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Comment by dustinls | Hacker News Reader

This falls apart when you have an interrupter who thinks they know everything, but really doesn't have a clue.

They don't let you explain critical detail about something because 'they got it they got it' and when they inevitably screw up its your fault for not explaining it right.

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> thinks they know everything, but really doesn't have a clue

This is a somewhat separate problem from whether someone is an interrupter or not, though conversational style can have an influence on when miscommunication is likely to happen.

> They don't let you explain critical detail about something because 'they got it they got it'

Well-meaning non-interrupters who “think they know everything but really don’t have a clue” can just as easily miss critical details, when the speaker wrongly assumes they understand something but never stops to verify that. At least the interrupter typically makes their ignorance obvious, giving others a chance to prepare some response/workaround.

* * *

In my experience it is entirely possible for both interrupters and non-interrupters to be (or not be) empathetic, perceptive, conscientious, detail-oriented, knowledgeable, humble, presumptuous, judgmental, aggressive, ...

It seems like it would be a separate problem, but in my experience, the two are linked. The person who is interrupting is interrupting because they're highly confident in their own viewpoint. We like to think that confidence must necessarily be correlated with how true our view is, but that isn't the case. There are some people who are equally confident of all of their views, no matter how much or how little evidence they have for those views. It's those people who interrupt, even though they don't have a clue.

You're describing a barker not an interrupter. A barker will insist on continuing their own rant to their own end, so they cannot be corrected. The interrupter will let themselves be interrupted in turn, so they can always be corrected.

^ This. In my family, the quickest way to find out if you're wrong is to assert something that's false. It may not surprise you to find out that both of my parents were once programmers.

Or interrupters who interrupt not to complete your thought, but to say whatever they don't want to wait their turn to say.

That seems to fall under "Barkers"

The distinction between interrupters and barkers is more of a slippery slope than a sharp divide.

You could say that about the distinctions between most groups of humans. There's almost always overlap/normal distribution

This doesn't fall apart, as they're providing feedback about exactly how they're misunderstanding you.

I have a colleague who regularly interrupts me to say the complete opposite of what I want to say. I'm, of course, in the church of strong civility, so I always continue after the rude interruption. You'll often hear something like:

"We're struggling to meet our deadlines so I think we should---"

"Rewrite the project."

"---Avoid rewrites and do small reactors."

I like your approach and in general I do the same. But some interrupters just never learn.

So in some cases when the interrupter keeps interrupting I simply ask him/her: "Can I finish my sentence?" In this case whatever the interrupter does it's too late for him, because it becomes obvious that his way of communication is not welcome and he was not even aware of this fact (i.e. he lacks self-awareness), and learning self-awareness in a group setting this way makes wonders.

Also I guess you make small refactors instead of reactors :)

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