Git Diagramming "The Weave"

Someone I know speaks in a reverse tree of sorts which actually does resemble a "weave", they start with various statements about the topic at hand without ever mentioning the topic, and eventually arrive at stating the topic near the end (hopefully). Sometimes I have no idea what they are talking about because they forgot to mention it until the very end when they have merged all their branches.

I had a professor in a math heavy subject that just started throwing out maths on the blackboard to derrive formula after formula.

It could take 20 minutes until we reach the conclusion, at which point he finally explains what the purpose of the final formula is and why we want it.

I got the habit of reading his book in reverse before the lectures; reading section by section in reverse order from the end. This way the mathematical calculations had a clear goal and were faar easier to follow.

... brilliant maths, but he was fully and utterly incompetent at teaching it. And he had a bit of an ego about how many students fail each year because "they're lazy".

Me and a few friends did deep recaps to de-tangle the explanations using his book, rephrasing it in a easier and shorter format; and he accused us of cheating because our scores deviated from the normal distribution.

All this to say; sometimes clever doesn't correlate well to great with words.... though dont take that as a endorsement of trump.

My mother-in-law is also a master of 'the weave'. When my wife and I visit she uses it to inform us about every possible happening of gossip and 'important events' . She just needs a key word and then she uses the chance to get all the information out in one stream of thought. (One problem is that she speaks in dialect and also assumes some deep knowledge about my wife's family relations). I often have thought of trying to map the branching. I often assumed that my wife could follow but I found out that everyone seems happy, without any deeper exchange of information.

This reminds a lot of a post here on HN. Someone described a very different way some people talk to each other. If someone else was else was listening in, no sentence and it's response from the other person would seem related at all. But to them that communication is very coherent.

Trying to search that post.

Edit: in the discussion there was a link to a do a YouTube video where to movie characters were playing word badminton with each other.

Edit: this clip https://youtu.be/swqfFHLck1o

When it all merges, the payoff feels great. I'm a big fan of when it's used in comedy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(comedy)

"As with many books, this one is best read piecewise backwards. In describing the contents, I accordingly begin with Part III."

Intro to one of the maths books I had to reference to do my masters thesis. :)

Yeah but a callback is just a reference to a previous joke, not a tying together of unrelated points. Does the latter have a name? It seems so hard that I can't remember seeing it much.

I talk like this and not sure why. I thought about it a lot over the years and figured that I for some reason need to have a, well, reason to tell a story. And so I tell it not as just a context free snapshot, but a bit more detail to it. And sometimes that resonates with people well, especially when it's something funny, but a lot of times it's too much to ask, especially these days when everyone has a short attention span. Which is fair, I'm the one doing the talking, listening is definitely more challenging.

It's the third beat (final stage) of the Harold, for what that's worth.

https://wiki.improvresourcecenter.com/index.php?title=Harold

> “…at which point he finally explains what the purpose of the final formula is and why we want it.”

I can’t learn this way. Great description of some of my instructors. I gravitate towards design and engineering. Goals are first. This sounds like play: “…and this happened, and this happened…” nope. Not me.

It reflects how the maths was discovered, by toying with formulas until something useful showed up. But its an awful way to teach it.

You might be thinking of the discussion around the weavers and storytellers, which I only just realised the connection between The Weave and weavers.

The idea helps when talking with autistic people who might have quite extreme versions of weaving. A conversation between two weavers is kind of an exchange of blunt facts about their world views, which does sound a lot like disparate unrelated tidbits. In contrast to storytellers, who have a discrete path and story to tell, with a start and a finish.

A sibling and me constructed a con-lang, and we tried reverse polish order where you say the terms before the connectives.

It failed badly. While it's easy to construct sentences that way, it puts immense cognitive load on the receiver. Probably because you don't have any structure in which to put all these terms thrown at you, we reasoned, so we reversed the order to get structure (connectives) first, followed by the terms.

It wasn't better. Turns out, receiving a structure with a bunch of holes to be filled later also results in high cognitive load.

Why? My guess is that the cognitive load mainly comes from the number of unfinished structural connections. To minimize that, you need to transmit a tree in such a way that the terms come as close as possible to the connective. In other words, not bottom or top first, but "side first".

I believe this is why infix notation is so popular. While you parse "A and B" or "X + Y" you never have more than one open connection. When you parse "(+ X Y)" you have two open connections after reading the "+". Five levels deep that begins to matter a lot.

I like the purist lispy idea of operation-first expressions, but I struggle to make my mind actually work like that. If you like clojure-type threading macros, consider that they do something similar to infix notation: they reduce the number of open structural connections during parsing.

That's a fascinating observation. I happen to study Japanese and my first language is English, and the reversed order is often cited as one of the bigger hurdles to language acquisition.

I feel it too, it's a higher context language and I agree that it is probably the fact that you are holding onto more unresolved threads at a time. But perhaps that's just because I didn't grow up with it? I would love to find out.

An interesting observation related to this is that on top of the sentence order differences, things are generally spoken about from the largest concept to the smallest which is different to English as well.

So where we would say "I ate lunch at the park today", in Japanese you might say Today, I at the park ate lunch.

In the second sentence it feels like there is a cliffhanger until we get to the end, the smallest details are often the point of a sentence, and so it's like waiting for the punchline. My brain is on hold until we get there, but in English I must admit I can tune out of a sentence early on and usually get the gist anyway.