This is a special post for quick takes by Biff Wiff. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Communication culture is important. It is a high level action that, if improved, has lots of nice downstream benefits.
One aspect of communication culture to address is interruption. What should the expectations be about interruption? Do you always wait for the other person to finish talking before you can start talking? Are you allowed to interrupt if it seems worthwhile? What determines whether an interruption is worthwhile? Where is the threshold for how worthwhile an interruption needs to be in order for it to be justified?
I feel like there are various conversations I end up in that get derailed by too many interruptions. And I've seen it happen in many contexts: at work, with my family, with my friends, at rationalist meetups. This seems important.
I'm not sure what the answers are for how to deal with "interruption culture", but it seems like something worth discussing. I am seeing this post from 12 years ago, but other than that, I don't really see much discussion here on LessWrong. I also don't really recall much discussion of the topic elsewhere, like on other blogs or in academia.
My hunch is that there are probably a handful of archetypes, and different archetypes will work better for different conversations. It seems like it'd be helpful if we kinda outlined what these archetypes are, what the pros and cons are, and when each tends to work best (depends on the people involved, the conversation topic, the emotions, etc). From there, especially if these archetypes were "in the water" and became common knowledge (eg. in our community), then I can envision people saying "hey, do you guys mind if we take archetype A here?" or "hey, I feel like we're using archetype C right now and it's not working well, can we switch to B?".
Another hunch I have is that low levels of interruption is a low risk option. I feel like I see conversations get derailed and ruined when there are high levels of interruption, but with low levels of interruption, I don't really recall that happening. I guess the exception is if one person rambles chaotically; in that case it seems worth being pragmatic and choosing to interrupt them. So with that said, in the absence of better norms and stuff here, I think it usually makes sense to default to low levels of interruption.
Also consider that it might be more productive to communicate asynchronously via text!
I agree that interrupting is an art. I love this statement in particular:
many situations (in fact almost all) won't have time for everyone to say everything they'd like to have heard, so competition is tempting and prevalent
I feel that I have a handle on when to interrupt in a two-person conversation, but the dynamics of interrupting differ:
as the number of participants increases (there's a phase shift at three, and then another one at six or seven as people typically don't like to speak less than one fifth of the time);
as the conversation become... (read more)