
Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness, It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick - fbrusch
http://nautil.us/blog/mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of-lazinessits-a-clever-data_compression-trick
======
chasing
Bullshit. You're mumbling when I can't understand you. Calling it "data
compression" is polishing an indecipherable turd.

Of course people make their language more efficient when using common words
and phrases. "D'ja do it?" "Yeah." "K." "No prob."

But that's not mumbling.

I think of mumbling as generally being an expressed disinterest in being
understood. Sometimes because the speaker doesn't understand what they're
being asked to speak about, sometimes because they're shy and insecure about
their words. Sometimes mumbling is a way to express derision or disinterest in
the information or the person someone's speaking to. Lots of reasons.

Not clever. Kind of the opposite of clever. It's a time-waster compared to
just flat-out saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure" or "I don't care" or
whatever.

~~~
MBlume
You appear to have no disagreement with the author of the post apart from the
definition of the word "mumbling"

~~~
Dylan16807
Pretty much. It's a bad title.

------
amirmc
> _" We also don’t know how well speakers tune their data-compression
> algorithms to the needs of individual listeners. Accurately predicting the
> information that a listener can easily recover sometimes requires knowing a
> lot about his previous experience or knowledge. After all, one person’s
> redundancy can be another person’s anomaly..."_

I'm glad the article recognises this (and the example immediately following
the quote is instructive). It's a natural habit to do this kind of 'data-
compression' when you're working with the same people all the time but this is
_also_ the reason that communication is difficult across different groups and
cultures. It requires you to make an effort to listen and _check your own
assumptions_ if you want to actually communicate effectively, rather than
talking past each other (or worse, walking away with _different_ ideas about
what was decided).

~~~
cheatsheet
> (or worse, walking away with different ideas about what what decided)

Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective creativity.
Expect the unexpected, but within a clearly defined range of variability. I'm
not talking specifically about software development btw; consider the
surrealists or any other artistic or philosophical movement (or literature,
music, mathematics etc). People have ideas together, walk away, and then have
mental independence. Mental independence is good, because too much binding in
thought = paranoia, nervous, control obsessed people. Too little and it seems
like people don't care. It's a balance.

~~~
amirmc
> _" Eh, this can also denote synergistic group think or collective
> creativity."_

I think you've missed my point. I was mostly referring to things like
meetings, where people typically are trying to reach an agreement (or
decision) about something. If those people are from different cultures, then a
mismatch can arise where people _think_ they're talking about the same thing
but only realise _later_ that things have gone wrong. Even then, people tend
towards recriminations, rather than root-causing and realising that their
terms mean different things. Take the example from the end of the post itself
(where 'skiing' meant different things to both people -- if they hadn't
clarified, they'd have parted with vastly different views on what was
discussed).

~~~
divegeek
I find it useful to keep in mind the notion that all knowledge is gained by a
process of guesswork and criticism. When you listen to my voice or read my
words, you must guess at what I mean to convey, because my words by
themselves, even if not mumbled, are almost never sufficiently precise to
carry my meaning.

So instead, you have to build and discard internal explanatory models of my
meaning, criticizing them by cross-checking them with other things I've said,
and with your understanding of my understanding of the world. Meanwhile, I'm
doing the same thing on the other side, hypothesizing the models that you're
creating based on what I've said and trying to add more words to fill any gaps
in what I presume that you're presuming that I mean.

When we arrive at a point where you and I both believe that you hold a
consistent mental model of what I wished to convey, then we believe that I
have communicated to you.

Stated that way, it's clear that communication is really, really hard -- even
though we do all of that model building and evaluation without conscious
effort in most cases. And it's also quite obvious why it's easier to
communicate with people you know well, because both sides have a better mental
model of the other's mental model. Both are _wrong_, always, but they're less
wrong than similar situations between people with less shared context.

This view also makes it abundantly clear that it's important to validate
communication. If you restate to me in your own words what you believe I
intended to convey, there's a good chance I'll catch any major discrepancies
between what I intended and what you got. A good chance, but we can still end
up believing that we're in agreement when we're not.

In theory it is possible to define a language and communication techniques
that do not depend on this iterative, contextualized method. This is
essentially what we do in formal languages, such as those we use in
mathematics or programming. But it is not how people communicate because it's
actually far more efficient to rely on compression via shared context than it
is to communicate with formal precision. Further, formal communication only
obviates guesswork and criticism at the level of understanding which is
directly expressed. I can read an assembler program and understand with
perfect precision what the individual instructions do, but the leap to
understanding the goal of the program again requires guesswork and criticism.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that the process of guess-and-evaluate
is essentially the same as the scientific method of hypothesize-and-test and
even the same as the evolutionary method of vary-and-select. There's a
compelling argument that all knowledge creation occurs via this process -- and
communication is knowledge creation, even if it simply conveys an idea from
one brain to another, because there's no direct transfer mechanism the
receiver of the idea must create it based on observations of the words of the
giver.

