TheOtherDave comments on How is your mind different from everyone else's? - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 05 December 2011 08:38AM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 05 December 2011 07:50:59PM 3 points [-]

I came to the conclusion that repetition is valuable by looking at how often, after giving a presentation in which I convey certain facts, the audience subsequently follows up in ways that make it clear that they neither retained the facts nor the awareness that I'd presented those facts. When I started making a point of repeating my key points several times during a presentation, tying it back to multiple different topics and multiple different questions, the incidence of that sort of followup question dropped.

That said, I haven't done a careful study, and I could easily be misattributing the result to the wrong cause. For that matter, I could easily be perceiving a result that isn't actually there. Humans make those sorts of errors all the time.

I agree that a lot of repetition is nervousness, and that a lot of it is an attempt to grab floor-time. (I'm not sure I'd call the latter nonstrategic.)

I also think a lot of repetition is an attempt to maintain control of the attention of the group. (As in:
A: "X"
B: "Y"
C: "NOT(Y)"
A: "X."