On Interruption

The Friendship Market

In a well-functioning friendship market, an interruption is a credible signal that you have something valuable to say.

At a general level, interrupting is positive-value if the interrupting comment adequately responds to the interrupted comment. That is, interrupting maximizes utility if and only if the person, upon hearing what you say, would not find it worthwhile to say what they are saying when they were interrupted, or would change what they say due to the information conveyed through the interrupting comment (and the value of that change is worth having to make the change).

Interrupting is negative value otherwise.

Granted, there are other reasons interrupting might be negative value. Some people just really hate being interrupted. BThe important thing is this: the value of the interruption greatly depends on the quality of the interrupting statement. Interrupting is “gambling” on the quality of your statement. In a functional market, you’re gambling with your own money.

In a competitive market for friends and conversation, a person who repeatedly makes negative-value interruptions will internalize the costs of their miscreance. Their value as a conversational partner will fall (people will not want to hang out with them) and thus, in the long run, they will shoulder the burden of their interruptions, even though the short-run costs fall on their conversational partners. In the long run, they will end up in conversations with other low-value parties who wouldn’t otherwise have anyone with whom to converse.

In an uncompetitive market for friends and conversation, the cost of negative-value interruptions is not internalized. Imagine you’re locked in a room with 2 people forever. In Hell. If they’re pointlessly interrupting you, there’s noting you can do about it. Sure, it makes you miserable, since you can’t escape them. But it doesn’t cost them anything.

Granted, you could have systems to internalize costs even in a non-competitive market for conversation. Both players in the conversation might adopt a “tit for tat” strategy of shrieking whenever the other party interrupts them in a negative-value way.

Competition is just one way to have a well functioning market. The important distinction is between well-functioning markets (markets where costs are internalized) and dysfunctional markets (markets where they are not).

Interruptions as a Signal of Conversational Value

In a well-functioning market for conversation and society, interrupting someone is a very credible signal of the quality of what you’re saying. If someone says something low-value after their partner stopped speaking, that isn’t that bothersome. The alternative would have just been silence. So, speaking in-turn is never that costly, even if the speech is low value. Contrast that with interruptions. If someone interrupts you to say something low value, that imposes a great cost – not only did they add no value to the conversation, they prevented you from adding value. Thus, the stakes of interruptions are higher than for other speech. Every time you interrupt, you gamble your reputation on the value of what you’re saying. In a well-functioning market, the value of your reputation is high.

Now, interrupting is not the only conversational behavior that is “high stakes.” Here are some others:

1. Speaking at length
2. Initiating a conversation
3. Breaking a conversational norm
4. Speaking in a particularly attention-grabbing manner
5. Making a statement with embedded inferences or obliquey (this forces the conversational partner to trace the line of reasoning themselves, which will turn out to have been a waste of their time if the reasoning was poor).
6. Speaking unmelliflously; using strange and offputting language.
7. Speaking unapologetically.
8. Making objections (making an objection is a waste of everyone’s time if everyone could already see how the original speaker would answer. Alternatively, it’s extremely useful if it corrects an error by the other speaker)
9. Making jokes (jokes either land or they don’t. If they don’t land, saying them was pointless).

When you speak in suchbways, and it wasn’t worthwhile, there was a great cost. You demanded attention, and you didn’t justify making that demand.

There are other ways to speak that are especially low risk:

1. Asking clarificatory questions
2. Thanking the speaker; apologizing – (almost) everyone likes to be flattered; talented flattery and untalented flattery are of similar value. Though there is more value in talented flattery, that’s not because we enjoy high-quality flattery the same way we enjoy high-quality insight. Talented flattery is more valuable because it is more convincing. Thus, sincere flattery is almost always a safe conversational choice.
3. Being kind, likeable, and polite. – Even stupid comments are endearing if spoken by a kind, likeable person.
4. Asking questions, generally. This is low value because, if the question is dumb, the other person can just answer quickly.

So, we can see that in conversation, there are more or less two possible strategies:

1. High Risk: regularly interrupting, making lots of jokes, especially off-color humor, speaking at length, using complex reasoning.
2. Low Risk: waiting for your turn, speaking briefly, speaking softly, apologizing, asking clarifactory questions.

You may notice that the people in your life tend to follow one of those two strategies.

