2:20pm August 31, 2014

Reply to neurodiversitysci about the posts about language communication misunderstandings and stuff.

Okay, so I’m writing this as a new post because it is somehow too difficult for me to do it any other way.  Here is the post I am replying to:

The multitude of connotations of words is a huge problem!  Coming from the opposite side—I think in words as well as patterns—I’m very sensitive to the history and ideological background behind words.  Like you, I see people arguing about words all the time instead of about the experiences and ideas they think they’re talking about.  So sometimes, if I want to get across a meaning but I don’t want to imply everything that goes along with a particular word, I will talk around it: I’ll use a sentence or a paragraph to get across the exact idea I mean, which will often be like 90% similar to the word I’m trying to avoid.  (I’ve done this with the word “privilege,” with audiences who were more likely to associate the word with “obnoxious SJW behavior” rather than “inequalities between people that are built into society.”).  It takes time and effort and thought, but it’s worth it to get my meaning across and avoid arguments about things I didn’t even say.  

This is a tangent, but—I’m not sure I fit into either side of your dichotomy between “thinking in patterns + not thinking in words” and “thinking in words/thinking in widgets.”  (Although, I imagine you’d expect there to be people who don’t fit).  When I’m thinking about my own life or other people’s, I immerse myself in the experience and see patterns in it. But those patterns automatically express themselves in words because I usually think in words.  Even though I think in words, I don’t do widgets, as far as I know. As I think you’ve pointed out, they can be inaccurate and even kind of scary—when people value their widgets over other people, for example.

Anyway, it sounds like making assumptions about what people are thinking based on the connotations of the words they use is an especially big problem for people with language disabilities.  But I think it affects everyone.  Most people just aren’t as aware of it.  Or, maybe people without language disabilities can adapt their language more to avoid these misunderstandings?

How can those of us who think in words learn how to see what you’re really trying to say, not just what it sounds like you’re saying?

Your tangent is the part that stands out to me.  Here are some things you should know about what I said:

I do not believe that there is any dichotomy between “thinking in patterns + not thinking in words” and “thinking in words + thinking in widgets”.

I am a person who naturally thinks in patterns and does not think in words.  Therefore, I talked about the fact that I think in patterns and do not think in words, most of the time.

The people I have run into the most trouble with are people who think in ideas (whether they are words or not) and widgets and ideologies.  Therefore, I wrote about people who think in widgets and ideas and ideologies.

I did not mention anyone else because nobody else was relevant to the post.  This does not mean that nobody else exists, or that I don’t know that anyone else exists.  It doesn’t mean that I don’t know there are people who think in both words and patterns or whatever the fuck I’m supposed to call it.  (I’m really nervous about calling it “patterns” because some people use that word to mean something along the lines of “formal logic”, and that’s not what I mean, at all.)  It doesn’t mean that I don’t know there are people who think in words who don’t use widgets.  It just means that there were people I needed to talk about so I talked about them, and there were people I didn’t need to talk about so I didn’t talk about them.

As for your question, I have no idea how to answer it.  I don’t think that people who think in words are the only people who misunderstand what I write in this way, for one thing.  And I have no idea how to prevent the misunderstandings, other than constantly pointing out to people that the misunderstandings are likely to occur.  Which is what I tried to do, in writing those posts, to begin with, because I was getting more and more frustrated with situations like that.

I know that people hate it when I bring up a problem but don’t have a solution, but I really don’t have a solution.

The biggest thing, to me, isn’t so much that people misunderstand things in the first place.  It’s that they persist in misunderstanding them even after I have explained what I really mean.  So maybe that’s the problem.  I’m not trying to prevent people from misunderstanding me.  I’m asking for people to respect it when I say “No, that’s not what I meant, I actually meant something entirely different.”

So like, if you insist I’m pro-life because I called a fetus a baby.  And I say I’m pro-choice.  And you keep insisting that I’m pro-life because pro-choice people are not supposed to call fetuses babies.  Then I’m going to start getting really pissed off.  

I mean, I think it’s really weird for people to make that particular mistake to begin with.  If I’ve already stated that I’m pro-choice, then I think they really have no excuse for thinking I’m anything but pro-choice no matter what I call a fetus.

But if I haven’t said I’m pro-choice, and they make that mistake, it’s just a mistake.  But if they say I’m pro-life, and I say “No, I’m pro-choice, actually,” and they persist in arguing with me about it and insist that I’m pro-life and lying about it, then I start to get really pissed off.  Because then it’s gone beyond just a misunderstanding.

So that’s really the sort of situation that drives me to write posts like that, and to repeat them over and over and over again as often as I possibly can.

