(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

If you can understand the sentences in the list below, congrats! You're great at English! Most natives have to read them twice or thrice or ten times before they get it.

Here's where encoding spoken language in written form really breaks down, beyond just the usual failure to encode sounds faithfully. In these examples, it would be really important to write out the length of delay between words and which words are said with stress or intonation. It's easier to understand when spoken out loud.

• "The old man the boat."
• "The horse raced past the barn fell."
• "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
• "The complex houses married single soldiers and their families."

See explanations below. But first, try to understand for yourself!

…

Explanations:

• "The old man the boat."
  • the old people are manning the boat
• "The horse raced past the barn fell."
  • You know the horse that was made to race past the barn? Yeah, that horse, it fell down.
• "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
  • this is a pointless sentence meant to confuse you, but it says that time passes fast, and also, that fruit flies enjoy bananas
• "The complex houses married single soldiers and their families."
  • i.e. there are married soldiers living in the apartment complex (or in some other type of building that can be called a 'complex'), and they are living there together with their families, and there are not multiple soldiers and families per apartment but only one (thus 'single')

What links here

• 2023-10-23
• Transparent language

(romankogan.net/adhd/#Auditory Processing)

I understand the above is typical of auditory processing disorder (APD), occurring in a subset of people with #ADHD. I suspect it's not actually about audio and more about language processing, because it happens with sign language too (for me).

I can have trouble listening to someone for especially long without spinning up a parallel track of thought. When I watch video I like to have my fingers on the speed control (varying video speed between 1.5x to 5x depending on the scene) to keep myself fully stimulated.

People talk so slow, especially in professional film.

Exceptions occur with people I like a lot, who don't need to talk fast with me, because I can spend the leftover part of my consciousness on just enjoying our company. Or if I drink alcohol, I can enjoy its buzz.

---

I can also feel slow at translating words into meaning. The meme community calls this Buffering, waiting for the brain to receive the message, and sometimes the lag is significant (up to 10 seconds).

It's not that I'm being distracted. I remember hearing the sounds in your sentence and I've recognized every word. It's just that those words carry no meaning at all for a while, until the appropriate part of my brain is plugged in. Then I go "oh, yeah yeah sorry, I'm with you now".

I've found it helps if I don't watch someone's face but an empty spot next to them, as eye contact seems to make my brain reserve a majority of CPU cycles on spinning its wheels doing nothing.

Subtitled video doesn't have these problems so much.

---

When reading something really cool, for some odd reason I start skipping like this person:

Maybe it's because the cool idea is now occupying my head and I have less resources for language processing.

What links here

• My ADHD signs and symptoms
• Meatspace conversations
• Understand my memory issues
• 2021-10-21

Root problem: to judge how likely something is, we sub in a judgment about representativeness, i.e. characteristicness.

See how this looks in two different failure modes:

• Availability heuristic: To judge the actual rates of homicide, we trust in how typical it feels to encounter reports of homicide.
• Conjunction fallacy: To judge the likelihood of "Poland is invaded followed by a breakdown of relations with the Soviet Union", we trust in how typical the sequence of events feels.

While the standard antidote to the conjunction fallacy is to learn to react to details as additional burdens, and there are multiple band-aids for the Availability heuristic, maybe we can also get to the root of the problem.

Which is…that our inner simulator loves to compare against 'typicality clusters'? And it's easy to see why if you think of it as implementing a neural net: light up more nodes, stronger sense of recognition.

Can we get it to habitually wire up a different sort of neural net?

See picture here: www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside

Not sure where I'm going with that.

Actually that's about words. The dangling node doesn't matter for this.

What we need is a… companion node tied to every node, working as a kind of gatekeeper so the node doesn't light up? Trained to be sensitive to the exact statement it hears, i.e. it knows A influences B doesn't mean B influences A.

<2024-Mar-25> Representativeness heuristic! That's the name for this thing.

#adhd

What is task constipation?

Example. I promise a friend to post an ad on Tradera by lunchtime. Then I spend a few hours on other things. The promised task applies pressure in the back of my head that I'm studiously ignoring.

In the meantime, if my friend texts me, I can't respond or even read the text because I would prefer to have done that task I promised first. So I'm unresponsive and emotionally unavailable.

Then I finally do the task. Freshly clear of "task constipation", I'm free to flood my friend with responses, though they may be much too late to be appreciated.

Countermeasures

• if you decide you don't want to delay responding to people, because it's nice not to delay, then remembering that may make it easier to summon a bit of steel in the stomach and admit "nope, didn't do that yet" even though you're not proud
  • some minimum of self-esteem required
• if you avoid saying what you plan on doing in the first place, this effect won't show up so much
• if it's already very late, you can always think whether or not you want to continue being quiet or talk to this friend. that could drive you to do some of the task.

What links here

• My ADHD signs and symptoms
• Craft tactics to prevent each failure-mode you've seen before
• Reasons we don't do things we want to do
• 2023-10-06