleen? I've probably forgotten it, unless you've allowed me time to write it down. If I remember, I'll garble it -- possibly very badly -- unless I've had a chance to read it back to you to make sure I've gotten it right. I know that some people have a very exact memory for conversation, and find this totally incomprehensible. Deal with it.

I do have a couple of non-problems. (Whether they're actually advantages or not is an open question; it probably depends on who I'm talking to.) The main one is that I'm comfortable with silence.

To some extent I've gotten that way out of necessity: I often have to pause to compose what I'm going to say next, and I often run out of things to say altogether. Most people seem to feel that they have to jump in and fill such a gap in the conversation immediately. I don't. If neither of us has anything to say at some point, I'm OK with waiting for a while.

This even works on the phone, by the way.

Another non-problem is that I have very few limits on where or how deep a conversation can go. Something that started out as pleasant chatter about the cuisine in the hotel restaurant could very well pass through filk music, theoretical physics, cosmology, religion, golden-age science fiction, and early 20th Century poetry on its way to life, love, loss, grieving and consolation. I don't compartmentalize my life the way some people do, and there are very few aspects of it I won't talk about, even to comparative strangers. So much of it is in my blog, my songs, scattered around my archived Usenet posts, that I have very little left to be secretive about.

I don't want to take a conversation to places you don't want to go, but you'll have to steer me away yourself. Possibly more than once: I believe I mentioned that my verbal memory is unreliable. And use words; I also don't read body language very well, and won't be able to tell whether something I've said makes you uncomfortable unless you tell me. I'll uaually try to deflect you in turn from the things that simply don't interest me (most sports, for example), or that contain obvious landmines (fanish politics). Other than that I'm quite prepared to follow you down whatever rabbit-hole you want to dive into.

You'll also have to tell me, explicitly and possibly more than once, what parts of what you're telling me have to be considered confidential. I'm OK with non-disclosure agreements and trade secrets, but there's a reason why I prefer to work with open source software, and it applies to my personal life as well. This applies in spades if there's something you don't want me to share with Colleen.

A final non-problem: I'm occasionally known for going into "Middle-Sized Bear mode". There will be another post on this soon, but for now I'll just say that some people seem to find me comforting to be around, even if I don't have much to say. (There's probably no truth to the rumor that this is why Colleen married me; I think she just wanted someone to scratch her back.)

And finally, an invitation. If you spot me at a convention, I'm always up for a good conversation unless I'm horribly busy with something. Just grab my attention, if you can -- a hug usually works.

My long-distance communication style has changed quite a lot over the last few months; this post is basically a status report. This is the first of a series of three River posts about communication and conversation: the other two will be titled "Talking with you" and "Crosstalk".

Just to say hello:

The main change over the last few months is that I've come to welcome simple social contact and brief, casual conversation -- along the lines of meeting in the hallway at work or at a con. I occasionally even initiate such contact, at least on IM. I expect that, overdone even a little, it would be a problem, but that hasn't happened so far.

When you get down to it, my main form of casual contact these days is LJ comments. They have the editability and asynchrony of email, they're as quick and casual to dash off as IM, and they're always about something, so there's an excuse to write.

That's always been my biggest problem: starting a conversation. I'm delighted to get the occasional greeting out of the blue -- it happens so rarely that it sometimes feels like a major event. But I hardly ever send one, in part because the results have not always been all that positive, but mostly because I rarely feel that I have something to say to any one person in particular. Usually I don't have an audience in mind, so I'll post it and sometimes get a handful of replies.

The idea that there may be one or two people who might actually call me even if they have nothing in particular to say beyond "Hello" is, at this point, pure fantasy. The idea that there might be a few people out there (besides my mother) who wouldn't mind hearing from me even if I have nothing in particular to say is still completely new and, I guess, a little frightening.