[jpdb]

Asking (begging?) people to communicate with you in a certain way because you think it is depriving you of your attention(time?) is _much_ more selfish because you are depriving people of the opportunity to control how they are perceived.

How and what people think of me is extremely important to me. I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with. Changing my voice to suit your inability to summarize and interpret the ideas being communicated is selfish and antisocial behavior.

You are not a being of pure logic. The way I say something to you _will_ effect your perception of me AND the topic at hand.

> Politeness has a place, but I beg you put clarity first.

Having conversations with little-to-no noise as possible has a place, but I beg you to consider that the person conversing with you has a baseline level of empathy and ego and is not a p-zombie.

Wanting to be seen a certain way is just as (if not more) important than the extremely minor distress you feel by having to read some extra words.

[rahimnathwani]

"I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with."

That seems like a good reason to adapt your communication to your audience. If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.

[jpdb]

> If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.

Absolutely! But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether.

Even if OP did in fact mean to suggest this when speaking to them directly, it is unbelievably selfish to ask (let alone _beg_) someone to eschew their voice just so you don't have to read a few more words and "waste calories" to gather the information they believe is important.

The pleasantries and preambles and hollow words _are_ important. People might be adding them without having deep thoughts on them to the point where they explicitly include them, but they want to signal to you that they consider your humanity. That signal isn't noise, it's a very minute sign of camaraderie. If OP doesn't value that signal, that's fine, but pretending it's noise is antisocial.

[rahimnathwani]

"But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether."

I'm not sure about this. OP said:

"When you ... [SNIP] ... you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal."

So it seems like OP wants other people to:

- not waste their time and energy, but

- is happy to take any emotional cost that comes with that.

[mayhemducks]

Oooh this is good! So - I agree with part of this.

When a conversational partner chooses to communicate a certain way because of how they want to be perceived, they are living out their values. And I admire that, and I think it is an important component of a healthy organization.

But, if you would, allow me to describe the distress I feel when I have to take in "extra words". Because I personally do not feel it as extremely minor.

My mind operates almost exclusively on language, mostly in text form. I do not absorb input in paragraphs with overarching or underlying emotional content. I don't even absorb it in sentences. I process language word by word - and when reading code it's character by character. Each chunk I take as input explodes into hundreds of possibilities of meaning that each must be thought about in turn, and then dismissed as probably not what the person meant. Some of these are quite funny, and if you are one of the dozen or so people close to me, I might even share them out loud hoping for a laugh. In a real-time conversation, this has to happen in milliseconds. It never turns off - the language parser/analyzer occupies a large chunk of my brain's processing continuously, even when I wish it didn't. If I am under some stress - even normal everyday work stress, and I feel like I need to force myself to process even more words, when they are not hyper-relevant to the stressful situation at-hand, I often find that I have not enough capacity left for managing my emotional state. Fear, uncertainty, risk evaluation all get heightened. Fight-or-flight can kick in too. What if the time I just spent socializing with this person and managing their emotional needs too puts the project over-budget? What if I loose my place on this team because of that? Depending on lots of things, this can either spiral into questioning my very existence and place in the universe, or it can fizzle out and you'd never even notice it.

So just be careful when you evaluate how distressing something is to another person. Unless you know them quite well, you might not have the clearest picture.

[jpdb]

Given that you literally started your response with a pleasant agreement and affirmation on my point makes feel like you are arguing this in bad faith, but if statements like, "how was your weekend" included in an ask cause you distress then you are so maladapt to society to the point that you should have close to zero expectations for others to accommodate your needs in public spaces such as a work environment. You almost exclusively have the responsibility to regulate your emotions or not expose yourself to situations where people might include a hollow inquiry into your weekend in their written communications.

Asking people not to include minor pleasantries in their written communication isn't a "reasonable" request for anything larger than a small group of people.

[mayhemducks]

Indeed. I am quite maladapted to society. That's my point - thanks for making it more obvious!