Weavers and Concluders: Two communication styles (2021)
neuroclastic.com
neuroclastic.com
That applies to everyone. It is a rare and skillfull person who can get a new point into a conversation. Spend any time at all watching how political debates evolve and it is quite clear that pushing a conversation from equilibrium to equilibrium is remarkably challenging to do and often comes under heavy social attack. There are also hints coming out of the world of the therapists where there are a stunning number of people who don't know how to express their thoughts to save themselves.
At a personal level the standard neurotypical strategy is not to say anything new, or anything that hasn't been pre-vetted by something else with higher status. So the problem autistic people tend to run into is that they aren't repeating what someone influential said in a similar context and that is an inherently high-risk strategy. Careful framing can't possibly lead to a safety. Autistic people may act in socially inappropriate ways, but the mistake is to assume other people are good communicators. They aren't, they are subtly limited by fairly strict guiderails and can't express/process a lot of concepts independently from the herd.
Q. How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.
Frame setting is a tool of power. It’s probably the single greatest tool that exists for manipulating people. (Well, aside from offering people giant sums of money). It’s the tool of good therapists and psychopaths the world over. And I think the only way to build resilience against it is to learn the skill yourself.
(It also comes with a paired skill - which is to become consciously aware of the frame someone is speaking from, and being able to name and debate the frame itself.)
Robert Kegan has a developmental model that bunches people into one of 5 progressive stages of cognitive development. The 5th stage is (very loosely) characterised by this sort of thinking. They did a broad assessment of the population and found only about 5% of people assessed are in this stage.
The sad truth is that most people spend their whole lives subject to the frames that other people set for them. Speech from outside the frames you know is usually incomprehensible.
Although I don't really feel comfortable just agreeing with someone on HN, so I'll also just poke https://josephg.com/blog/why-i-am-no-longer-a-libertarian/ while I'm on the way through to stay in practice. The complaint against libertarianism could be made against any system. Note that through history the developed world generally just leaves poor nations to starve and fumble for example (well, that is a bit generous - we raided and pillaged them). On the spectrum of pure authoritarianism to pure libertarianism, the system that has the best chance of finding a reason for the wealthy to help the poor turned out to be liberty. And within libertarianism there is a lot of room to negotiate over how mineral rights and economic rent are handled.
That is, a reason why people with similar communication styles understand each other is also that they pretty much have the same concepts and even conclusions in their mind, and they actually communicate very little new information to one another.
Failures in communication for me seem to be often on the listener side, and we keep telling people to communicate better, without spending the equal amount of effort on providing people with listening and comprehension skills.
Looking at the wiki article, indeed others have noted that already:
> Tamarian language was compared to the difficulty of communicating with an autistic 19-year-old patient by Elizabeth Kim et al.[12]
Something I’ve recently come to realize is that certain, uh, substances make this problem literally evaporate away for me. For a few hours I can connect with people in a way that feels natural and expected and that they will notice and call out as different. It’s led me to think of my “communication differences” more like layers that can be peeled away than something that is completely ingrained in me.
But are those expectations a 'hard-wired communication style' as the article claims, or are they just a result of adherence to societal norms? I definitely communicate more using obscure references and inside jokes with my close friends than my co-workers and it doesn't exactly strike me as neurodivergent.
Unfortunately the article author is demonstrating another common fallacy, overgeneralizing their experiences. While the two styles identified are useful things to talk about, these are not the only two styles and the whole situation really is not so rigid. (I find it ironic that someone who disclaims the "concluder" style can go straight to a conclusion and dig in on it, but in my experience with neurodivergence in my family, that seems to be something of a hallmark.)
Yeah, this is a subtle and important point. I’ve heard this skill referred to as “attunement”. Like, you have your antenna up and listen for all the subtext that sits underneath someone’s expression. And listen for the quiet “asks” that would clearly make the person feel comfortable. “She feels anxious and low status.”. “He seems to want to talk about problems and solutions, not feelings”. People make bids like this constantly. Essentially, they’re saying “please respond to me in a complimentary way”. If you ignore or reject the bids people make in conversation, they will subconsciously feel ignored, rejected or dismissed. If you respond appropriately, people feel like you care about them. (Give the anxious person a place to sit down and offer them a cup of tea. Join the problem solver in problem solver mode. Etc.)