~~~
cheatsheet
> communication is knowledge creation, even if it simply conveys an idea from
> one brain to another, because there's no direct transfer mechanism the
> receiver of the idea must create it based on observations of the words of
> the giver.

I feel like science and mathematics (and even computer science) attempts to
counter this.

If we can mechanically generate mathematical proofs, and those proofs can be
proven equivalent to one another, then we have essentially simplified the
abstraction mechanics of the individual brain and transferred them to a
computer.

I view abstraction as a means for expanding all potential permutations of a
given model and it's application, and then a reduction to a different set of
terms that connects models.

We might be able to prove that we can agree with one another, but we might not
be able to prove that we agree with our own selves. We can always make the
problem more difficult individually by guessing and creating more questions.

To me the process is two sides of the same coin. One side is creation, the
other side is destruction. You can't convey an idea without having an idea,
and you can't question that idea without having another idea. Negation is
still a logical mechanism. You can question whether there is more to think
about than a choice between [(exist) or (does not exist)].

I really prefer to think about possibility and potential. It's an open space
to me.

------
kinleyd
I knew a guy who mumbled so much you could never understand him. It was really
irritating, but also the secret of his success. His job was to liaison with a
number of governmental/bureaucratic organisations - involving customs
clearance and things like that - and he was incredibly successful. No one
knows for sure how exactly he managed it, but a leading school of thought was
convinced that it was his mumbling. The bureaucrats just gave him whatever the
hell he wanted as quickly as possible so that they could get him out of their
offices asap.

------
zw123456
When I was growing up, I had a cousin named Eddie, and he was a "lazy talker"
or at least, as I recall, that was the name they had for his speaking style.
Eddie would not mumble, he would just not say the whole word. For example (and
it is hard to convey here in the written word) he might say "Hi, my name is
Eddie and I am a lazy talker" but it would come out "H, m na Edeh, an I lah
tak". Again, not capturing it here, but it was not mumbling. I have met other
lazy talkers, and they are not mumbling. I think the article was maybe
referring to lazy talkers and not mumblers. Mumbling to me denotes an actual
corruption of the words, lazy talking is just not saying the whole word
completely, which is more like lossy compression while mumbling to me, means a
bad Signal to noise ratio, low volume and garbled words.

~~~
dbbolton
The reason this sort of speech pattern is still mostly intelligible is that
consonants are actually more important clues markers to the listener (as a
general rule).

For example, you could probably interpret "thuh kwuhck bruhn fuhx juhmps uhvr
thuh luhzy dug" quite readily, but not "duh dwid drowd dod dudd oded duh dudy
dod".

It is true that vowels are sometimes the distinguishing phoneme between
minimal pairs, but the reality is that we are quite adept at calibrating
ourselves to cope with vowel variation.

One example is actually head size, of all things. I won't go into all the
psychoacoustics involved (not my area of expertise), but your brain adjusts
its expectations for how a given vowel should sound based on the speaker's
unique "instrumental" qualities. In other words, you can end up with two very
objectively different waveforms that your brain is able to match up without
hesitation.

A more familiar example is dialects. A Southern American speaker might say
"ice", and to a General American speaker, it may sound much more like "ass",
but this kind of variation doesn't really lead to the hilarious confusion one
might expect. After a quick "scan" of another dialect, we usually adapt fairly
quickly, and we retain those "settings" for the next time we hear a similar
dialect.

One example that's not so easy to work around might be the pen-pin merger. In
general, it leads to few mix-ups. But those speakers, "pen" and "pin" are
homophones, and unlike other such pairs (bin-Ben, lint-lent, mint-meant,
tin[t]-ten[t], win-when, etc.) they may not be easily differentiable by
context. In response, many speakers refer to pens as "ink pens" and pins as
"stick pins", which avoids the ambiguity (animal pens and female swans aren't
really an issue I suppose).

So even when vowels lead to genuine ambiguity, we get around it pretty easily.

