Human Communication and Data Transmission

[EyeSeeCold]

Communicating with other humans is practically a fundamental aspect of life. So at some time or another, one has experienced the situation of trying to relay an idea to other people, whether it was successful or ineffectual. It's clear that the factors of successful communication involve things such as common language and background, similar ways of thinking, capacity of intellect and understanding, attentiveness, and willingness to engage.

Not to overlook the complexity of communication itself, but it seems communication between humans can be insightfully understood through the context of data transmission. In passing information to others, there is for example, data loss, latency, compression, and firewalls.

Data loss

Or misunderstanding. The general deterioration of communication between humans happens due to misunderstanding of information. High latency, compression, and firewalls are some ways data loss can occur.​

Firewalls

Or attitudes. Attitudes are most apparent, negatively, in highly intolerant people, such as the extremists found in fundamentalist religions or exclusive and prejudiced societies. On the other hand, attitudes help protect one from malicious people influencing the minds of others. Attitudes are a matter of orientation: the more open-minded you are, the more vulnerable to manipulation(yet accepting), the more narrow-minded, the more secure(yet intolerant). Successful communication involves the mutual adjusting of attitudes in order to be reasonably open to information and the message people are trying to get across.​

Latency

Or responsiveness. For any number of specific reasons, how responsive people are will fluctuate in quality. Most generally this is due to interest, ability to understand, wakefulness, availability, and ability to verbalize one's thoughts. Periods of low latency can be experienced between two or more people who are engaged in a captivating discussion, are highly compatible, or are highly desirous of each other's company. Periods of high latency can be found between people where one or more persons are not interested so much in their communication, or have difficulty understanding or verbalizing. Latency is symptomatic, thus communication can be improved by identifying and addressing the specific causes.​

Compression

Or accommodation. Information is compressed at varying levels to accommodate the setting and audience. While an idea is able to be effectively conveyed under compression, for some topics compression hinders full appreciation and understanding. In the former, parents accommodate for their children in discussing lessons of life, in the latter, similar minds speak of things without "dumbing them down". Uncompressed information being relayed to someone who cannot process it all however, can be overwhelming, and would be just as unhelpful and useless. Appropriate accommodation then is one aspect of successful communication.​

The extended analogy may be unnecessary, but I think it provides a helpful bridge into the cognitive psychology and science of humans and can be applied to typology.

 

[scorpiomover]

I like your ideas about humans using cognitive Firewalls. It does seem like a lot of the time, people will readily accept ideas that fit certain value-patterns using certain jargon. Use other jargon, or other values, and they seem to interpret the statements as if they were said by another person that fits a stereotype, like they've not recognised the communication protocol, and just dumped it into the HTML browser port, even though it sounds like garbage there.

I also like the idea about communicative compression. I find that different MBTI types use different compression systems, and usually behave as if their compression system isn't being used, when you are using yours.

Not sure entirely yet. Need to give it more testing. But it sounds like it has the potential to be a very good descriptor of human communications, and thus has the potential to be really useful.

 

[rattymat]

I would also add compiling/decompiling. Which would basically correlate as higher level languages (abstracted) translated into assembly language and machine code being similar to humans translating stimulus such as other human's communicating into somewhat subjectively defined layers of conceptual abstraction down to associated experiential memory, and into the associated physical electrochemical impulses.