Weavers and Concluders: Two Communication Styles No One Knows Exist

Great article. Interestingly, I'd suggest the introductory material has a subtle empathy gap that can be summarised with the "Regardless of how careful we are to frame what we say, there is a strong chance that it will be misinterpreted" comment.

That applies to everyone. It is a rare and skillfull person who can get a new point into a conversation. Spend any time at all watching how political debates evolve and it is quite clear that pushing a conversation from equilibrium to equilibrium is remarkably challenging to do and often comes under heavy social attack. There are also hints coming out of the world of the therapists where there are a stunning number of people who don't know how to express their thoughts to save themselves.

At a personal level the standard neurotypical strategy is not to say anything new, or anything that hasn't been pre-vetted by something else with higher status. So the problem autistic people tend to run into is that they aren't repeating what someone influential said in a similar context and that is an inherently high-risk strategy. Careful framing can't possibly lead to a safety. Autistic people may act in socially inappropriate ways, but the mistake is to assume other people are good communicators. They aren't, they are subtly limited by fairly strict guiderails and can't express/process a lot of concepts independently from the herd.

Good article, but one thing I'd like to add from my own experience, is that we interpret a difficulty in communication when people have different styles, when the problem sometimes is that the message itself is rejected regardless how we present it.

That is, a reason why people with similar communication styles understand each other is also that they pretty much have the same concepts and even conclusions in their mind, and they actually communicate very little new information to one another.

Failures in communication for me seem to be often on the listener side, and we keep telling people to communicate better, without spending the equal amount of effort on providing people with listening and comprehension skills.

The weavers style reminded me of the famous Darmok Star Trek episode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

Looking at the wiki article, indeed others have noted that already:

> Tamarian language was compared to the difficulty of communicating with an autistic 19-year-old patient by Elizabeth Kim et al.[12]

This resonates deeply with me right now because I’m very acutely aware of how different my communication style is and when/where it’s holding me back (socially and in my career.) I have a lot of frustration that other people seem to have such rigid expectations for how they need to be communicated with; at the same time I know I’m the outlier. Trying to “fix” this also just makes it worse.

Something I’ve recently come to realize is that certain, uh, substances make this problem literally evaporate away for me. For a few hours I can connect with people in a way that feels natural and expected and that they will notice and call out as different. It’s led me to think of my “communication differences” more like layers that can be peeled away than something that is completely ingrained in me.

How irritating. I thought that cognitve style was just being reasonably well read and not a pathology. I am also suspicious of why it might be considered a disability as that externalizes responsibility for ones path through life while centralizing these advocates and activists and their critical frameworks. Worse, it legitimizes these advocates as peers to some rarely gifted people and infantalizes their talents vs. the sort of unctuous political maneouvering theorists trade on. If I had gifted children, I would learn to identify these snakes and keep them at bay.

What I’m hearing is that years of improv classes, telling me to avoid asking questions but instead yes-and to establish facts, has made me autistic?

The Weaver communication style described in the article reminds me of the "Die Katagnetten" acts in the former German comedy TV show "Bullyparade".

Here a YouTube compilation of these acts (requires good understanding of German):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7RFX7hwLvI

I don't buy it, sorry. What makes "weaving" exclusively a conversation style of autists and not neurotypicals? The author suggests he has only seen it in autists whichI findhardto believec

Speaking from experience, me and my good friend often "weave" together by playing rounds of hipbone games [1] on a napkin. And the better you know each other, the more it feels like this [2].

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38371/hipbone-games

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BZpm4DX9Bo

This resonated fairly well with me, but I have some thoughts.

1. The archetypical 'weaver' conversation is introduced as the exchange of apparently disconnected facts, with each as an invitation for an interlocutor to add a fact that they perceive as connected to the previous one. However, if you replace facts with scandalous stories, you get the structure of gossip. The purpose of a gossip conversation is not necessarily to communicate information, but to strengthen the social bonds between interlocutors.

2. The 'Peak Weaver' conversation could do with a little more commentary. Not being familiar with any of the references quoted, I can't discern the structure of this conversation: how does each quote follow from its predecessor?

3. I can only recall one such 'Peak Weaver' conversation in my life, but at the time, I felt it was more of a game to say as much as possible as obscurely as possible. However, we did have an audience at the time, which may have affected the dynamic.

4. This entire passage could very well be describing me:

> I have a theory about Weaver communication and the specific ways that some brains are configured. Weavers tend to be good at memorizing things that resonate with them, like song lyrics, lines from movies or books (sometimes even whole movies), and other large pieces of information.

The author and his daughter seem to have a humanities bias. As someone with a hard sciences bias, I can easily memorise amusing anecdotes, but also the behaviour of complex systems. When I was a teacher, my colleagues expressed genuine concern of the but-you-can't-do-that variety about my ability to speak for 10 minutes about something without notes.

> My daughter is definitely a Weaver. Others have remarked on her memory and how with each person she knows, she will remember little “things” they had as points of interaction that were in some way meaningful. She remembers and brings up things from the past, and I know the response she’s hoping for. She wants them to build on those moments of connection and weave a tapestry of relatedness together.

For me, this is often about things and ideas rather than moments. Perhaps I've learnt from interactions with others that you have to have a point to these sorts of reminiscences.