Furthermore, communities differ. Hisk risk strategies are traditioinally associated with men, Jews, Italians, Lawyers, the Northeast, Economists, Physicists, South Asians, Australians, the Dutch, Twitter, comedians, urbanites, Wall Street, and any group referred to with the epithet “____ Bros.”

In particular, analytic philsophy seminars and Economics seminars used to have a reputation for use of extremely high risk strategies. Interruption was ubiquitous, objections were loud and explicit, speakers would often be required to literally run their calculations on the board.

Many people found such a community discomfiting, and prefer lower risk strategies.

Low risk strategies are associated with women, Methodists, Sociologists & Anthropologists, librarians, therapists, American Indians, the rural, Midwesterners, and the Japanese.

A community of high risktaking excels at quickly identifying who has worthwhile things to say – everyone is staking their reputation all the time.

A community of low risktaking excels at preventing annoying bullshit.

Thus, there are (roughly) three types of communities, and you can tell which one you’re in based on who interrupts:

A Well-Functioning Market: (High variance in interruption; interruptions are generally high value).

If you live in a functioning market, costs are internalized and high-value speech is rewarded, so the people who speak in the High Risk fashion will tend to be people who actually have interesting things to say.

Now, that doesn’t mean that many people use the high risk strategy. You can have a well-functioning market where there are few interruptions. That will be one where people just really, really hate being interrupted. The sign of a functioning market is high variance in strategies, where strategy is correlated with ability. Talented talkers will tend to adopt high-risk strategies, since high risk strategies are rewarded if they lead to good outcomes. Poor talkers will tend to take low-risk strategies, in order to minimize losses.

A Poorly-Functioning Market: (High variance in interruption; interruptions are often low value).

If you live in a poorly functioning market, there will be lots of people who have full social lives and adopt a high-risk strategy, but nevertheless bloviate. Strategies are adopted based on personal preference, not skill. Many talented talkers take low-risk strategies because they aren’t rewarded for high value speech, and many poor talkers take high-risk strategies because they aren’t subject to market discipline.

A Middly Functioning Market: (low variance in interruption).

In a middly functioning market, everyone adopts a similarly risky strategy, because social forces compel every person to act the same, regardless of differences in talent.

Such social forces impose a cost (risky but high-value speech is prevented). However, they also have a benefit (blowhards are prevened from menacing the innocent). This isn’t a first best solution. Ideally, talented talkers (and only talented talkers) would adopt high risk strategies, providing value to everyone. But it might be hard to police blowhards without also suppressing talent. In that case, it might be best to have a hard rule against high-risk behavior.

The mark of such a society will be that everyone adopts basically the same strategy everyone else uses.

Now, technically you could have a society where social forces compelled a high risk strategy. But it’s hard to imagine that actually happening. That is, it’s hard to imagine a society where we punish blowhards for not talking enough. So, few societies will compel everyone to take high-risk strategies.

Beyond Function & Dysfunction

Beyond the question of function & dysfunction, some societies will tend to have riskier strategies while others will tend to have more cautious ones.

A society would tend to encourage risky strategies when the following conditions hold:

1. People don’t happen to be bothered by interruptions very much (high tolerance for bloviating)
2. The value of speech is agreed (that is, everyone mostly agrees on what speech is high value vs. low value)
3. The value of speech is predictable (such that a person can know the value of their speech before deciding to say it)
4. The value of speech is high (in general, people do not value their tranquility very highly).

What communities are like this? Well, it will be communities where speech is more of a game, there are many common projects, and it is easy to determine what other people want to know.

Ideally, an academic field should involve a lot of high risk strategies. Academics should be hungry for information, and have well-defined standards for what is a valuable argument and what is not. Everyone should be engaged in a common project of inquiry where reasoning is explicit. So, it should be easy to tell where the holes are that ought to be filled. That is, speech-value should be high, predictable and agreed).

A dysfunctional academic field would not reward high-risk strategies. In a dysfunctional field, lots of communication is implicit; so it’s hard to tell what arguments people are looking for. There is a split between the official standards for high-value speech and what people actually want to hear. Eeveryone has different ideas of what’s high value speech and what isn’t.

Now, not everything in the world should be an academic department. Outside academia, values are plural; trying to predict ahead of time the value of your speech to another is hubris, so you probably should take low-risk strategies.

But the decline of high risk strategies in academia in the last few decades is almost certainly a sign of research paradigms breaking down without replacement. Or just a general psychological divestment from inquiry, as a project.