Dear Douglas:
A Nice novel idea for me to ponder. I too have spend years, to use your
terms trying to find a methodology that would increase "net baud rate". One
of the disciplines I studied in considerable depth was the model proposed by
Richard Bandler and John Grinder under the name of Neuro-Linguistic
Programming. If you are not familiar with this discipline, do a web search
and some reading.
One of their postulates was that people take in information through a
primary sense, in most cases, it is visual, auditory or tactile or in some
cases through words. Let me dwell on this a bit. If I say, "The sunset was
beautiful tonight with exquisite colors of orange and yellow against a
background of deep blue." I am using words to paint a picture. A highly
visual person would use these kinds of words to describe and particular
experience that was relevant to his selected primary sense. An auditory
person might say, "The sunset was harmonious, so quiet and reflective with
the background sounds of nature creating a meditative state." Or a tactile
person might say, "There was a peacefulness in silence and colors of the
early evening". Now each of these three imaginary people might be standing
next to each other viewing, hearing and feeling the experience and taking in
that information through a predilection of on primary sense.
It gets more complicated. Each person has an internal sensory
representation of the world which he/she creates inside their own head. So
for a visual person hearing the first description, they literally make an
internal image as the assimilate the words. However for a person used to
making internal imagery to understand the world, the description of the
other two individuals - made from their sensory bias - would make it very
difficult to make an internal picture. Conversely, the auditory and tactile
person would have difficulty understanding the statement of the visual
person.
Now you begin to get an understanding of how Bandler and Grinder's research
explained the difficulty of increasing net baud rate. Their answer after
studying a number of highly successful people was to state that some people
have the flexibility to shift primary sensory modes while most people remain
locked into their habitual perceptional framework. In fact they went so far
as to claim that those above average people of our society have developed
this flexibility and this allows them to communicate better with more people
thereby increasing their ability to persuade and communicate. One of the
goals of the discipline was through a series of exercises, to expand your
individual flexibility by being able to identify another persons primary
mode and move into an identical mode by having the flexibility to change
yourself. They called this ability - exquisite. In your terms, it meant
the ability to increase net baud rate with anyone.
These skills could easily be taught in a conventional education set up
except that discipline has never been able to penetrate the University
educated elite who believe that it is what you know, not how you communicate
what you know that is the essential skill.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas P. Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: December 17, 1998 9:19 AM
Subject: FW -- net net baud rate
>I'm taking a short break from simulation and matching work to post a
>couple of messages stimulated by recent discussions and web pages
>visted about Gross Progress Indicators and about population.
>
>I started out to address those topics, but instead wrote a preamble
>discussing a related question. For now I'll just post this preamble,
>and will get to the actual amble itself next message.
>
>On my web pages I talk about "true bandwidth" or "net baud rate" by
>which I mean the amount of actual communication on a channel between
>two people, as opposed to the number of bytes sent and received. I
>won't worry here about the technical details, but there is a major
>concept here that everyone should be aware of.
>
>Suppose it takes you one minute to read a 6000 byte message -- that
>would be 100 bytes a second or 800 bits per second, roughly 800 baud.
>But that is a gross baud rate, measuring only the flow of bits from
>screen or page to your eyes. What I'm trying to communicate to you
>here is the idea of "net baud rate", the actual amount of
>communication taking place.
>
>For example, suppose you can only read and write in an unrelated
>language that uses the same character set, such as Malay, or Finnish.
>You could still run yours eyes over this page and see each character
>of the text, but there would be no actual communication taking place:
>a net baud rate of zero.
>
>Personally I'm not very good at communicating with people, and I
>expect that for many of you, even though you can read English
>perfectly, the net baud rate for this text is very low, near zero. In
>part this is because of my deficiencies as a writer, but mostly its my
>choice of topics and underlying assumptions.
>
>If I to was write a cheerful account of my last trip to Vancouver
>mentioning only the places visited and people seen, the net baud rate
>would be much higher.
>
>I can think of a few people out there who know me and my favourite
>topics quite well, people who can read most of my text quickly and
>still understand it almost perfectly. But for those people the net
>baud for a piece of text like this one is much lower than you might
>think, because the people I have in mind already have some
>understanding of what I am saying here. In information theory
>'information' is really 'news', what is new, and to people who know me
>this text is "just more of Wilson's crazy ideas" -- not news.
>
>The maximum net baud rate for this message would be for someone who
>has a good understanding of English, an interest and understanding of
>technical matters, BUT has never heard of or seen these ideas before.
>
>Or we could turn that around, and say that if one of you writes a
>message that I can understand easily, but which contains a lot of new
>ideas I've never encountered before, then the net baud rate for me
>reading that message would be quite high.
>
>What I most want to do is to increase the net baud rate for all the
>communication I partake in. I want to send my messages to people who
>will understand them and will find them interesting and newsworthy.
>And I want to receive messages from people who will write stuff I can
>understand, and be interested in, and will find newsworthy (new,
>novel, etc.)
>
>Your own motives for reading and writing messages are unknown to me,
>but I can guess that what I just said in that last paragraph holds
>true for you as well. Doesn't it? Don't you also want to increase or
>maximize the net baud rate of your communication? Think about it,
>please!
>
>One of the ideas that I have been working on for many years involves
>network optimization to maximize the effective or net baud rate of all
>communication on a network (the "net net baud rate", so to speak).
>I've written both about doing this for messages flying about the
>internet, and for interpersonal communication on what I call the
>social network, the network of interacting human beings, mediated
>mostly by speech.
>
>For anyone who has read my web pages or earlier messages, it won't
>come as any surprise (news) to read that this network optimization
>problem is a combinatorial optimization problem, and that I propose to
>solve it by matching people to each other based on personality,
>interest, and education profiles. But let me just emphasize here that
>this is a very solid plank in my platform -- I have written a great
>deal of nonsense over the years, but I think this one point is
>completely solid, susceptible to mathematical proof.
>
>Of all the things I have to say, if there is only one thing you take
>seriously let it be this:
>
> We can maximize the global net baud rate for interpersonal
> communications by using combinatorial optimization to match people
> based on personality, interest, and education profiles.
>
>I'd appreciate your comments on this, whether you agree or not. More
>important, perhaps, I'd appreciate your advice on who might be
>interested in what I have to say. Many of the people reading this
>will be taking it in at a low net baud rate for one reason or another,
>lacking either appropriate educational background or interest in the
>topic, or perhaps being already familiar with the ideas. But even so,
>you could probably recommend a person or a mailing list of people that
>might absorb it more completely. If so, please let me know!
>
> dpw
>
>Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
