Doorway effect

The doorway or (whatever) is already a natural traffic bottleneck. And these people are making it worse by stopping right in the middle of it.

I suspect it's because of this psychological effect. But it's so annoying that many people's response seems to be to stop in their tracks. Okay maybe you've forgotten why you went through this doorway. But have you also suddenly forgotten that you're in the middle of a crowd of people trying to move around? Apparently so.

In four words, the above comment is: harsh, judgmental, not curious.

Below, I hope to (a) offer another point of view about how your comment may be perceived and (b) demonstrate to you that the sample sizes and replicated studies regarding the Doorway Theory are unimpressive.

First, you made this discussion personal, and it wasn't particularly constructive. It is hard to say what goals you might have, but if your goal is curious conversation, I don't think this is the way. Do you? What is your experience/philosophy/science of productive conversation? Based only on this interaction, I wonder if you may not have thought about this very much and/or you aren't putting it into practice and/or you're taking something out on me.

Second, the word "stereotypes" gets casually thrown around. Empirically, how often would you say that using it advances constructive conversation?

Third, using this definition of stereotype: "a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing." ... why would you think my view of this is "fixed" or unchanging? I don't see a rational reason for seeing that based on what I wrote.

Fourth, for people that think in a Bayesian way -- and I think such a model is fairly useful in modeling how people actually operate -- we all have priors. Please do not accuse me of stereotyping when I'm only sharing a prior. One key question is what we do with them as we gain more information.

Fifth, on what basis would you validly say that my prior regarding my confidence in psychological studies is an "over-broad stereotype"? I've tried, but I don't think you can. You can disagree with my prior -- that's fair game. And we can talk empirically and rationally about how/why we have different priors.

Sixth, your comment shifts away the context I intended (I hope it was clear given the context, but maybe it was not) and criticizes a straw man. You wrote "There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of context and context changes on many different forms of cognition, going back decades". Perhaps this literature is largely sound and replicable. But that's not what I was referring to here; I was discussing the Doorway Effect in particular. From what I've seen so far, there were two early studies, both at Notre Dame, consisting of about 90 people in total. This alone certainly isn't enough in my mind to give high credence to the results. At least one subsequent attempt to replicate was mixed. So, please don't tell me to "do some google scholar searches". That is rather presumptive.

Would you like to continue to discussion on a better foot going forward?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking

You're describing a correlation but haven't established causation. Is the causality:

someone using the word "pedantic" -> uninteresting conversation

Or could the causality be:

person being pedantic -> uninteresting conversation

AND

person being pedantic -> someone using the word "pedantic"

?

I have many experiences where a pedantic person shuts down a conversation and nobody uses the word "pedantic", so I feel there's strong evidence that pedantry, not the use of the word "pedantic", makes conversations uninteresting.

> Using the word "pedantic" often gets perceived as a kind of slight. It is hard to say if the speaker realizes this consciously or not. It feels to me like it conveys a subtext, as if "why are you being so detailed about this?". This goes along with a general attitude of conveying less curiosity and more certainty. Speaking for myself, on forums such as this, I'd rather learn about other's perspectives and reasoning rather than discount them.

With love, I'd like to gently ask: is that what you think you were doing when you discounted the researcher's perspective because they didn't define the word "doorway"?

In my experience, whether or not something is a slight has been irrelevant to whether it's true, so perceiving things as slights is counterproductive to maintaining an attitude of curiosity. Particularly, I'm curious about what I can do better.

It's worth noting that the reason I'm recognizing your behavior as pedantic here is that I have received the feedback that I'm prone to being pedantic, and as a result, I've worked very hard to recognize when I am being pedantic. I say this because I hope you'll recognize that I'm giving you feedback which I found helpful to myself and hope will help you, not because I think I'm better than you or I'm trying to hurt you.

I'd venture you may have received this feedback too, and received it as a slight or shutting down the conversation.

Indeed given some of the things you're referencing such as "perfect Bayesian agent", believing free will is an illusion, and Sam Harris, I strongly suspect we have very similar intellectual backgrounds.

> I don't like using "pedantic" when I want to encourage curious conversation. Speaking personally, when I hear it, it gives me the impression the other person is not demonstrating a mindset or vocabulary for the kind of communication that I find most valuable.

The person you are communicating also has a mindset and vocabulary for the kind of communication that they find most valuable. You don't get to force everyone into your communication preferences, and attempting to do so is a surefire way to prevent communication entirely. Even if your communication preferences are objectively better than theirs (which is a real possibility!), the content of the communication is likely much more valuable than the means of communication.

My experience is that the most valuable communication is a product of collaboration between both parties to build a common terminology. That collaboration can't happen if you insist on your own preferred forms of communication. Maybe if you could get the other person to use your form of communication it would be better, but you can't ever get anyone to communicate exactly how you want, so that's irrelevant. And notably, your preferred communication probably isn't perfect in every way.

> I simply want to add that I have a low-to-middling confidence in psychology based studies in general, at least out of the gate, until I dig into (or find someone else I trust who has) the study.

Same.

Part of my objection to insisting on a stricter definition of the word "doorway" is that it doesn't address any of the reasons my confidence is low. If I have 51% confidence in a study of doorways, it's not particularly interesting to me to improve that to 51% confidence in a doorways between wooden doorframes painted white that connect two rooms of equal size within a 20,000 square foot residential property that costs $70k in a top 10% school district. Specificity isn't adding anything pragmatic here because I still can't base most decisions on such low-confidence conclusions. If anything, the conclusion is less useful, because it only applies to such a narrow situation.

But, you asked about falsifiability--and I think that's a pretty different topic from confidence.