NancyLebovitz comments on Mental Metadata - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Alicorn 30 March 2011 03:07AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 March 2011 04:22:29PM 1 point [-]

Personal experience. I tend to like hearing less detail than people want to give, and it's difficult to get them to summarize.

People don't generally ask me to change my detail level-- I don't know whether I'm in a sweet spot, the tolerable range, or (as I strongly suspect) most people are much more inhibited about asking for a different detail level than I am.

Comment author: handoflixue 30 March 2011 08:33:05PM 2 points [-]

If you ever figure out any tricks to get others to change, I'd be interested - I run in to the same problem :)

Conversely, I do get a fair number of requests to change my own detail level: I tend to strongly encourage people to ask for elaboration as needed, so I do get a fair number of "requests for additional detail". And occasionally I'll have someone cut me off for having answered a question they didn't intend (i.e. "I meant, what color is it?"). I've found demonstrating positive/happy body language in these situations, and verbally reinforcing that I like this, has made people do that more often.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 March 2011 04:41:34PM 0 points [-]

It may also be a specific, rather than a general inhibition: if someone responded to me in a way that made me believe they wanted less detail than I was providing, I would not be inclined to ask them for more details about their answers even if I wanted more information than that in general.