I subscribe to the view that to be a successful thinker you need accurate mental models of the surrounding world. With an accurate modeling apparatus you can predict how the world will react to what you do. This includes other humans.
I believe, perhaps mistakenly, that this is especially true when communicating with fellow human beings. Perhaps that's why I greatly prefer one-to-one chatting over the plenum.
On fostering understanding
For instance, to talk to somebody you need to know which language they speak. You can't speak Italian to many people in Denmark, or vice versa, and expect to be understood. If you're an expert in something, and know the other person is too, you can use technical terms or slang.
This is true to an extremely detailed level.
For instance, my coworkers are software developers, so obviously I can talk about editors and programming languages and libraries of software routines with all of them.
But not all of them are subject experts in the system I mostly work on. I can use terms from that system with those that are, but not someone who is not.
Even further, if I worked on something yesterday with a person, we can talk about that, using concepts we developed yesterday. I can't have that kind of conversation with anyone else in the world.
So in other words, to improve communications you need a better model of others - the root of misunderstandings is that we don't realize what others understand.
But the problem may not be you
Yet I had an epiphany during a sleepless bout this night that I have been missing something important.
It even seems really obvious in retrospect: When I say something, I use my internal modeling to predict whether my conversation partner will understand my intended meaning. When they reply, they use their model of me.
So the problem might not just be my model of them, but also their model of me. If they have the wrong model, we may be in trouble.
Now what kind of trouble?
As long as it is merely a problem of terminology, I can try to infer some meaning or ask follow up questions.
But even though I've been using terminology as an example, succesful communication goes much deeper - sometimes we can't really talk about something without a shared understanding of values.
For example, I have deeply held beliefs about grading being incorrect, that is assigning simple absolute scores to people's performance being essentially a bad practice. I've arrived at those over time, through observation and a developed set of arguments. Yet it is not something I can easily talk about.
Say someone actually loves grading. Perhaps they got good grades in school and are proud of that, or perhaps they enjoy sports - competition is, unfortunately in my opinion, an integral part of many sports, and many of those competitions are basically made by grading, assigning an absolute score for comparison purposes.
This in itself does not mean we can't talk. I don't generally have a problem with people liking something.
But if somebody loves grading, their base model of other people may be that they like grading too - why not? So their model of me may be that I love grading too. Oops.
So as we speak about it, I don't react in the right way. I might nod and signal that I understand, but I might not smile, I might only be slightly sympathetic, to basic appeals to how getting a good grade has felt, because I have tried long ago to separate those feelings from an overall judgement of the systemic view of grading. The person may claim that without grading they would not have had the motivation to do what they achieved, and I might not even nod there, because I would have second-level thoughts about what would have occured under a different motivational regime.
Yet, in the revelation of such deeply hold belief it would not be polite to trod out a long-winded argument of why grading might be incorrect.
As a consequence, what that person sees is that I don't react in the way they would expect from their model of me, for impenetrable reasons. That's annoying! We easily end up in conflict.
The other person's model of you is wrong
When communicating with other people there's the danger that you assume they are too much like yourself, so you get the model wrong.
But not even that, there's also the danger that they assume you are too much like them, and get their model of you wrong.
You can try to work on yourself to mitigate the former. But how do you mitigate the latter?
I guess you need to figure out some way of efficiently having them arrive at a better model. If they even bother, it may not be important to them.
Or perhaps try to work around their misconception. Pretend, act out the part, and then work from there.
Oh, well, at least my model of others now include the concept of their model of me. Only one recursion level deep at the moment, though.