It’s the situation where people want the misunderstanding to stay misunderstood.  They want me to believe something I don’t believe, and they want the words I use to be proof that I believe whatever that thing is.  And so they treat me like I’m a liar.  And that pisses me off to no end.  Like why would I lie about what I believe, and why would I insist in explaining what I really believe, over and over, if I were really lying?  Like why would that even happen in the first place?  And why are some people so happy to assume it is what’s happening?

So basically, the best way to deal with these misunderstandings isn’t to prevent them to begin with.  I don’t think that’s possible.  It’s to believe people when we say things like “No, that’s just how the words I used came off, but it’s not really what I meant.”

Unfortunately, I think there’s another element to this that plays into things.  And that is, not everyone goes into a conversation in order to have a conversation.

Some people go into a conversation looking for an argument to win.

Some people go into a conversation without good faith.

Some people go into a conversation without assuming good faith on the part of the other person.

Some people go into a conversation in order to assert their dominance over the other person.

Some people treat conversations as a game where you have a winner and a loser, and they want to be the winner, no matter what the cost to the other person, no matter what the cost to the truth.

So a lot of people are in conversations for reasons other than wanting to know the truth.  And a lot of people actively don’t want to know the truth, if the truth would interfere with their ability to ‘win’.

I had a really frustrating conversation with a guy, years ago.  He kept insisting to me that he knew what I was thinking, about a wide range of topics.  And when I told him that actually, he was making assumptions based on the language I used, he exploded at me like… way out of proportion to anything I’d said.  And what he said was:

“You are always using language problems as an excuse to get out of being accountable for what you say!”  And it only escalated from there, I won’t bore you with the details.

But basically, people with this kind of language problems rely heavily on the assumption of good faith.  If people refuse to believe that we actually have language problems.  If people refuse to believe that our language problems are resulting in miscommunication.  If people believe that we are using our language problems to “get out of” something.  Any of those things, if they happen, mean that any chance for being understood in the context of that conversation, is totally dead.  And sometimes that’s not a big deal, but sometimes it’s a huge deal, depending on who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about.

So the most important thing is to believe someone.  Like… yes, there are manipulative people out there.  I know there are.  And I’ve even known people who claim to have “communication problems” as a means of bullying people.  (Being bullied by such people when you have real communication problems that are playing into the bullying experience in other ways, is a horrible experience.)  But most people who say “I didn’t mean that, I actually meant this…” are for real.  And most people who say that, badly need people to believe us, if we are to participate in communication on an equal playing field at all.

I can see one situation where this could be really difficult, though.  And that is where you are basically, in an argument with the other person.  And it would be so much easier if they really believed what you thought they believed to begin with.  So you’re tempted to go on believing it anyway, regardless of what they say, because it’s simply easier.  Because if they believe what you thought they believed, then you win the argument, because what you thought they believed was something easily proven wrong.  And when you’re in that argument mode, I can see why it would be difficult, and for some people impossible, to believe someone who said “No, that’s not what I meant.”  Because it’s damn inconvenient to have to start an argument all over again, working to understand what the other person was saying, especially if you disagree with them, or think you disagree with them.  And especially if their viewpoint is not one you’ve ever heard of before, but it sounds just enough like one you’ve heard of, that it’d just be really simpler, if it were the one you’d heard of.  And life would just be easier.

And I think that’s one of the situations where I run into this the most.  And where that guy’s exasperation with me came from — he wanted me to be wrong, he wanted to be able to tell me how and why I was wrong, and he resented me telling him that I didn’t actually think what he thought I was thinking.  This doesn’t excuse the way he treated me, at all — he became very nasty and it escalated into bullying in the end.  But I do think that’s where his weird ideas about “accountability” came from.  (To him, “accountability” meant that I had to take responsibility for meaning whatever he thought I meant, regardless of whether it ever was what I meant in the first place.  And he got very nasty with some people who tried to politely explain my language problems to him, because he was trying to get me to explain things that I was incapable of explaining, and then getting angry with me when I told him I couldn’t explain.)

Anyway… yeah.  So it’s pretty simple:  When someone says “I didn’t mean that, I meant something else,” believe them.  Believe them even if they can’t explain exactly what they did mean.  

Tl;dr:  Sometimes, people misunderstand what I mean.  They think that because of the words I used, I must mean something different than what I actually meant.  This is inevitable sometimes.  The problem comes in, when I say “that’s not what I meant,” and they don’t believe me.  People with language problems like mine (who may not show any obvious outward sign of language problems, until we outright state that something comes from a language problem) run into this situation a lot.  It’s important for people to believe us when we say we didn’t mean something.  The initial misunderstanding may be inevitable, but you can prevent further misunderstanding by believing us when we say “You’ve misunderstood me.”  Even when you really want to believe that we meant something else, and even when you can’t really imagine what else we could’ve meant.  But in order to be able to communicate effectively at all, we’re relying on you to believe us.

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