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Humans generally use multiple channels of communication (speech, body language, etc.), not just one, and if someone says they can't read you, that doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to what you say, it means they are paying attention to more than that, and their is a perceived incongruence between the channels of communication.

And if it is someone who has been around you a lot, it means that the usual attunement through experience that adapts this multichannel communication to the quirks of particular individuals is still insufficient to resolve the incongruence.

This can be, among other things, connected to neurodivergence and lack of experience dealing with the particular form of neurodivergence beyond one individual.

> that doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to what you say

That was exactly what it meant.

> But people do get it wrong, and a girlfriend once confessed to me, somewhat exasperated: "I can't read you". To which I said: "You should try listening to me instead".

> Communication ≫ Reading

Mostly true, except sometimes people have a habit of saying one thing and doing another. Ultimately, actions are all that count in a relationship. Maybe that's what she was responding to?

Nope, the exact opposite.

I was and am extremely congruent between my actions and my words. This is not easy.

She ignored my words, tried and failed to "read" me instead and then was baffled when my actions were congruent with my words and not her reads.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A tremendous frustration at the inability to say what you mean and mean what you say has plagued me for years

I'm going to assume a hetero relationship, in which case your experience is a common one. Intersex communication is trickier than intrasex communication. The lived experience between men and women are different (duh). One way I have rationalized the experience of "women not saying what they mean" and "women not listening to what men say" that have some acceptance among women I'm acquainted with is women having the common experience of being considered pushy when communicating in ways that might be called "direct" if a man were to say the same things. So out of necessity, women may end up communicating indirectly and women may end up reading between the lines for reasons that are very easy to empathize with once considered.

Communication is so automatic for us that we may not even realize or understand how we communicate. So many people don't even take the time to understand their own thoughts, and understanding our own communication is many times harder because you have to inspect your own thoughts and be constantly building a model for how your communication is affecting the minds of the people around you. You had a specific idea for how communication works, just because you're both speaking the same language (e.g. English), in many ways, you might not have been speaking the same language since the ideas one person intended to transmit in good faith still did not end up in the mind of their audience.

I'll just point you back to my original post in this thread: yes, I used to even be very impressed by this, and also just accepted that there are two different but otherwise equal forms of communication.

I have since learned better. These two forms of communication definitely exist, for example Paul Watzlawick refers to them in axiom 4 of his 5 axioms of communication:

Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: This axiom refers back to the use of non-verbals and system strategy explained in the first axiom. It is mostly related to the digital content of communication within a relationship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi...

However, these are not co-equal. As I wrote, analogue communication can be very precise, you can often get very fine nuances across. But it is also always open to interpretation and hence error prone.

Precise but not accurate.

Since it is always open to interpretation, it simply cannot be used for verification, but that is exactly what some people use it for, especially women. This is understandable, but leads to catastrophe, because it is based on tuning in emotionally, so it fails horribly when the receiver is emotionally involved.

It's a common theme that otherwise really receptive and aware women fall for people who everyone else can clearly see are horrible. How? Reliance on analogue communication/"reading". It ain't reliable.

"However, analogue and digital in terms of communication have nothing to do with this physical definition of the term. When we communicate, analogue means that what is said is open to interpretation, it includes facial expressions and gestures and means non-verbal communication (e.g., rolled eyes, grimaces). Digital, on the other hand, means that what is said refers only to the factual content (e.g., the statement "the experimental report must be prepared") and leaves no room for interpretation."

https://www.iapm.net/en/blog/axioms-of-communication/#idx5

One of the areas where I learned to use analogue "communication" (receiving-side) is interpreting poems: you first leave yourself open, read the poem and let it induce feelings in you. That's the analogue part. Then you interpret those feelings the poem induced, and try to find out how the text did that.

If you just interpret poems "digitally", it probably won't work at all. If you just interpret it using your analogue receptors, your interpretation will be flat.

Combine both: that's the ticket!

But everyday communication is not poetry, and in particularly poetry is not a very good medium for verifying communication.

Anyway, I can highly recommend Watzlawick's writings.

I love some of the ideas you pointed out.

> Precise but not accurate. Since it is always open to interpretation, it simply cannot be used for verification

Agreed - the main way I try to manage this is to have a very coarse interpretation of statements - almost like a probability distribution of semantic meaning[1]. For example, if someone says "I like spaghetti", most of the probability distribution is located somewhere between "I tolerate spaghetti, but I won't say it that way in case you're about to serve me spaghetti" to "My favorite food is spaghetti, but only if it's served in the general style of my hometown".

I might be misinterpreting what you're saying right now, but we can continue to have this conversation, and I hope you're enjoying it even as I am enjoying it!

I generally agree with the idea that it cannot be used for verification, depending on what you precisely mean (my probably distribution of _your meaning_ has significant overlap with what I would agree with, but not entirely, though to be pedantic, it never entirely overlaps since there's always a chance of misinterpretation). I think that's why it's important to establish relationships and baselines of communications. Repeatedly successfully interpreting each other's words can provide a strong baseline for future communicative success. It's important not to project one relationship onto another, which we are _very_ prone to do. E.g. we should not project how we communicate with one sex to another sex, or necessarily even one person to another person!

[1] Maybe this is the next representation of semantic meaning that LLMs will use somewhere in its internals? Instead of a single embedding, it describes some probability distribution around an embedding with the greatest probability?

I suspect the people that read you best you are unaware they are doing it, may not be aware themselves.

I also have a partner that reads me poorly but I tend to read people, including her well. The key is that reading let's you see without letting you understand what you see. You never see the context which is among the reasons communication and listening are key.

Your comment is on point, but also, while I feel this article is kind of interesting, I fail to see it is relevant to Hacker News. I feel we are recently, often, going quite far off-topic.

Hmm...

Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This article would be appealing to someone who enjoys having basic human interactions explained to them in narrative form. I hope HN is broader than that.

It sort of works like pseudo-science and woo. It sounds impressive and even plausible but at the end of the day, it's asserting something unknowable as though it were truth, but is largely a product of projection.

Nevertheless, I can still read and appreciate it from _that_ perspective because it's always interesting to me to hear how others see the world.