Conversational Compression Loss

All that talks (even if great) cant give

Imagine you are at a party and you find someone who did something that you haven’t done before. E.g. Surfing. So you ask, “what was it like to surf?”

What happens in response to this question is very interesting. The answerer first mentions something smart and impressive, but often generic

“It was terrific. Riding waves smoothly is so hard but so much fun.”

You are intrigued, but you know there might be some performative aspect to the answer, just because the speaker may want to impress. So you prod deeper and ask more about what’s bad, and you get

“Paddling back takes a lot of energy, waves aren’t so fun when they hit you on face.”

You asked 10 other surfers the same question and you got a good summary of what are the good and bad parts about surfing.

The problem however is, this is terribly incomplete.

The reason the second category exist is that it’s often tough to articulate the exact experience (and not just because people don’t want to). There were so many things that were going on -

you were waiting for the wave, made a false start, thought of stopping in between, but went ahead, managed to barely stand up, kept wondering if your balance is right, slowly shifting your back leg a bit back, but front leg still feels a bit front. You hope it’s not, but alas, you’re right and the board seems nosedives. You try to salvage by going back, but too late. All of these, in just split seconds.

And this is, again, just a snippet of what actually happened. Add that across the full experience and you have a lot of inexplicable feelings / thoughts.

You may conclude surfing is hard, but only after getting the full experience, you’ll know how hard it is.

The consequences of these are immense.

Conversations are ultimately a poor substitute for experience. Everyone knows this, but very few people take it seriously. People still make a lot of decisions about an experience based on conversations with people.

10 of my close friends have told me X is very hard and has a lot of pain. I don’t think it’s for me.

10 of my close friends have told me Y is just amazing. I just have to do it.

X, Y can be anything, from starting up to having kids, surfing to meditating, etc.

A better way to look about this is through the lens of priors and posteriors.

Before the experiences, everything you consume, be it blogs or videos or conversations, have to be treated as priors. They help you get a picture but you should be always cognizant that it’s an incomplete picture, in the absence of new information.

These priors shouldn’t be used to judge the whole experience beforehand, but instead, help you approach the experience better. E.g. If multiple people have told you paddling takes a lot of time and energy, you train yourself well before going to surf.

But once you enter the experience, the feelings and thoughts in that moment take over. They help you really define the experience. All those feelings and thoughts, while often ephemeral, are your own. These are the posteriors you update after your experience.

Even after this updation, the picture won’t be complete, as there will be an element of time to it (i.e. Surfing a second time will be different than the first one, even if in very small ways). But after each experience, the vestiges of those experiences stay with you, some articulated, but most, often not.

You know this already. Just keep this in mind when you are changing your behaviour based on just conversations.