Do you ever think about how communication works? I mean we all have different backgrounds, beliefs, knowledge, intentions; meaning is often so elusive that we even attribute different meanings to simple words. I once had a very long argument with someone about what a donut is. /1

Resolution proved impossible. So how the heck do we ever communicate? For all I know, we each speak a different language and there are no translators. For this reason, in scientific communication, I am a sucker for pedant-level precision and clear, local definitions. /2

Better safe than sorry. This same approach however tends to suck the life out of casual convos. It’s no fun having small talk with a pedant (it’s never fun to have small talk for an introvert but that’s beside the point). What I think helps in casual convos is the opposite: /3

Intentional ambiguity. Leaving some ambiguity in words, sentences, intentions, all meaning... And trust that the other person will “get it”. /4

(Incidentally, this is why I think Twitter convos fail so often. We do not trust each other, and instead of using ambiguity to understand each other, we abuse it to misunderstand.) /5

Anyway, my totally uninformed musings aside, I just read a fascinating paper by my brilliant friend @irisvanrooij and colleagues, and they happen to study just this curious phenomenon called communication. /6 https://twitter.com/markblokpoel/status/1192460881009037312?s=21

Using Rational Speech Act and agent based modeling, they study how agents interact under different levels of asymmetry (of knowledge) and ambiguity (no one-to-one mapping between signal and object). Amazingly, they find evidence supporting my intuition: /7

Ambiguity is not merely an obstacle to overcome but might actually serve a functional benefit in coping with the ever-present asymmetry between agents. Isn’t that just fantastic? For more details, do read the paper though! /END https://osf.io/q56xs/ 

Glad to see this thread getting as much attention as it did! I just wanted to highlight a cool paper that I personally related to. Nice to know that it resonated with so many of you