I think a lot of people on the spectrum struggle with this. But I also know some autistic people who are way better than neurotypicals at this stuff because they’ve learned how it works consciously, and then studied and practiced. The high sensitivity that often goes with autism can make these bids much easier to notice once you know what to look for.
Doing drugs opened my eyes to how much my general anxiety and frustration with other people had made me intolerable.
After I started smoking regularly I became more personable to the degree that my career took off, I started having adult relationships, and my peer group grew enormously.
I don't really recommend it as a lifestyle but I think its good for everyone to unpeel the onion once in awhile.
This is, I think, a critical point; I don't know if it's autism specific or general anxiety, but some people really remember any time they made a mistake, and will try and navigate around it - to the point of obnoxiousness.
Recent example, I was in a meeting, someone asked a question, I was the person to answer the question. However, they didn't stop after asking the question - they started to elaborate, with like "what if x" or "could it be y" etcetera. On the one side it felt like they were talking to themselves. But now I wonder if they were just anxious, because they once upon a time asked a question and were misinterpreted or ignored entirely.
Another thing I notice is that a lot of people will keep talking until they are interrupted. To the point where they start to reiterate their point, propose answers to the question they just asked, etc. I'm not sure where that's from, possibly exactly from being interrupted so often that it's become expected.
The article's perspective partially excuses a person who otherwise would have intense anxiety about communicating because they are not "normal" and are generally considered awkward. The burden of communication is similar to the burden that an "intense introvert" would describe how "i like your company, but only in doses". With the label of weaver, this weaver communicator person could seek friends who think with a similar thinking style opposed to trying and failing and learning helplessness when it comes to friendships. Career wise, this label allows a weaver to pursue a path that doesn't involve sales where making a point and the "constant close" is highly valued.
To people who have intense social anxiety or a neurodivergent pathology where many peers are unable to hold a job. The idea that children/adults with this label can be steered to areas where they can easily excel is a very good thing.
I have a hunch that a part of the topic of "neurodivergence" is an abstraction over the effects of a hyperliterate society without a cause or heritage and the trials that people of a more oral disposition face.
The advocacy you speak of is also concerning, because it makes it all the more apparent to me that people with bad taste (i.e., are culturally deprived) are using the pathology of pathologizing as a power grab.
To clarify what I understood from the article:
Autism is independent of cognitive mapping based communication styles, but it definitely makes difficulties in communication more intense especially when all communication styles are lumped into the same bucket. When considering neurotypical people, the way language is processed (left brian vs right brain) is often based on the "default" for the language. Here is an oversimplification of two languages, but the "default" seems to fit:
- American Sign Language is a visual and idea based language that tends to have more "weaver" right brain, "no point" communications. The Grammar focuses on "what and How".
- English is a auditory and command based language that tends to have more "concluder" left brain, "get to the point" communications. The grammar focues on "Who did it and why"
Improv classes increase "creative pathways" in the right brain. Others who are more right brained, may engage in "planning and resource allocation classes" to stimulate language usage in the left brain. Ability to "get to the point" and ability to "creatively improv" are both crucial skills, and by default as we speak english, the average person in class may need more "improv" classes to be successful. (you are an individual and not equal to "average", so this doesn't quite apply to you)
The neuroscience, which is nuanced and complex, continues to prove valid. Our two hemispheres process the world differently.
Here a YouTube compilation of these acts (requires good understanding of German):
(Ignoring the laugh track, for the moment)
[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38371/hipbone-games
1. The archetypical 'weaver' conversation is introduced as the exchange of apparently disconnected facts, with each as an invitation for an interlocutor to add a fact that they perceive as connected to the previous one. However, if you replace facts with scandalous stories, you get the structure of gossip. The purpose of a gossip conversation is not necessarily to communicate information, but to strengthen the social bonds between interlocutors.
2. The 'Peak Weaver' conversation could do with a little more commentary. Not being familiar with any of the references quoted, I can't discern the structure of this conversation: how does each quote follow from its predecessor?
3. I can only recall one such 'Peak Weaver' conversation in my life, but at the time, I felt it was more of a game to say as much as possible as obscurely as possible. However, we did have an audience at the time, which may have affected the dynamic.
