I really like the idea of there being a cultural norm in the rationalist community about this. To facilitate that, I feel like it’d be helpful if there were a single word or phrase to describe the idea.
Maybe something like, “backflowing”? The idea being that the members of the conversation were previously in a flow and by addressing a new member it interrupts that flow.
From there, if a newcomer interrupts a high context conversation you can point to the idea of backflowing, and maybe that’s less awkward than a longer-winded explanation.
Actually, when I try to think about how that looks in practice it doesn’t seem true: “Hey, you’re actually doing something called backflowing right now that we have a norm against.” It seems that it might be better for the word to describe the original conversation, not the newcomer. So that it’s more of“we’re in this delicate state right now” not “you’re doing something wrong”.
Maybe we could use the phrase “high up the stack”, in reference to a call stack in programming. I think that’s a decent analogy for what a high context conversation is. You start discussing point A but in order to address that you have to figure out point B, but to address that you have to figure out point C, and then from there you can pop C off the stack and return to B. The context in this example could be described pretty well by a stack. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it seems good enough to be useful.
And from there, I guess the comment to the newcomer would be “Hey, we’re actually ‘high up the stack’ in our conversation right now.” But again, that doesn’t actually seem so useful in practice. It’s only useful if they already are familiar with the idea then a quick mention of “high context conversation” would be all you need and they’d understand. And “high up the stack” doesn’t actually seem like an improvement to “high context conversation”.
So I think I’m left feeling like the big benefit to a word/phrase is because it can make concepts stick more easily. For example, “Socratic grilling” is an idea that I’ve been aware of for a while, but giving it a name helped things click for me. Another example that comes to mind is “cached thoughts”. I think “high context conversations” might be enough though.
I really like the idea of there being a cultural norm in the rationalist community about this. To facilitate that, I feel like it’d be helpful if there were a single word or phrase to describe the idea.
Maybe something like, “backflowing”? The idea being that the members of the conversation were previously in a flow and by addressing a new member it interrupts that flow.
From there, if a newcomer interrupts a high context conversation you can point to the idea of backflowing, and maybe that’s less awkward than a longer-winded explanation.
Actually, when I try to think about how that looks in practice it doesn’t seem true: “Hey, you’re actually doing something called backflowing right now that we have a norm against.” It seems that it might be better for the word to describe the original conversation, not the newcomer. So that it’s more of “we’re in this delicate state right now” not “you’re doing something wrong”.
Maybe we could use the phrase “high up the stack”, in reference to a call stack in programming. I think that’s a decent analogy for what a high context conversation is. You start discussing point A but in order to address that you have to figure out point B, but to address that you have to figure out point C, and then from there you can pop C off the stack and return to B. The context in this example could be described pretty well by a stack. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it seems good enough to be useful.
And from there, I guess the comment to the newcomer would be “Hey, we’re actually ‘high up the stack’ in our conversation right now.” But again, that doesn’t actually seem so useful in practice. It’s only useful if they already are familiar with the idea then a quick mention of “high context conversation” would be all you need and they’d understand. And “high up the stack” doesn’t actually seem like an improvement to “high context conversation”.
So I think I’m left feeling like the big benefit to a word/phrase is because it can make concepts stick more easily. For example, “Socratic grilling” is an idea that I’ve been aware of for a while, but giving it a name helped things click for me. Another example that comes to mind is “cached thoughts”. I think “high context conversations” might be enough though.