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Rahul Prabhakar's avatar

community-seekers end most text messages with "lol"

truth-seekers don't

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Taylor Zapolsky's avatar

I’m interested in your sentence “The goal of communication is to convey information content; the output is the point” as applied to truth-seekers, because I think it’s reductionist of the information contained beyond the direct meaning of the words. Things like tone, word choice, and timing (highly valued by community-seekers, but supposedly not truth-seekers) communicate very valuable information that can make communication more efficient even in a fact-based argument. This information isn’t fully encoded by the words themselves but rather is largely latent. The content encoded by these things can be things like “I have studied this subject thoroughly and know my stuff, you don’t need to explain the basics”, “I am biased such that certain arguments are unlikely to convince me even if they’re true, you should try a different angle”, “I am poking at you to get a sense of your emotionality so I know what kind of conversation partner you will be and thus how I should recalibrate my approach going forward” (note the feedback loop in that last one). In my opinion, these things are absolutely real information and are not simply signals of connection.

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