The Toilet Door

So there's an election due in September and this means that both major political parties are starting to have some 'serious' debate about the state of the economy, debt, policies and so forth. One thing that I've noticed is the way all parties use numbers as talking points as metrics for success or failure.

A hypothetical example would be, "We've created 150,000 jobs and unemployment has dropped to 5.2%". At face value this seems like a good statement to make, but the more I think about it, the more it seems meaningless. Creating jobs is obviously a good thing but it's the numbers they throw around in a debate that concerns me. What does creating 150,000 jobs mean? Did the public service grow by 150,000? Are the jobs in industries or fields we should be investing in or pulling out of? Are they full time jobs or is this casual work? Similarly with the unemployment rate dropping to 5.2%, what was it before? What is the underemployment rate?

These are all questions I'm thinking of when I hear someone mention something with numbers, what do those numbers really mean in the larger context of everything else. Now obviously numbers are important, having any metrics, even flawed ones are better than having no metrics, part of the issue I realise now is that people don't really understand numbers.

A study was performed testing if people would behave differently for a reward if it was $3 or 300 cents. The results, surprisingly indicated that some people preferred 300 cents. Even if  cents and dollars were switched around, people were more easily swayed by the larger number.

This knowledge has some interesting consequences for looking at political discourse. Are the politicians aware of this effect and use it to mislead or confuse citizens about the state of things? It's possible, there's limited time in media segments to accurately and adequately describe what a number truly represents, it's probably more important that the reader or viewer simply remembers that it was 150,000 jobs created or that a policy will cost $94 billion.

Speaking of policy costs, it's interesting to observe that the cost of everything is often put in vacuum. $94 billion sounds like a lot and it rightly is for an individual to own, but in the context of an entire country that has a yearly GDP in the order of $1.5 trillion ($1500 billion), it doesn't seem as large, it'll seem even smaller if instead of stating the total cost over 10 years and comparing to a yearly GDP, we state the yearly cost $9.4 billion.

I'm going to keep an eye on how it progresses and see if there's a correlation between the way the numbers are presented and how they are meant to be viewed. Obviously positive achievements would be promoted and negative achievements downplayed.

As part of writing, and being a social creature in general I'm often thinking about communication and how it actually works. There's a number of categories and ways to categorise communication. Do we split it up between verbal and nonverbal? Or do we sort it by the number and roles of the participants, one to one, one to many, many to many, many to one. Or can we sort it by the time delay between the sending and receiving of messages, from symmetric real time to asymmetric with a long delay. We can even split it up by ephemeral or non-ephemeral

I'll start with the one to one communications as they are the type that most people have, and can comfortably understand already. Within this classification, we can have several sub classifcations

• In person - verbal and non verbal
• Verbal only (phone or skype)
• Written only (texting, chatting)

We can also add the non realtime symmetric communications

• Verbal only (voice mail)
• Written only (email, letters)
• Video messages (contains verbal and nonverbal information)

Lastly, we have the non realtime, asymmetric communications

• Written only (Books, blog posts, documents)
• Verbal only (audio instructions, audio books)
• Video only (movies, tv shows, instructional videos)

Now I'm a bit skeptical of including movies and tv shows, as they wouldn't solely fall under a definition of a one to one conversation. They also can be one to many. It's hard to call them a conversation, but it can be classed as a one to one communication, except one party is delivering information, and the other party is receiving it. Anyway, there's far too many to cover in one post, but I'll focus on the first one, in person communication.

One to one conversations in person are probably the most important thing to get right, but the way we are taught in schools to communicate represents an idealised way we should communicate compared with the way we actually communicate. Typically, we spend a good deal of time learning about nouns, verbs, adjectives, sentence structure. The purpose of this is to develop mastery of the language. Now I can only write about Australian English, but I imagine most of what I'm about to discuss is relevant as well. We are taught to communicate using our words, since if everyone can agree on their definitions, then all ambiguity should be removed.

For the most part, this is correct, communication with words is what we should aim for, but where things get complicated is in all the non lexical communication. The tone, the pacing, the emphasis on certain syllables all delivers additional information. Additionally, the body language communicates information about the state people are in, opening up, making yourself appear larger communicates confidence, where as crossing arms, crouching, or making yourself smaller communicates insecurity and fear. The distance placed between people, the angle between them, the amount of eye contact all communicate information about how the two people perceive each other.

Now all this information is a lot to consciously consider, for the vast majority of people, it's mostly subconscious. If you had to actively manage your body language, your tone, your posture as well as choosing the correct words to say to effectively communicate your message, your brain would be fairly overloaded. This is where the ambiguity comes into one to one conversations in person. The words someone is saying might be what you want to hear, but the rest of what they communicate adds significant weight about whether or not you can trust those words. It is especially difficult when the words and the body language are communicating different messages, which one are you to believe? Is the person actively controlling their body language or is a result of their subconscious.

Over the years I've been doing a lot of reading about communication, body language, posture, non verbal cues and various other topics. One of the things I try to do now, is to simply make conscious observations during conversations about these things. What is my posture, what is theirs? Am I fidgeting or am I engaged with what they are saying? I view it as trying to peak into my subconscious to see what it is I like or dislike about someone. I also view as a challenge to peak into their subconscious/conscious to see how they feel about me and what I'm saying.

I'll definitely come back to this topic at some point, but that's all for now.