Recalibration

[solarbird]

Look, it's a poll! About emotional crap. This is, of course, triggered by things which have happened recently, and, to a lesser degree, by things which have happened often over the last couple of years, and to a still lesser degree, by things I've been working on since forever. But it's been a while I've done any surveying like this.

These are all questions about how others see me and my attempts to communicate my emotions. I can't make polls anonymous, or I would. I hope you'll answer honestly despite that. No one who reads this journal is involved in the most recent thing which prompted this survey, so this isn't a SEKRIT MESSAGE to anybody.

[Poll #1745043]

Comments

[solarbird]

Well, I was querying about negative impressions; I don't think I was actively balancing towards the negative insofar as I was doing my best not to prompt for overly-positive responses. Of course, a lot of the people who are most likely to answer most negatively (based on other interactions) are also not answering this poll, so arguably the whole thing is a tad useless.

Still, it does tell me that even of those percentage of people who do have enough emotional engagement with me to answer, nearly 45% find me emotionally confusing and/or difficult to connect with emotionally. (Some of the people who selected "other" gave answers which I include in that percentage.) This is somewhat disappointing as this is the higher-connection self-selecting subset, which means that the actual percentage is likely even higher.

A bit of context: I'm an elf; I have to work very, very hard to translate my emotional signals into the signal sets humans expect, because otherwise the signals match up... poorly. So everything is translated, to lesser or greater degrees. And I have to do all the back-translation as well, since nearly nobody is going to try to reciprocate that and talk to me on my terms. (This is a source of no small resentment, and occasional disaster, but not doing it is much worse.)

The data are implying that I'm not doing as good a job as it as I'd hoped; honestly, I think I'm doing a worse job of it now than I have in the past. The data are also implying that the music, despite its non-customary form, is suffering less badly from this; that's very good.

(And I didn't give more answer options about the music because I'm investigating this specific property and don't want to distract from it. But if you'd like to volunteer other options, go ahead!

[maellenkleth]

Piling on here, since (for whatever reason of disorganisation on my part) I completely missed the original poll (at least **I** did) -- translation will always suffer from the problem of disjunct lexicons. If I try to parse your communications as being human ones, they come out muddled. That's an inescapable consequence of the human and elf lexicons' being noncongruent in detail.

If humans are absent from the interaction, which is a rare circumstance in my experience, then **yes** it's easier to leave the communication within elf terms, which map more directly. In elf terms, you're easy to read.

I have not thought-through the interesting side question of how the lexical noncongruence impacts human's reception of musical performance. Interesting question, for which I thank you for having inspired it however indirectly.