Trying to get to root cause of what's actually wrong with my communication capability, I've come to the belief that transplanting a thought from my mind to my wife's mind intact is really hard. Fidelity can break down in several transformations: how clearly the thought is formed in my mind, the words I choose and arrange to express it, how fluidly I can speak them, whether there is impedence in the environment or emotional state, how accurately she hears the words, the precice meanings she applies to each word, the context she overlays and finally, any bias that modulates the meaning.
Even if all of that goes reasonably well, my expression of thought encounters the intent modulation. What does she believe I am trying to accomplish by communicating this thought?
To a large degree, having a positive outcome from any conversation relies on the trust between us, the value we place in the relationship and the willingness of each of us to monitor for and correct misunderstandings so that even when conflict develops, the understanding of the situation is the same for both parties.
What gets me down is knowing that for some (most?) people, the above is so intuitive, they've never had a problem with it. Alas.
In my experience, I would say most people have problems with exactly this.
They don't even think about the possibility of noise/interpretation in the communication.
and they never stopped to think about it the way you did.
If you (+above commenter +any other HN per users) want a good Wikipedia article, the metalanguange/metacommunication ones do a great job of explaining how this works in CS friendly terms - the connection to meta programming is a great aside.
Even if all of that goes reasonably well, my expression of thought encounters the intent modulation. What does she believe I am trying to accomplish by communicating this thought?
To a large degree, having a positive outcome from any conversation relies on the trust between us, the value we place in the relationship and the willingness of each of us to monitor for and correct misunderstandings so that even when conflict develops, the understanding of the situation is the same for both parties.
What gets me down is knowing that for some (most?) people, the above is so intuitive, they've never had a problem with it. Alas.