I was in my garage with my keys in my back pocket, checking the tire pressure on my truck, when it started honking at me. My butt triggered the panic button.
I have acute hearing. That was painful and hardly deliberate!
I live in an area where we have these[1], and they're generally not something you see all that often. Their biggest danger isn't their venom (they're less venomous than the diamondback) so much as their curiosity, which can get them into locations they otherwise don't belong. They aren't overly aggressive snakes, and I've encountered them several times over the years.
Alon with bullsnakes, they're extremely useful for getting rid of said rodents—which CAN carry awful pathogens, like hanta virus!
I lived in NC for 6 months once. My boss at the time told me I'd need to watch out for copperheads in September when they come out. Indeed, I did have to shoo one off a bike path when September came.
It's August for us here in the SW US, but there's been construction in the area that has displaced a number of them at odd times of the year.
Fortunately, snakes will generally leave you alone unless they're provoked or cornered. Unfortunately, if you have curios animals (cats, dogs) it can be a much more significant problem!
Human proclivities tend toward repetition as well, partially as a memory/mnemonic device, so I don't see this as disadvantageous. For example, there's a minor opinion in biblical scholarship that John 21 was a later scribal addition because of the end of John 20 seeming to mark the end of the book itself. However, John's tendencies to use specific verbiage and structure provides a much stronger argument that the book was written by the same author—including chapter 21—suggesting that the last chapter is an epilogue.
Care needs to be taken, of course, but ancient works often followed certain patterns or linguistic choices that could be used to identify authorship. As long as this is viewed as one tool of many, there's unlikely much harm unless scholars lean too heavily on the opinions of AI analysis (which is the real risk, IMO).
> unless scholars lean too heavily on the opinions of AI analysis (which is the real risk, IMO).
This is what I was talking about. Knowledge and ideas develop often by violating the prior patterns. If your tool is (theoretically) built to repeat the prior patterns and it frames your work, you might not be as innovative. But this is all very speculative.
This is a really interesting observation, because I'm in an adult discussion class in Sunday school that is arranged like a circle, and I've been trying to figure out why it seems that structure works so well at limiting conversational divergence.
It seems that when everyone is forced to look at each other, it's harder to divest from the main conversation without drawing your attention away from the remainder of the group. It seems better for fostering discussion with a single speaker at a time since everyone can look at that person all at once.
It's not perfect but for larger groups the "circle strategy" definitely seems to work well.
The circle shape makes you feel engaged and able to converse with everyone so it feels cohesive. It's also pretty obvious you were arranged in that shape to emphasis a group conversation activity is taking place.
Kind of the opposite as when you get seated at a restaurant in a long rectangle table. You immediately know it will be difficult to talk to the whole table and will have multiple conversations taking place. If you're at one end, you'll likely only talk to 3-4 people. If you're at the center, you might talk to 3-4 to the left and right but they'll be different conversations. Not that this is a strict law of table talk, just kind of what usually takes place. Sometimes there's something that comes up that gets everyone's attention and the whole table is shouting. An even more extreme example, is a bar top seating, where you are just a line facing the same direction. You might only talk to your neighbors and possibly their neighbor but it's not great at facilitating larger group discussion.
If you ever go to a banquet or wedding where they have round tables but a very tall floral decor piece thing in the middle, it completely breaks the circle advantage. I think eye contact and your ability to convey body language is a major component.
I really hate trying to carry conversation in restaurants for that reason, and because the background noise levels can often get to a point where you can only hear the person sitting right next to you.
You're absolutely right that 1) group composition, 2) room structure, and 3) motive(s) are all important factors. As someone else observed, having a "discussion leader" is also important in that sort of setting.
Your case is relatively unusual and unlike general conversations, since you have:
- a topic that everybody knows will be the focus, and
- an audience that actively values your conversation.
Outside your core discussion time is when you'll see general discussion tropes. If people are (generally) neither leaving nor arriving, in my experience we see transient circles of 6-8 that split (if more than 8 people, or if multiple topics persist) and merge (if fewer than 6 people). The article's limit of 4 doesn't apply if movement between different groups is considered a feature rather than a bug.
That's exactly it, and I really like your observation that the "limit of 4" doesn't apply in some cases. Before/after class, we have the exact experience you mentioned here where people will transiently go around talking to different groups (often 2 or 3 individuals, sometimes more where there are more listeners than speakers).
What's really interesting about your observation is how the rule-of-thumb breaks down when the conversation is limited to more confined topics or: If the individuals see each other with some regularity outside the group setting (no need to engage in extended conversation about who's doing what) or some of the conversations involve topics brought up in the course of the class.