4. This entire passage could very well be describing me:
> I have a theory about Weaver communication and the specific ways that some brains are configured. Weavers tend to be good at memorizing things that resonate with them, like song lyrics, lines from movies or books (sometimes even whole movies), and other large pieces of information.
The author and his daughter seem to have a humanities bias. As someone with a hard sciences bias, I can easily memorise amusing anecdotes, but also the behaviour of complex systems. When I was a teacher, my colleagues expressed genuine concern of the but-you-can't-do-that variety about my ability to speak for 10 minutes about something without notes.
> My daughter is definitely a Weaver. Others have remarked on her memory and how with each person she knows, she will remember little “things” they had as points of interaction that were in some way meaningful. She remembers and brings up things from the past, and I know the response she’s hoping for. She wants them to build on those moments of connection and weave a tapestry of relatedness together.
For me, this is often about things and ideas rather than moments. Perhaps I've learnt from interactions with others that you have to have a point to these sorts of reminiscences.
> This doesn’t always pan out for her, though, as others don’t always– or even usually– remember the moment she’s referencing. When I tell them, “Remember two years ago, that time you were throwing rocks in the creek, and you said ‘splash’ with a funny voice and both kept repeating it and laughing at each other?” They think I’m crazy for imagining that a 4.5-year-old could remember something from two years ago or could be referencing that in a conversation years later.
I'm not sure how common this sentiment is, but I would feel extraordinarily uncomfortable -to the point of feeling a bit like a fraud - if I were to speak about something continuously for 10 minutes (at a high degree of entropy, rather than just taking glancing stabs at the same observation from multiple angles) _unless_ I could do it without notes. If I could not do so I don't think I would even attempt to participate in a conversation on that subject, feeling as though I had nothing useful to contribute to the conversation.
I've often been able to speak for 15 minutes, up to 2 hours, on topics without repeating information. It was usually in a teaching or on-boarding context. The people were engaged, nodding, laughing, taking notes...
I simply knew the subject and its adjacencies inside out and backward.
Ten minutes, for a subject you care about, seems trivial.
But what I mean is that 10 minutes would be perhaps the approximate boundary where I feel comfortable holding the floor engaging in curious but uninformed speculation, and the sense of fraud that I am possibly wasting everyone's time by continuing to speculate begins to encroach.
If I care about a subject enough I think like most people I don't have problem holding forth on it, free of supporting notes, for 2 or 3 hours if circumstances (and the extent of my command of the material, and the patience of my audience) would allow.
Do we really need _another_ simplistic model that puts every human into two distinct idiosyncratic categories with the purpose of revealing some supposed underlying human nature? No. We definitely don't need another one of those.
I would question "small minority". I've met quite a few people who like the sound of their own voice so much they don't care about the actual message.
I can't tell enough from your comment to see if you found any characteristic other than they talked more than you preferred in a conversation.
I have found that MBTI is generally considered pseudoscience and survey nonsense that has small correlation to anything with the preference for "big 5" instead. This definitely decreases the "ah ha!" feeling I had when reading this article.
My understanding of the article is that this is not a giant framework to try and "categorize the world" like MBTI, but is a way to help the people who have difficulty communicating without being deemed "awkward" to think about the neuroscience and the strengths that they can focus on instead.
Maybe Ill look up any studies performed over P & J to see if it is correlated with anything other than "awkward" predictions.
[my apologies to my fellow HN-glass-beaders ... I've been, and probably will be for the next couple of days, busy altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter]
(good thing he wasn't the inspiration for Orwell's 2-minute hate; that guy would've had a much harder time backtracking)
Indeed we had. We were both able to keep multiple threads running. It was really a fun time.
This article reminds me of it and I think I can align. But albeit it sounding nice and smart it’s not easy to be on the “weaving” side. Some conversations can be frustrating. For example, people expect that I bring some magic solutions to their problems while I don’t have any.
I can find those, I’m not bad at t it, but for that I need to brainstorm while vocally exploring problem scope: recall similar situation, make some naive statements, ask stupid question, allow myself to get corrected. During such sessions I prioritize, assess root cause but also try understand political and social aspects, because it might be that I need to back off for non meritorious reasons.
