
You don't always know what you're saying - ColinWright
http://www.nature.com/news/you-don-t-always-know-what-you-re-saying-1.15136
======
softatlas
"Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means
of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast, and one pricks up one's ears,
and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears
for instance the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall."

I repeated this to myself, out loud, 100 times. The goal was to simultaneously
maintain another persistent stream of thought as I recited, religiously.

The next day I converted my left control key to Backspace, months after asking
myself in earnest the question of what I should do with my left control key
now that I had already delegated that role to my caps lock. Days later I
learned that a co-worker has worked on a keyboard missing its Backspace for
years now.

As a practicing psychonaut one must, in order to ascend the order of skills,
learn to master speech in a way that is disorderly from other cognitive
functions. But first, what is speech must be recognized.

I think with keyboards, we experience much of them same thing: where Backspace
becomes a word or a character of one's textual lexicon. It's just a matter of
where you put it (let's say, "in your mind"). It's like the paralanguage of
"uhms" and "wells" which litter everyday academic to grocery language,
cheerily grows in programmers' circles, and then those pauses to reset the
conversation of their weed like proliferation.

We do not always know what we are saying because most of the time the meanings
are quantifiably outside of the grammar with which our brains have adapted for
the purposes of internally efficient speech. Each of us constructs an idiolect
for our use, and the semantic edifice wrapping our words which we use to
exercise thought often bears signs of the issues we have dealt with, not
necessarily in _learning_ the language, but also _building_ it for our
individual purposes. Sometimes the constructs we internally put together are
resistant to forms of complexity that are outside of the cowpaths we have
paved for ourselves.

~~~
Lost_BiomedE
Very true, you are very aware how we think. But I am hesitant to say it since
I may be encouraging your behavior, depending on how it is manifested. Be
careful, because as you look in, the abyss stares into you. So depending on
how you see your behavior, you may want to discourage thinking in this manner.

------
skierscott
I feel like the title is overstated. These researchers showed that feedback
wasn't important in one small experiment. The title _seems_ to imply something
much broader.

For example, when I'm talking about a deeply technical subject I'm well versed
in, I use the correct vocal and syntax to express my ideas: I know what I'm
saying. When I'm doing a small quick exercise like shown, I might say
something inadvertently.

~~~
ColinWright

      > When I'm doing a small quick exercise like
      > shown, I might say something inadvertently.
    

So that would mean you don't always know what you're saying, just as the title
explicitly says. If the title was:

    
    
        You never know what you're saying.
    

... then it would be wrong. As it is your comment seems to say that it's
right.

What have I missed?

~~~
skierscott
> you don't _always_ know what you're saying

> You _never_ know what you're saying.

(emphasis added)

There we go. You clarified why I felt this was off -- it's making a global
statement. There's almost always a condition that goes with a scientific (or
even mathematical) finding. Nature overstated their results.

~~~
ColinWright
It appears to me that you're saying that

    
    
      > you don't *always* know what you're saying
    

is logically the same as:

    
    
      > You *never* know what you're saying.
    

That's not at all how I read it. To say:

    
    
      > you don't *always* know what you're saying
    

is to say:

    
    
      > There are some occasions when you
      > don't know what you're saying.
    

We can see that in mathematical logic wherein moving a negation across a "For
all" changes it to a "There exists", and _vice versa._ In this case the
natural language formulation matches the mathematical logic one. In
particular, "never" is not the negation of "always."

So that's exactly what you agreed with when you said:

    
    
      > When I'm doing a small quick exercise like
      > shown, I might say something inadvertently.
    

That shows that there are times when you don't know what you're saying,
confirming that you don't always know what you're saying.

So it still seems to me like you are confirming the title, not refuting it.

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Pyrodogg
A really funny related affect is had using the SpeechJammer app, or similar.
It plays back a slightly delayed feed of your voice. Other than the delay it's
not altering the speech. If you get the timing right it's almost impossible to
talk.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjWzQEBGCMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjWzQEBGCMo)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icechen1.s...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icechen1.speechjammer)

------
laxatives
I'd guess this is especially true if you're drunk or speaking in front of a
large audience.

------
LordHumungous
I rarely do in fact.