~~~
slg
Is this really a instance of consonants versus vowels or an instance of a
large group versus a small group? The biggest reason it is hard to distinguish
your second example, is likely because you are changing a larger percentage of
the word than in the first example. If you select a random 5 consonants and
change them, I have a feeling you would get similar results to changing
vowels.

~~~
dbbolton
The very fact that there are so many more consonant phonemes than vowel
phonemes in English reflects their importance.

------
Kenji
The robustness principle comes to mind:

"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

You can save yourself a headache if you communicate as clearly and accurately
as possible. At work, with friends, with a partner. I don't care what mumbling
is a sign of, I care about its result. Don't optimize the wrong thing. Just
like nobody likes seeing ugly JPEG artifacts, nobody likes to recognize
mumbling.

~~~
mjburgess
That implies making a cognitive activity out of a non-cognitive activity and
thus defeating the point.

~~~
civilian
You can make a cognitive activity into a non-cognitive activity with enough
repetition and habit.

------
LordRatte
Some people over-compress, though, until the point where the data becomes
corrupt and the antivirus (our social attention span) quarantines it as a mild
threat.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Reminds me of Scott Aaronson's Umeshisms[0]/Malthusianisms[1]. If you don't
sometimes over-compress it means you're compressing too little and there's
room for improving efficiency.

Also,

"Why do native speakers of the language you’re studying talk too fast for you
to understand them? Because otherwise, they could talk faster and still
understand each other."

[0] -
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=40](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=40)

[1] -
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418)

------
pkinsky
People also mumble when they're deliberately talking around something. For
example, see this section from the audio recordings that brought down Nixon.
There's no doubt that both parties knew exactly what they were referring to
and could have expanded on it if needed. It's more clear if you listen to it:
they mumble as an obfuscation tactic, likely as an ingrained habit when
talking about such matters.

[http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-
tape.html](http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html)

>Haldeman: .../only way to solve this, and we’re set up beautifully to do it,
ah, in that and that…the only network that paid any attention to it last night
was NBC…they did a massive story on the Cuban…

>Nixon: That’s right.

>Haldeman: thing.

>Nixon: Right.

>Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat
Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this…this is ah, business here we
don’t want you to go any further on it.” That’s not an unusual development,…

>Nixon: Um huh.

>Haldeman: …and, uh, that would take care of it.

>Nixon: What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn’t want to?

------
mmanfrin
I'm a chronic mumbler -- I try not to be, but when I speak, it feels very loud
(to me), but comes out quiet and mumbly; when I speak up so friends can hear,
it feels like I am yelling.

Definitely not about compression, though.

------
kmm
I have always liked the noisy-channel model of language. It appeals to me
because I think of the human as an extremely good pattern recognition
"device".

In my opinion, it gives a satisfying explanation as to why many languages
(about half of them) divide their words in noun categories or genders, which
are rarely sex-based. It's a system of redundancy, which allows for noisy or
compressed speech (either mumbled, or at a party, or fast spoken), to still be
understood, because the gender endings give clues to what the original word
was

------
bgilroy26
These aren't different things! If you compress data by saying less, you're
expending less energy.

It seems like the author is arguing that in order to be lazy about sound
production, you need to expend energy picking out which sounds you need and
which can be safely left out. That's all well and good, but in the middle of
the article, the author herself refers to mumbling as a kind of "strategic
laziness"!

Curse these headlines!

------
woliveirajr
Kolmogorov complexity theorem states, in a very naive interpretation, that
information is as complex as the ammount of symbols you need to represent
it...

------
jdeibele
I have more trouble understanding what my daughters are saying than my son. My
daughters are in Spanish Immersion programs while he's in Japanese. My oldest
says that she's just used to using Spanish and that's why her English isn't
more clearly enunciated.

My son does mumble at times but I've always thought it was when he was saying
something he knew he wasn't supposed to.

------
arrrg
Am I completely off base here or is this mumbling equals laziness thing
something unique to the English language?

I'm German and I really wasn't aware of this association at all. I associate
mumbling with shyness … and that's about it. And what's more that association
to laziness seems positively weird and non-sensical to me.

------
mc32
So drunkards are better at data compression than the non drunk population?

And forget about southerners who speak English as if it were French. Eass for
east. Repore for report. Assed for asked, etc. (really you 'assed' me a
question?) It can quickly make a conversation ambiguous as this tendency
results in lots oh homonyms.

------
cwbrandsma
My father-in-law and one of my daughters are both mumblers. But my father
needs hearing aids.

Best way to make sure father-in-law speaks up is to have my father around.

Downside is it physically wears my father-in-law out. He just can't handle
expending that much effort into speaking.

------
cgtyoder
So just a coincidence with today's xkcd?
[http://xkcd.com/1489/](http://xkcd.com/1489/)

------
dozy
this reminded me of an interesting New Yorker summary of a study on 'filler
words' and how our ability to speak and explain efficiently develops:
[http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-
comment/conscienti...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-
comment/conscientiousness-kidspeak)

------
UhUhUhUh
The title is wrong because it can be both and much more. When will we stop
using titles as hooks?

------
surgerunner
Compressed data stops being human readable.

------
grimmdude
I mumble, and I will now send this article to all the people who tell me not
to. Thanks

------
a3voices
The purpose of speaking is to convey information to another person. As long as
you are accomplishing this, your volume, enunciation, tonality, etc. doesn't
matter.

