Listening to the thoughts and opinions of people with differing cultures or political opinions with the intention to understand, instead of respond, is such a powerful tool. It can help dismantle prejudices, make you a better advocate for your own values, and/or help practice giving people room to communicate what they really intending to say rather than giving preloaded responses. I think most people would benefit greatly from engaging in this kind of practice on a regular basis.

I have experienced this kind expectation to reality relationship in some of my personal relationships. These people had an idea of what they could be if they could just stop being inadequate that only served to generate shame and guilt. Often, there was never any real grounding for the things they expected of themselves, but they felt the weight of those expectations as if they were an undeniable reflection of their potential. I am sure many of this is related to external social expectations that are later internalized. These expectations seem to rarely serve as drivers for someone to be more productive and more often seem to break people down and make them overall less likely to engage with life.

One of our recent lectures identified the importance of an improvement mindset. Tools like these could help avoid developing unrealistic expectations that ultimately dissuade attempts at self improvement. They could provide an interpretive lens to contextualize feedback in ways that are more constructive.

This bit of information reminds me of a few studies and lawsuits that have occurred in the last decade or two regarding names on job applications. The inquiries focused on the concept that someone's name being less culturally familiar to a recruiter would negatively bias an applicant's chances of getting to the interview stage. This effect was studied using identical resumes with different names associated to measure employer responses. This seems like a great example of the primacy effect making biases that are sometimes difficult to identify more obvious.

I can see this effect happen where you may not think expectation would matter very much. There are many times where someone has stopped to say something to me, but the content of the statement is outside of my current mode of thinking. A perfectly understandable statement can become completely unintelligible purely because the context of the message did not prepare the receiver to comprehend it. If something like this can happen in the case of straight forward comprehension, the effect must me exacerbated by the complexity or obscurity of the intended communication.

I have dealt with many experiences like this in my professional life. At one time I was a manager for a large, multinational bank, and part of my duties was taking calls that escalated for whatever reason above the agent that made first contact with the customer. We employed many people from the Philippines and also some from India in addition to our local American representatives. There were countless times that customers would completely pass up one of the offshore representatives and demand to speak to someone at my level because they assumed someone with their accent couldn't complete the task. There were even many American representatives that had immigrated to the United States later in life that would get the same treatment if there was any detectable foreign accent. For many of these customers, something I thought to be inconsequential, was enough to write someone off completely as a competent professional. Those calls always left me thinking about that dynamic after they were over.

The concept of a unique communication pattern being held within small groups, families, or communities is something I have often wondered about. How much of my communication with my wife of 10 years is functionally unintelligible to the general population? This must be an example of the way the regional dialects and, eventually, entirely new languages come to be. The continual compartmentalization of customs that is so isolated for so long that is truly does become an entirely new system.

Building foundational knowledge in any specialized field you want to engage with is often necessary to being able to properly engage. What happens when the specialized field is government and people with differing levels of ability from differing backgrounds all have to be able to engage with this "specialized field". There are so many barriers to just exercise your rights and freedoms that are likely underappreciated. Tailoring communication strategies surrounding these issues to include as many different kinds of people can have massive effects on the political engagement of a population and their ability to get access to services they need and have a right to access.

This specific sentence, more than anywhere in the following paragraph, brings stark attention to one of the biggest professional struggles I have personally come across. This speaks to trainability in general, which is not only useful for the aspiring student, but also critical for an effective member of a team. The ability to be receptive to information is often so much more important that the ability to send information.

I have always found the philosophy of categories to be super interesting. It seems than no matter how hard we try, humanity is completely incapable of providing all encompassing, categorical explanations for abstract concepts. Its appears like a constant reminder of our inability to grasp the scope of our own cognition. This problem becoming a central issue of AI development seems to speak to the eternal struggle against the systemic imperfections in our communication methods.