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Literalness/  /March 18, 2010

Literalness is commonplace in the geek subculture. One hears the tale of the man, an advanced AI programmer, who when his wife asked him to "beat some eggs," he "put them in a bowl and pounded them with my fist." Tyler Cowen's book about autism stresses that autistics (and I am still not convinced he doesn't simply mean "nerds") are known to be excessively literal, failing to understand jokes or figures of speech.

It occurs to me I don't think I've ever seen someone fail to understand figurative language because of a basic inability. Rather, geeks use it as a dodge: if you can't quickly respond to what someone's really saying, it remains easy to put the words together literally and answer that. You might get a laugh, and you can't be accused of being wrong!

Tonight in a technical talk, the speaker was asked, "Where do you stand now? Have you delivered on [these impressive promises]?" And the speaker said, "Right now, I'm in building E51. (pause) Room 315. (pause) Giving a talk about the work." He had us going for a moment. He almost got off the hook.

I'm very interested in the effort to understand what someone is really saying, rather than simply parse their words. It's easy to fend of critics, and indeed to make people feel small, by firing back their words with literal-mindedness. This way you claim the supposed high-ground of "correctness," and perhaps belittle them for speaking imprecisely. As I say, this is easy. Much more learning comes from stretching to see what the other is really getting at.

On similar lines, also see Conal Elliott's remarks on "Communication, curiosity and personal style."

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—posted by More Info at November 16, 2012 3:03 AM
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