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NancyLebovitz comments on How is your mind different from everyone else's? - Less Wrong Discussion
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If I may ask: how old are you?
I used to have the same ability (and am still well above average) but it's lessened over the past 3 years or so. I've been trying to work out whether it's due to a) age (greater number of life experiences and/or memory naturally less good), b) studies (prioritising studied material over episodic memory), c) greater socialisation (I used to be fairly isolated, so it's possible that there were just fewer noteworthy things to remember), d) some other factor.
And relatedly: do you also have that sense of frustration when people keep repeating themselves over multiple conversations? It took me a long time to realise that they weren't doing it on purpose and that not everyone can remember what they've said to who in the past.
I can live with repetition over multiple conversations, but prefer it if the person will let me mention that I've heard and remember what they said.
What drives me crazy is the extent to which most people repeat themselves in the same conversation. I may not be doing anyone a favor by pointing this out-- but if you listen, you'll find that the real world sounds rather like Waiting for Godot, though the topics are more varied.
I have concluded professionally that I am far more effective when I repeat myself often in conversations: I get more evidence later that the information I was conveying actually gets across.
I have yet to decide whether it's because people mostly don't understand and/or forget what I've said, so repeating myself increases the odds of a particular message getting across, or because people understand repetition to be an indicator of importance, or for some other reason.
It frustrates me, but I try to do what works rather than what I think ought to work.
That's a good point. Do you have a way of telling whether what you're saying has registered, or do you use a heuristic that a certain number of repetitions is likely to work?
My impression is that a lot of repetition isn't strategic, it's nervousness (I think people are more likely to repeat themselves when they're looking for support and feel unsure of getting it) or making sure they get more time in the conversation.
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."
Looking back at this, it occurs to me that I may have misunderstood your question and thus answered a different one that you meant to ask. There are things that I take as real-time indications that what I've said has registered -- for example, being able to answer questions or to ask sensible ones -- and things that I take as indicators that it hasn't, such as asking questions I've already answered. When I'm talking to groups I often get neither, unless I've done enough prep to create exercises specifically intended to obtain them,
If the person you're talking to is distracted by another task or has a short attention span, they may appreciate repetition, for example if the person you're talking to is distracted by another task or has a short attention span. (I have accidentally sounded like this in LW comments before.)