~~~
cryptophreak
While a strict interpretation of your statement technically evaluates as true,
it’s worth noting that volume, enunciation and tonality can themselves carry
information which alters the meaning of your communication.

------
Dirlewanger
I hate it. This, txting talk, bastardizing the way we converse with one
another, it's all happening so unmanageably sudden that repercussions will
take a generation or two to manifest. The Internet doesn't help. I know, I
know, each generation loves to make a pastime in being armchair harbingers of
doom regarding successive generations, but seriously maiming the way we
communicate is on another plane of concern I think.

Ok, off my soapbox.

~~~
stephenhuey
There was more variation in language before the courts of Europe began
dictating the usage of standard dialects. Languages may have changed even
faster in the past than they do now (not counting the vast increase in jargon
we have in the modern world). The internet may not have publishing gatekeepers
like books have had for centuries, but like books and the courts of yore it
probably still does more for encouraging people to use the same language
patterns rather than different ones just because it's so accessible. If the
movies of Hollywood have influenced the usage of English worldwide, how much
more so would YouTube? Long before the internet, multiple Latin American
countries started chopping off certain sounds in Spanish words. Although it
makes it difficult for other Spanish speakers to understand clearly at first--
and they may feel like their language has been maimed, as you put it--the ones
doing the chopping seem to communicate quite easily with one another.

~~~
Dirlewanger
Of course this phenomenon has been happening since language first became a
thing, but the rate at which it's happening has not. The most cynical part of
me fears that places like courts, government institutions, academia, and other
sorts of walled gardens will soon be the only bastions well-written and cogent
language (and that this will happen before the end of the century). I don't
know...maybe it won't. But still.

~~~
stephenhuey
I'm no professional linguist, but my understanding is that there is less
variation in language now than there was a century or two ago. When travel and
communication were more difficult, you did not see speakers across a nation
using uniform language patterns as much as they do now. Not only that,
numerous languages we had only a century or two ago have been replaced, and
some predict "that 90% of the circa 7,000 languages currently spoken in the
world will have become extinct by 2050." This is sad to me, as I would prefer
the preservation of linguistic diversity. I'm pretty sure you have little
reason to expect there will be an increase of nonstandard language patterns.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language#Language_loss](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language#Language_loss)

