February 3, 2002

• Overdosed on Me -

  
  

  I'm a lion, I'm a strawberry, I'm a bear with a rainbow on its chest and a fairy with a tattoo on her butt, I'm blue, I'm Introspective, I'm and experimenter.  I'm Alice in Wonderland, I'm either Galadriel or Celedon, I'm . . . finally tired of these quizzes.  Last night I surfed around the taking quiz after quiz after quiz.  (The messy results are in the blog below.)

  
  

  Finally I got thinking about why it's so fascinating to me what these tests say.  I've been intrigued since the first time I took the first communications class by the disconnect between what I think I'm saying and what other people think they heard.  When I'm talking to a "test" the results are discreet and easily calculated.  But, when real live human type people are on the other end of the message, there's no predicting how much of what I'm trying to say will get through.

  
  

  I try to be a good listener.  I ask questions to double check and see if what I heard was what you meant to say.  (Yes, this drives my husband nuts, but that's the price you pay for clarity.    I recognize that at least half the responsibility for your success in speaking to me, is mine as the listener.

  
  

  So having said that, I'm back now to the question of why people hear the message they hear and what it says about them and me.  One of the things that I've been fascinated with in the past is the idea of the "ladder of abstraction."  I've noticed that a great many of the communication gaffes I've experienced result from participants being perched on different rungs of the ladder.  I speak about a specific thing, and the hearer generalizes.  Or I'm trying to be general and the hearer starts dissecting the details of the metaphor.

  
  

  Metaphor is both the genius and the bane of communication.  Without metaphor we can't communicate at all regarding abstract concepts.  Try to explain numbers to a child and you'll see immediately what I mean.  Numbers don't mean anything without a metaphor "Let's take these apples . . . "  The more mathematical the scientific model, the more metaphorical the language that explains it.  That's how it is that I'm able to understand scientific ideas that are way beyond my ability to compute.

  
  

  But metaphor has gross limitations as well.  ((Now let me be clear.  In many ways, wormy is a bona fide genius.  I'm not being sarcastic in anyway to use that word.  On the other hand, he is my brother and has waived all rights regarding the content of our conversations.))  So, I had a conversation with my brother, the math genius, some time back where we were talking about statistical probability of a certain event.  The probability in question was something like 10 with a million zeros to 1 against the event ever occurring.  My brother, the math genius, kept saying, but that's not the same as saying that it "WON'T" occur, because in all those numbers, there is that one chance.

  
  

  But, that's the flaw of metaphor.  Those numbers don't mean that if you repeat the trial all those times the event WILL happen once.  Those numbers mean that EVERY time you repeat the trial the odds are 1 in 10 with a million zeros behind it against your success.  For most of the rest of us non-genius types, we'd just say that the odds of that event happening are zero.

  
  

  In math the separation between the formula and the metaphor is a clear distinction.  When I'm trying to convince my husband why HE has to be the person in charge of trash disposal in our household, the line isn't quite so clear.  Introduce the idea that things change or that time passes and you get a very messy business with lines that look like string art.

  
  

  And maybe that's the bottom line.  That's why communication isn't a science.  It's too chaotic for that.  Communicating is an art.  So all those silly quizzes have one thing right, an artfully drawn word picture.

  
  

  Oh, rats.  It's 9:00.  I'm due at church in 20 minutes.  My hair isn't dry and I'm the TEACHER this morning. 

  • 9:10 am
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