What Great Listeners Actually Do
The computational complexity varieties of listening:<p>Let n be the number of things the other is talking about (tricky to define a "thing" but, whatever?, use a consistent thing metric)<p>- O(1) listening: ignoring/may as well not be there - reading your phone while the other talks to you<p>- O(n) listening: loading their information into your brain while they talk - e.g. repeating back to them, nodding to salient points<p>- O(n log n) listening: sorting the information they've talked about - talking about the most important bits (after hearing everything)<p>- O(n^2) listening: cross-comparing all the things they've said for informational pairings<p>- O(|V|_n + |E|_n + |V|_m + |E|_m) listening: suppose your thoughts are laid out in network form, |V|_x and |E|_x are the # vertices and edges for person x. You are m. Then this is breadth-first search on both your idea-networks.<p>etc. Thoughts?<p>edit: I wonder how P and NP come into this! For instance, if someone asks you a question that takes P work, you should be able to derive the answer from what you've talked about alone. But if someone asks you something like, "Were you at that party 25 years ago?" and you have since forgotten, but then your other friend produces a photograph of you in a pair of silly glasses and a clown afro, you can verify quickly that you were! The hardness of remembering something might be classifiable by computational class?