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What Great Listeners Actually Do

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Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#31

Post by daveevad »

woodandsteel wrote: post #6
DarkTree wrote: post #5

Honestly, it seems as if the article is just bending the definition of listening. It appears their idea of "the best listener" is the person who engages you the most in conversation. Sure, that person might be a more valuable person to talk to, but I fail to see why that has to be the definition of a great listener.

No, it is not arbitrarily changing the definition. They did a study where they asked people to identify how good others were at listening, and then studied what behaviors distinguished those who got the highest ratings.

That doesn't necessarily identify good listening skills, which perhaps was OP's intent.

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#32

Post by WalterBright »

hoodoof wrote: post #22

My ex partner always said I didn't listen to her. I really want to be a better listener. It seems to me that the key to listening is to actually be present and not half thinking about something else or what YOU want to say. Hard to do. >> thus, if you’ve been criticized (for example) for offering solutions rather than listening, guilty

I too am guilty of every characteristic of bad listening. It's turning out to be a hard thing to work on.

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#33

Post by AdieuToLogic »

One of the easiest metrics I've found to determine whether or not oneself is a good/great listener is to honestly assess:

Am I busy thinking about what I'm going to say when I get a chance?

The more the answer is "yes" the less listening a person is performing.

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#34

Post by cellularmitosis »

woodandsteel wrote: post #6
DarkTree wrote: post #5

Honestly, it seems as if the article is just bending the definition of listening. It appears their idea of "the best listener" is the person who engages you the most in conversation. Sure, that person might be a more valuable person to talk to, but I fail to see why that has to be the definition of a great listener.

No, it is not arbitrarily changing the definition. They did a study where they asked people to identify how good others were at listening, and then studied what behaviors distinguished those who got the highest ratings.

The article is freely interchanging the concepts "being a good listener" and "being perceived as being a good listener" from one sentence to the next. That's worse than arbitrarily changing the definition (but being consistent with it).

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#35

Post by pizza »

The computational complexity varieties of listening:

Let n be the number of things the other is talking about (tricky to define a "thing" but, whatever?, use a consistent thing metric)

- O(1) listening: ignoring/may as well not be there - reading your phone while the other talks to you

- O(n) listening: loading their information into your brain while they talk - e.g. repeating back to them, nodding to salient points

- O(n log n) listening: sorting the information they've talked about - talking about the most important bits (after hearing everything)

- O(n^2) listening: cross-comparing all the things they've said for informational pairings

- O(|V|_n + |E|_n + |V|_m + |E|_m) listening: suppose your thoughts are laid out in network form, |V|_x and |E|_x are the # vertices and edges for person x. You are m. Then this is breadth-first search on both your idea-networks.

etc. Thoughts?

edit: I wonder how P and NP come into this! For instance, if someone asks you a question that takes P work, you should be able to derive the answer from what you've talked about alone. But if someone asks you something like, "Were you at that party 25 years ago?" and you have since forgotten, but then your other friend produces a photograph of you in a pair of silly glasses and a clown afro, you can verify quickly that you were! The hardness of remembering something might be classifiable by computational class?

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#36

Post by [deleted] »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #24
GuiA wrote: post #13

"People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above average." Well, the vast majority of people are actually above average drivers. If you got into 0 accidents over the past year, then you are doing better than average. (Similarly, most people have more legs than the average human)

Sorry, I'm a little slow today. Can you elaborate on that last statement? Are you invoking a trick meaning to the word "average"?

[deleted]

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#37

Post by r00fus »

Bahamut wrote: post #15
woodandsteel wrote: post #9

As someone who has taught and researched listening skills, I found this article very insightful. However, let me add that the simple skills they described at the beginning (not interrupting, saying "um-hum," and being able to repeat back), are still good to teach because they are better than what most people do much of the time. Here's another HN link on listening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12228062

I despise the tactic of repeating back what other people said - it shows me that the other person isn't really dwelling on what I said, or more often in my experience, are using that to distort what I am saying in order to fit a particular agenda. I rather someone not fake listening in that case and wasting everyone's time.

Distorted Active Listening is conversational terrorism http://www.vandruff.com/art_converse.html

(edit: added link)

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#38

Post by InclinedPlane »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #24
GuiA wrote: post #13

"People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above average." Well, the vast majority of people are actually above average drivers. If you got into 0 accidents over the past year, then you are doing better than average. (Similarly, most people have more legs than the average human)

Sorry, I'm a little slow today. Can you elaborate on that last statement? Are you invoking a trick meaning to the word "average"?

Most people (more than 50%) have an above average number of legs, arms, and eyes, but a below average number of nipples. This is because having more than 2 legs, arms, or eyes is exceedingly rare, whereas there's a small number of folks who have 1 or none, which brings the average below 2. Similarly, extra nipples are more common than losing a nipple. It's the difference between median/mode and mean.

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#39

Post by solipsism »

pizza wrote: post #35

The computational complexity varieties of listening: Let n be the number of things the other is talking about (tricky to define a "thing" but, whatever?, use a consistent thing metric) - O(1) listening: ignoring/may as well not be there - reading your phone while the other talks to you - O(n) listening: loading their information into your brain while they talk - e.g. repeating back to them, nodding to salient points…

The brain is massively parallel, your analysis seems to assume 0 parallelism.

Re: What Great Listeners Actually Do

#40

Post by solipsism »

neom wrote: post #10

In my experience building organizations that have totaled over 275 humans: it's a rare, rare person that can truly distinguish hearing from listening. The key to being a good listener is simple: always, to the absolute best of your cognition, meet the speaker in their place.

You should come up with a better "key" -- one which doesn't require expansion. Wtf is meeting someone in their place?
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