> This doesn’t always pan out for her, though, as others don’t always– or even usually– remember the moment she’s referencing. When I tell them, “Remember two years ago, that time you were throwing rocks in the creek, and you said ‘splash’ with a funny voice and both kept repeating it and laughing at each other?” They think I’m crazy for imagining that a 4.5-year-old could remember something from two years ago or could be referencing that in a conversation years later.

It sounds like Pokemon. "Weaver used Tapestry... it's super effective! Concluder fainted".

Do we really need _another_ simplistic model that puts every human into two distinct idiosyncratic categories with the purpose of revealing some supposed underlying human nature? No. We definitely don't need another one of those.

> Weavers are a small minority of communicators, and they do not communicate with a destination in mind.

I would question "small minority". I've met quite a few people who like the sound of their own voice so much they don't care about the actual message.

Rediscovered the P and J classes in MBTI. P is weaver and J is concluder.

This reasonates deeply. I really would love to have a space for weavers to weave their nets together.

One day I met with a friend in restaurant. We’re both high energy and chaotic communicators. We were discussing something when waitress interrupted us to ask for the order but also asked how can we do THAT. We didn’t know what “THAT” was and she said that we were having dozens of conversations at the same time.

Indeed we had. We were both able to keep multiple threads running. It was really a fun time.

This article reminds me of it and I think I can align. But albeit it sounding nice and smart it’s not easy to be on the “weaving” side. Some conversations can be frustrating. For example, people expect that I bring some magic solutions to their problems while I don’t have any.

I can find those, I’m not bad at t it, but for that I need to brainstorm while vocally exploring problem scope: recall similar situation, make some naive statements, ask stupid question, allow myself to get corrected. During such sessions I prioritize, assess root cause but also try understand political and social aspects, because it might be that I need to back off for non meritorious reasons.

And even here, in this very thread, there are comments like “people who talk too much” or “like the sound of their voice too much”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The description of Weavers' communication style makes me think about how my brother in law mostly communicates. Usually he tosses up 'interesting' "facts". Often I get annoyed, not because I think it doesn't lead to a conclusion (I do like to phylosophise without such goal), but the fact that most of these "facts" are blatantly incorrect and there is no good way to communicate that to him.

Framing this divide as a neurotypical/neurodivergent thing is perhaps a bit narrow.

Consider "The Hollywood Ending" vs "The French Ending". People used to Hollywood, where all the details[0] get wrapped up in a definite ending, often complain about the artier side of french cinema that their films "don't end".

When you're used to it, however, which is a more satisfying experience? A film with a canonical ending, where you're spoon-fed the resolution, or one which sets up a world, and a story, and stops at the crucial moment, so after watching you can go to a café and have a glass or two and argue with your friends about what would have/should have happened next? (it's possible to come up with alternative narratives for Hollywood fare as well, but too strong a canon pretty much impedes most fanon)

I believe I've even noticed this tendency in the concluding speech in anglophone vs francophone conferences: anglophones tend to summarise the proceedings ("conclusion"), kind of putting a ribbon around all the previous presentations and tying a bow on it, while francophones tend to hilight how to go beyond the proceedings ("future work"), kind of putting up signposts to all the areas that next years' conferences might be exploring.

(tennis/ping-pong, etc. also have a weaving/concluding dichotomy. In competitive games, the goal is to score points, to avoid having a serve returned[1], but in entertainment games, the goal is to keep the rally going; to dance, not duel, with the counterparty)

In academic writing, the footnote provides a way to bridge both worlds: the main body can be a more (or less) taut line from introduction to conclusion, but the footnotes[2] can provide portals to all the side excursions that were cut from the main body in the interest of concluder communication.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eiY4EiOhmQ

[0] unless deliberately leaving the franchise open.

[1] contrast hacky-sack, where the goal is that all players touch the ball during a play.

[2] and, in textbooks, exercises. (Consider also the potential of parentheticals; inveterate weavers have also been known to leave a few warps and wefts in the index)

The author here presents a theory that among non-neurotypical people, most individuals ("concluders") are motivated to use communication to arrive at points, express concern, etc. In addition, the author proposes that other people ("weavers") are motivated to use communication to create some combination of a vibe, extend riff, and in-joke bit. Or that weavers do have goals in mind, but want to achieve them via implicitly asking people to reciprocate their unstated and more specific motivations.

For example, the author suggests that to ask about someone else's day, "weavers" might say "I stubbed my toe." If their conversational partner reciprocates with the same motivation, the quality of each person's day will surface in the conversation. From what I know, some part of this might fall under the so-called "double empathy problem." I'm not an expert, however.

From the outside, neurotypical view, it's hard to know what to make of this. There is probably no way to describe or theorize about different sub-types of communication styles (or the underlying dimensional differences without coming up with straw-person arguments and using oddly abstract language. For the author to take this idea further, they'd have to convince neurotypical people how weaving is different from how neurotypical (?) people frequently engage in extended riffs. Whose Line is it Anyways?, improv comedy, the work of Stewart Lee and other stand-up comedians, and Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" for example, all involve the creator and audience pretending to take on different roles for the sake of the piece of art.