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The one thing that really surprised me, the thing I learned that's affected my conversational abilities the most: turn taking in conversation is a negotiation: there are no set rules. There are protocols: - bids - holds / stays - implications (semantic / prosodic)

But then the actual flow of the conversation is deeply semantic in the best conversations, and the rules are very much a "dance" or a negotiation between partners.

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That's an interesting way to think about it, I like that.

It also implies that being the person who has something to say but is unable to get into the conversation due to following the conversational semantics is akin to going to a dance in your nice clothes but not being able to find a dance partner.

Yeah, I can relate to that. Maybe it's also because you are too shy to ask someone to dance. I think I learned that lesson: just ask, and be unafraid to fail. Things tend to work themselves out. Much of this is experimentation. I think our models need to be open to that: which is one cool thing about Sparrow-1: it's a meta-in-context learner. This means that when it try's and fails, or you try and fail, it learns at runtime to adapt.

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