And even here, in this very thread, there are comments like “people who talk too much” or “like the sound of their voice too much”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Consider "The Hollywood Ending" vs "The French Ending". People used to Hollywood, where all the details[0] get wrapped up in a definite ending, often complain about the artier side of french cinema that their films "don't end".
When you're used to it, however, which is a more satisfying experience? A film with a canonical ending, where you're spoon-fed the resolution, or one which sets up a world, and a story, and stops at the crucial moment, so after watching you can go to a café and have a glass or two and argue with your friends about what would have/should have happened next? (it's possible to come up with alternative narratives for Hollywood fare as well, but too strong a canon pretty much impedes most fanon)
I believe I've even noticed this tendency in the concluding speech in anglophone vs francophone conferences: anglophones tend to summarise the proceedings ("conclusion"), kind of putting a ribbon around all the previous presentations and tying a bow on it, while francophones tend to hilight how to go beyond the proceedings ("future work"), kind of putting up signposts to all the areas that next years' conferences might be exploring.
(tennis/ping-pong, etc. also have a weaving/concluding dichotomy. In competitive games, the goal is to score points, to avoid having a serve returned[1], but in entertainment games, the goal is to keep the rally going; to dance, not duel, with the counterparty)
In academic writing, the footnote provides a way to bridge both worlds: the main body can be a more (or less) taut line from introduction to conclusion, but the footnotes[2] can provide portals to all the side excursions that were cut from the main body in the interest of concluder communication.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eiY4EiOhmQ
[0] unless deliberately leaving the franchise open.
[1] contrast hacky-sack, where the goal is that all players touch the ball during a play.
[2] and, in textbooks, exercises. (Consider also the potential of parentheticals; inveterate weavers have also been known to leave a few warps and wefts in the index)
For example, the author suggests that to ask about someone else's day, "weavers" might say "I stubbed my toe." If their conversational partner reciprocates with the same motivation, the quality of each person's day will surface in the conversation. From what I know, some part of this might fall under the so-called "double empathy problem." I'm not an expert, however.
From the outside, neurotypical view, it's hard to know what to make of this. There is probably no way to describe or theorize about different sub-types of communication styles (or the underlying dimensional differences without coming up with straw-person arguments and using oddly abstract language. For the author to take this idea further, they'd have to convince neurotypical people how weaving is different from how neurotypical (?) people frequently engage in extended riffs. Whose Line is it Anyways?, improv comedy, the work of Stewart Lee and other stand-up comedians, and Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" for example, all involve the creator and audience pretending to take on different roles for the sake of the piece of art.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
...causing this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
It's a nice bit of synchronicity that it occurred in a thread like this.
I had some thoughts about the authors proposal, and looking back on it I found myself in "peer review" mode. In my field and current line of work, one typically does a "deep summarization" of a text or proposal to indicate that you have read it and aren't just, for example, responding to the headline. If it reads as dry, well, that's part of the training one receives in grad school.
If you want to compare, I loaded the blog post in to Chat-GPT4o and asked it to summarize the contents as well as make "an insightful hacker news comment."
------ LLM Output Below ---
LLM Prompt:
Can you summarize this blog post and write a good hacker news comment that a) starts with the summary, and b) provides some insightful analysis? [... Rest of blog post...]
LLM Output:
Hacker News Comment
> Summary: Terra Vance's article identifies two communication styles within the neurodivergent community: Concluders, who aim to make a point, and Weavers, who build interconnected conversational tapestries without a fixed endpoint. This distinction can cause misunderstandings and conflicts but recognizing and accommodating these differences can enhance mutual understanding and relationships.
> Insightful Analysis: This distinction between Concluders and Weavers is a fascinating lens through which to view communication breakdowns, especially within neurodivergent communities. It underscores the importance of neurodiversity and the need for broader societal understanding and accommodation of different communication styles. This could have profound implications not just for personal relationships but also in professional settings, where miscommunications can lead to significant consequences. Moreover, it challenges the conventional view of communication effectiveness, suggesting that what is often seen as a lack of social skills may simply be a different, equally valid way of interacting. This perspective could foster more inclusive environments and help reduce the stigma faced by neurodivergent individuals.
Do neurotypical people enjoy the work of Stewart Lee?!
Don't expect points from some people. Just listen to the whole picture they're trying to show.
Being conscious about commuincation style helps to keep assumptions about others at more relevant to reality level.