Dysfunctional Communication
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I believe that dysfunctional communication cuts productivity at least in half. It causes untold damage, not least because people anticipate it and have to work around it.
If humans and Vulcanians (the original term for who we now call Vulcans) were evenly matched in their technological progression, I think the Vulcanians would progress much faster due to simply giving straight answers to simple questions.
So this topic is to list various forms of dysfunctional communication.
Here's my first:
"If you ask him for the time, he'll tell you how to build a watch, and his directions will be wrong."
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Discourse
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@boomzilla But how would we find our enemies without discourse?
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@jinpa by swinging a cat?
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@boomzilla I don't know how swinging cats would help find enemies.
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@jinpa said in Dysfunctional Communication:
@boomzilla I don't know how swinging cats would help find enemies.
When you hear someone yelp from encountering the claws, you found an enemy!
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This must be a typical wife thing because I've never had that in the workplace⁰ but a fried has the same thing with his his wife:
[running around while talking, making random bits hard to hear] When you go to town, can you bring coffee please?
When I go to town I need to do what?
To tooown!What she repeats is infuckingvariably the part of the sentence I understood perfectly well and repeated to make it clear that I understood it. I've tried to react to acoustical problems with just a "WHUD?" to get her to repeat the whole sentence but it rarely works, usually its' still a partial repeat, obviously of the wrong part.
⁰ At least when my workplace wasn't at home
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+1
She also seems to interpret ambiguous sentences in the least probable way. Like an inverse Occam's Razor.
This is something I do for comedic purposes, but I always make it obvious with the tone of my voice, and I do not usually do it when the improbable interpretation is nevertheless plausible.
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@Zecc said in Dysfunctional Communication:
@LaoC
This is something I do for comedic purposes, but I always make it obvious with the tone of my voice, and not usually when the improbable interpretation is nevertheless plausible.do you though? do you really? because i've known several people who have said similar things, and all of them have a markedly less than 100% hit rate on making the change in tone of voice understood by the other party. most down around a 50% success rate.
so if they're having that poor luck getting others to differentiate sarcasm from reality by tone of voice... are you sure you're doing much better?
tone of voice markers like that are invariably fragile in communication, different cultural background on the part of the listener changes their meaning, struggling to pay attention to the words through a noisy environment or other hearing issues renders the tone unhelpful as it was lost when concentrating on the words, any sort of phone call will crush the tone down to be barely understandable.
so many problems with communication i've come across stem from one side assuming the other is hearing them perfectly, and often getting annoyed if their personal perception of the words does not appear to be what the other party received and/or intended.
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@accalia said in Dysfunctional Communication:
are you sure you're doing much better?
Yes? It's not like I miss her reactions to what I've said. And she's not as deadpan0 as I am; on the contrary.
Different backgrounds and noisy environments don't apply here.
0 By which I mean I'm usually monotonous when talking seriously, which makes my non-seriousness ever more apparent.
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@accalia said in Dysfunctional Communication:
all of them have a markedly less than 100% hit rate on making the change in tone of voice understood by the other party. most down around a 50% success rate.
IME there's also some people who seem to be fundamentally incapable of understanding sarcasm; the entire notion of someone saying something that isn't meant to be taken 100% literally is utterly inconceivable to them, and they'll get hopelessly confused by it.
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@ixvedeusi BEEP BOOP
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@ixvedeusi said in Dysfunctional Communication:
IME there's also some people who seem to be fundamentally incapable of understanding sarcasm
TIL
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@dkf have encountered. And I don’t mean the people who just don’t pick it up from text-only post content.
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