[gjygj]

> important pieces of communication are non-verbal

That can't possibly be true for actual information (in the Shannon sense).

When you say to someone "go to the grocery store and buy a soda", these words can't be just 7% of the total information. Or put another way, what exactly do you communicate in the other 93% (13 times more information)

[mym1990]

I guess the short answer is: it depends. What if there are 5 people in the room and it’s not clear who the command is to? What if the person asking for the soda is crying? Surely you wouldn’t just get the soda and walk away…

In a sense, there is information to be had, whether or not you want or need to have it is totally up to you and perhaps the situation. Low stakes situations it probably matters less, negotiating with something big on the line would be a different story.

I think if humans always told the truth or could always express themselves fully in words, then yes, verbal communication would be a bigger chunk. But the truth is that humans can hide behind words or not know quite the right way to express themselves, but it’s much harder to do with tone and body movements.

[sseagull]

Hard to quantify, but how that sentence is said and the corresponding body language dramatically changes the meaning.

Is the person smiling? Yelling? Pointing angrily? Making a motion like they are thirsty? Making puppy eyes? Laughing like it is an inside joke?

It can change from a mere friendly request to a demand possibly backed up by violence.

[gjygj]

Sure, but how many bits of information are in those modifiers you mentioned? Maybe you can modulate it in 200 different ways?

Surely way less than in the actual sentence, since you have millions of different posibilities for the words: go/store/soda

[mym1990]

I think you’re missing out on the almost infinite possibilities of how body language and tone can give off different moods or intentions of a person. But these cues aren’t often processed in a literal sense, our brain can pick things up without us knowing exactly why something is wrong or different, it just is. It’s very intuitive based I think.

[gjygj]

In that case a transcript of a conversation would be almost worthless since it's depriving us of the body language or the tone.

[mym1990]

Yes, I would say if you gave me a random transcript of a conversation, it would be pretty worthless without any additional context. We are talking about active communication here, not a record of communication happening at some point in time.

[shkkmo]

There is a huge amount of nonverbal information that would be accompanying that statement.

The speaker's motivation for that statement, the speaker's attitude towards the soda getter, the speaker's attitude towards soda, the implied outcome/motivation for the soda getter, the state of beverage availability and thirst in the immediate vicinity, the proximity of the store...etc

Every time someone says something we have to model what different interpretations imply about the mental state of the speaker, compare that with the recent conversational history, the tone and body language of the speaker (and other listeners), our knowledge of the speaker and the broader context. At the same time, each new statement can cause us to refine our past mental models of the speaker and reinterpret the interpretations based on those models.

[gjygj]

The word "huge" carefully avoid quantifying the amount of information.

Imagine a conversation with zero non-words information (a transcript).

Now one with zero words (mime game) .

Which one conveys more information?

[munificent]

If you're going to make a reductionist argument like this, then consider the byte size of a text transcript versus the byte size of an audio recording of the same speech act. The latter will be orders of magnitude larger. Thus it strictly contains much more information.

[shkkmo]

That depends on the conversations.

Sometimes you can say far more with a single look than you can with mere words.