Is there a clear leader/facilitator in that discussion class? Someone who keeps the discussion "on track" and prevents it from wandering from the chosen topic?
That would be different from the spontaneous, unstructured conversations the article is talking about.
Now, it does break down somewhat when the core discussion is over or if someone is a bit disruptive (which has happened recently).
As a sibling comment to yours wrote, it DOES help that the topic is understood among everyone present, there is a clear intent to the gathering, and everyone has approximately the same motives.
I'm going to shamelessly borrow your phrasing, because what you've described is exactly what happens: It's a rotation through other participants so neither the study leader nor other individuals have to "[carry] the conversation." It's really interesting, because it fosters conversation that can lead to interesting questions, observations, or other information that might not otherwise come to light. There are some significant deficiencies, of course, but I think works fairly well depending on the group.
Where it breaks down is if one person starts to dominate the conversation for the duration of the class and carries it off-topic, or if someone becomes combative. So, the group composition and personalities can influence the relative success.
That's a really interesting observation too. I've always preferred round dining tables for six people at home and hadn't really made the connection with the idea that it does allow for a single conversation rather than a rectangle with two rows of three people facing each other when it easily breaks into separate conversations.
It's interesting that you see a large group of people having one conversation as a success. Personally I really dislike those situations and would much rather it splinter into smaller groups.
I think it depends. In the context of a discussion class, it makes sense, because you don't want to deviate too far from the purpose of the study. As someone else pointed out, it doesn't work as well for unstructured conversation.
This is really fascinating to me, because it explains some things.
I have a friend who crushed the tip of one of her fingers, but it wasn't amputated. She's described sensations very similar to yours, presumably from nerve damage. I never asked a bunch of questions about it, and now I wish I had after reading this post.
If it ever comes up in conversation again, may I share a link to your comment with her?
i dont have any nerve damage (that i know of) but if i touch along my ring or little finger near the knuckle, sometimes i feel a tickling sensation on my cheek next to my ear. kinda weird!
> i dont have any nerve damage (that i know of) but if i touch along my ring or little finger near the knuckle, sometimes i feel a tickling sensation on my cheek next to my ear. kinda weird!
That's funny. I think I can reproduce that.
Do you often use those knuckles to touch that area of your face? Might be that those nerves fire together so often, your brain strongly associates them. I have a habit of massaging that area of my face while thinking and slouching on my chair.
Unrelated but similar: I live in a rural area, so we don't get street delivery of mail. Instead, we need to apply for a PO Box. Every year, to verify that only residents are using the PO Boxes, the Post Office sends out a renewal form, and you have to show up with a current bill and your driver's license. The latter makes sense—the State, presumably, goes through the validation of your address, and you sign their forms under penalty of perjury, etc., the the former is hilarious.
So, to receive the very bill used to authenticate "current residency," the bill has to go through the Post Office (remember what I said about no street delivery? anything that's mailed to our street address goes... to our PO Box!), and then we show it to them to validate that we are receiving email to that address—which cannot be independently validated outside the driver's license.
The PO Box we're renewing is therefore used to validate itself. And the fun part is that if you delay in returning the form, they'll block off your box.
Doubtful we'll ever know for sure, but sometimes it's difficult to discern with cats whether they know what to do but are just letting us do the work for them or if they genuinely don't know.
I suspect the answer is somewhere in between. Our cats have an approximate model of the house and if they see something outside the window, they'll run out the door and to that window knowing where the object of interest was in relation to the interior of the house. But, this comes from years of conditioning. They've been upstairs and have looked out the windows, but when I've spoken to them while they were immediately below the window they've sat on, they started crying apparently having no idea a) how I got up there and b) where in relation to their known "map" of the house I was. (In complete fairness this could be because they spend very little time upstairs since, unlike most cats, they absolutely love commotion and socializing with humans.)
Yeah, really... I picked up a 128GiB card from the store on something of a whim a while back, and I'm not even sure I paid more than about $18USD (with tax) for it. I bet I could have gotten it cheaper, but I was impatient.
Funny. It used to be if you received that sort of response, you might imagine the author being pressed for time and giving a sort of prewritten/canned copy response.
I guess LLMs have removed some of the tedium from the process while making it more tedious for the recipient. That's annoying.
I was in my garage with my keys in my back pocket, checking the tire pressure on my truck, when it started honking at me. My butt triggered the panic button.
I have acute hearing. That was painful and hardly deliberate!