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Comment by alcover | Hacker News Reader

Rude interrupt has been taking a definite toll on me. Many people do this and I can't take it anymore. It's offensive and wasteful.

I talk very fast, shortly, and pack my sentences with information. So it's not like I waste people's time with complacent drooling. I don't. But still, those people will cover me mid-sentence with their yapping so that none of us gets the rest of both streams.

Why ?? Someone suggested I make people feel insecure. I don't know.

It gets me to the point of near acting-out. As if we were walking together and you would repeatedly - voluntarily - step on my foot ? And I'm supposed to go along with this ?

Do you suffer from this, and how do you deal with it ?

Thank you for reading my torment blog.

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> As if we were walking together and you would repeatedly - voluntarily - step on my foot ?

I’m not a witness to your conversations. Take this with a grain of salt.

There’s a certain amount of “floor time” you get in a conversation before somebody else gets a turn. The right amount is going to be different depending on the individual people talking, their cultural backgrounds, and the nature of the conversation. If you try packing your sentences more densely full of information, then it’s natural that the amount of time you speak would be correspondingly shorter.

And no, this does not mean that other people need to compete with your level of density, or that they need to say things which are constructive to the conversation. Other people may simply want a chance to participate in the conversation as a speaker.

If we go with the metaphor about walking together—suppose we are in a museum, and you keep running ahead to the next room in the museum before I am finished looking at this room. If you like walking through museums quickly so you can see more pieces, and I like walking through museums slowly so I can spend more time looking at each piece, then we are going to have to come up with some kind of compromise.

If we go with a different metaphor, imagine that you are playing chess. You do not get to make extra moves just because you are faster. Imagine you play chess twice as fast as I do, and every time I make a move, you make two moves.

Again, I’m not a participant in your conversations, so this is conjecture and may not reflect reality.

>I talk very fast, shortly, and pack my sentences with information.

As a listener, I find the people easiest to listen to are those who speak slowly and concisely.

Fast speech is harder to understand than slow speech, especially depending on the speaker's accent and vocabulary. In particular, speaking slowly is a skill that people who hope to be intellectual must learn.

Short speech is not the same as concise speech, because short speech might be missing critical information that the speaker would know but the listener would not without conveyance. Concise speech, by contrast, is speech that is short by virtue of removing all unnecessary expressions.

"Packed" speech is the opposite of concise speech, because the listener must break down your speech in order to understand it. A proper paragraph of 1 to 3 sentences in large type is easier to grasp than a "packed" paragraph of 10 to 20 sentences in small type, to put it in literary terms.

Effective communication is about conveying information in a way the listener will understand. If your listeners interrupt you in general, that might mean you need to step back and adjust how you speak.

Have you considered that

> I talk very fast, shortly, and pack my sentences with information

might mean some people find it quite difficult to listen to you? And perhaps "need" to interrupt in order to clarify some of that packed information, or just because the torrent is overwhelming?

I get you, but it's not that. I don't torrent. My bursts are short and in case they would take longer I'd have no problem with stopping as soon as the person signals a need with "wait!.." or "Ok, I get it" or a gesture. I long for dense conversations and so am totally fine with constructive interrupts.

No, those people jam my sentence mid-way and it's awful and turns the convo into a fight for the choir.

> I get you, but it's not that. I don't torrent. My bursts are short…

Are you sure? This may not be as true as you think it is, in my experience.

I have ADHD, so tend to talk fast, excitedly, and pack my sentences full of info. I have found, through experience, that intentionally slowing down and explaining a little more goes a long way toward understanding and productive discourse.

ADHD people, in particular, often see connections where neurotypical people don’t; making those connective leaps explicit is often extremely helpful in that context, but it’s easy to assume that something obvious to you is obvious to someone else, even when it usually isn’t.

Some people would see their signalling of understanding difficulty as weakness. Regardless, I suspect interruption almost always indicates that the listener simply isn't gaining value from what I'm saying, for whatever reason.

> I long for dense conversations

There are at least two ways to interpret this, and neither of them sound pleasant to me. I say this as someone who enjoys meeting and talking with new people, whether engaging in small talk or more deeper topics.

I’d kind of like to ask one of two things: a) what do you think about “small talk”? b) do you have some example in mind where someone recently interrupted your sentence you think is perfectly normal and informative? If you can write a quick script, using as many phrases as possible from the situation you remember, including the topic, I bet you could get a free, informative, constructive critique.

Perhaps it's the nature of your bursts that make other feel they need to interrupt, lest they fail to get a word in edgewise: a fire hose of information tends to overwhelm people.

Also, if your audience isn't following you, they may want to interrupt simply to get things back on track. I've seen this happen where devs may be saying things that are technically correct, but the (usually non-devs) just don't follow and start interrupting. Heck, even I feel the need to interrupt devs when they are going on a tangent, even if that tangent is technically correct.

If I had to give one piece of conversational advice in general (not just for you but for anybody), it's to make short pauses on a regular basis, and immediately cede the floor to anybody who begins to interrupt. It will make them feel better that they can get their opinion heard, and you can always "steal" the floor again if necessary.

If talking very fast in a way packed with information isn't working, have you considered changing that? Perhaps it's very hard for others to deal with.

> Why ?? Someone suggested I make people feel insecure.

Forgive me for oversimplifying here, but the problem isn't that you make them feel insecure. The problem is that they are not your people. If possible, go find your people. They are out there.

There are some people who will misunderstand or forget the topic of the conversation and pack their sentences with tangenial, unncessary information.

The other person in the conversation must interrupt or ignore that, or there's risk that the time spent talking will be wasted on the tangent.

Sometimes what appears to be a tangent is actually an introduction to a previously unseen but crucial aspect, but that needs up front connection in order to hold the listener's attention.

Of course, this all only matters when the conversation has a specific goal.

I've worked on not interrupting people for my entire adult life. I get excited when listening to a conversation and want to start the ping pong of back and forth. This comes across as not listening and rude, when I actually am listening and am wanting to throw out prompts for more information. But, now I tend to just let a person go on.

To address your point, there could be a couple things going on. If you're packing so much information in short sentences people may be looking for spots to ask questions. Something I've been doing for awhile is to put almost awkwardly long pauses before moving on to another idea so people have the space to a) recognize the pause and b) time to jump in. If you're talking really fast, people may not see space to interject. If you don't want to do pauses, simply ask others for their thoughts.

Going by the diagram in the article, I hope you can see, that the approach in the Church of Strong Civility is better able to scale. As a devotee of the Church of Interruption, I hope you can recognize, that too many participants can lead to an overload of the main audio bus (too many interruptions). This reduces the efficiency of communication.

In the CoSC there are side channels (one for each participant), via which they can signal their desire to speak. Once the current speaker has finished, the participants who desire to speak can negotiate the next turn (e.g. by a rule that the person who has talked least may go first). This way, constant collisions on the main audio bus can be avoided.

>I talk very fast, shortly, and pack my sentences with information

I can't help wondering what this sounds like (in good way!).

I think I have a tendency to over-communicate ideas/thoughts (especially if it's a topic I am passionate about) and that people may find it exhausting to process that amount of information consistently.

My hunch is the interruption is so you don't go that deep into the topic, because maybe they haven't thought about it and don't want to sound uneducated or that they really don't care about the topic and want it to remain superficial.

Suggestion: reduce your information flow by 2/3.

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