Some little thoughts

[brainwane]

I wonder whether area code redlining was a thing (a very hasty search does not turn up anything) stopping people in different neighborhoods from easily talking with each other across racial lines.

Maybe TNG : Ramayana : DS9 :: Mahabharata? And Data is a bit like Hanuman and Odo is a bit like Karna.... But Picard : Rama :: Sisko : ?

In an era of very low media/consumer choice and availability, Book Of The Month and monthly record subscription clubs were popular. The rise of subscription box services comes as consumers have so much choice and availability that we desire better discoverability and curation for that choice. And book clubs also provide some of the same value; "this is the book we're reading" also helps the reader say no to other new books (for now) and ignore the rest of the To Be Read pile.

Some people are actually fine, most of the time, with probabilistic communication and not being certain that they're hearing or being heard properly. This is tough for me to grasp.

Comments

[lilysea]

What is probabilistic communication?

[brainwane]

Good question. I mean .... Let's say there is deterministic communication, where both sides only consider the transaction a success if the speaker and recipient are both pretty sure the recipient has received the message, and they usually check whether success is likely, and if it seems unlikely, then that's a problem that needs fixing. And if the speaker starts to say something, and then gets interrupted, speaker or recipient notice that and prioritize coming back to that interrupted communication once the interruption is finished/put aside. And so, once a thing is said and understood, repetition does not happen much, or causes annoyance when it does happen.

And then there is probabilistic communication, where it's more ok if some individual sentences/questions get dropped/misunderstood/interrupted and never followed up on/answered, because over time the group will collectively remember/repeat stuff and ... I guess the state of everyone's head will be eventually consistent.

I'm sure there are linguistics concepts including Gricean maxims that apply to all this.

[elysdir]

I’m curious: is deterministic communication a special case of probabilistic communication, with the probability being particularly high?

I ask because you said “pretty sure” and “likely” in the description of deterministic communication.

…Or is the focus here more on intent and preference than on the likelihood of information being successfully transferred?

[brainwane]

I don't know, sorry. I am writing pretty quickly here and not being precise in my diction.

[brainwane]

Probably intent, with big side effects on cadence, transaction length, communication type, chances of things falling through the cracks, etc.

[seekingferret]

There is this weird thing that is possibly related where my new subordinate who I am trying to train to be a useful engineer someday will nod or otherwise signal understanding after I explain something... and then I will explicitly ask him if he understands what I said and he'll say no.

[brainwane]

Oh hey, I have run into the nod-of-acknowlegment that looks very similar to the nod-of-understanding before! A frustrating impedance mismatch; sympathies.

[seekingferret]

Hmm... I hadn't really processed it that way before. I've been reading it as areluctance to admit not knowing/understanding something because of perceived lack of job security. Maybe you're right. Either way, damnit, I need him to start admitting when he needs more explanation or he won't learn.

[brainwane]

You open to advice on this?

[seekingferret]

Sure

[wohali]

Even worse, I learned while living in Japan that "Hai!" (yes) doesn't necessarily mean "Yes, I agree with you," but can also mean "Yes, I heard that you said something just now that I may or may not have understood!"

This lead to some very confusing conversations with the team I was leading at the time. :(

[bibliofile]

> area code redlining
Oh, you mean exchanges? Maybe. (Area codes are too big and recent.) I always assumed that exchanges were built based on physical limitations (but then I'm from Chicago, where the entire city is laid out flat on a grid system).

[brainwane]

Maybe that is what I mean? Not sure, need to learn/read more sometime.

probabilistic communication

[bibliofile]

Is that a technical term?

(Some days I wonder that any pair of humans manages to communicate at all, never mind meaningfully.)

Re: probabilistic communication

[brainwane]

It is not! I made it up. I think.

[ckd]

I wouldn't think area codes would be the issue, but rather long distance vs local call areas which depended on the particular Bell company and/or state regulators. When I was a kid, Seattle and Tacoma were both in the same area code (and are still part of the same LATA) but Seattle was intra-LATA long distance (you had to dial 1 before the number and would be charged per-minute/per-call, but you didn't need the area code) so I couldn't call Seattle BBSes.

[brainwane]

Oh yeah - I dealt with a similar issue at one point, where another city was in my area code but calling it still racked up charges.

Book Of The Month as curation

[elysdir]

Interesting. I guess my impression of Book of the Month club and other such companies was that they were primarily about curation rather than about increasing choice and availability. There were lots of bookstores that were chock full of books; I feel like BotM was primarily a way to subscribe a curation service that would send you a particularly interesting book every month.

There were alternate choices each month too, and probably a way to order from some kind of catalog. But I feel like the main focus was on the one main book they would send each month.

Re: Book Of The Month as curation

[brainwane]

I appreciate the correction! And I don't know what proportion of club subscribers had lives that made it hard to get to a good bookstore.... or much about the various book/music subscription mail-order services' histories in general. Perhaps when I have more time I'll do a bit of reading about them.

[ccommack]

The original 1947 NANP area codes are far too large to have systemic bias built into them, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that over the subsequent 72 years, there have been serious shenanigans in the evolution of the system. Those shenanigans including but not limited to: the choice to split an exhausted area code vs. overlaying a new code onto the territory of the old one, or choosing the boundaries of a split, or determining which side of a split area code got to keep the old number and which side had to learn a new one.

Actually, that last one is totally a documented thing; the traditional method is by which side has more business telephone numbers, because updating those records (and PBX systems) is considered more difficult than changing residential numbers. So city centers and cities proper tend to keep the old area code numbers, while the suburbs get a new one; the class and racial valence of this has obviously shifted drastically since the 1990s and the Great Inversion.

I don't know how you want to treat the one really deliberate case of bias in the 1947 area codes: bigger, more economically important cities were deliberately assigned lower numbers because 1s and 2s take less time to dial on a rotary telephone than 8s, 9s, and 0s.

[brainwane]

Thanks for the info and pointers! Am regretting I don't have more spare time to dive in right now, otherwise I would be settling in with a beverage and opening tabs....

[marahmarie]

Google seems to show zip code redlining as a thing (mostly word of mouth results show up for that). Zip codes and area codes can have some overlap, so...

[brainwane]

Based on what other commenters said here, my guess is that AREA codes didn't get the treatment I was vaguely wondering about, but other telephonic administrative divisions might have gotten treated in relevant (racially discriminatory) ways...