Booting Language and Common Ground

Tom Dietterich posed an interesting question…

That led me to reference my Turings and Shannons post, add some thoughts (below), and eventually reference the Ron Garret blog I mentioned before.

Tom’s post also got a response from Yoav Artzi, including a link to a fantastic paper by his student regarding LLM communication. (Really - it’s a great paper and exceptionally well-written.)

That, in turn, led me to recontextualize my story about cows. Here is the thread unrolled, with light editing and emphasis added:

July 6, 2025 at 10:59 AM

This is really a quite nice piece of work and very well written. Thank you! Let me offer an interesting, related corollary, from personal experience. Pick a concept - A. Suppose you have 2-3 groups of people, each of whom have adapted to an efficient discussion of A within their group.

Now take one person from each group and have them discuss A. You will rapidly find that each person...
Has an idea of what A is,
Has difficulty understanding that their nomenclature for A is different from the other two's nomenclature, and
Therefore will "talk past" the others, sparking heated arguments.
In my case (Bell Labs Switching, Loop Transmission, and OSS discussing "links"), this could not be resolved within context.

Rather, at the initiative of one of my colleagues, we began discussing "cows". (He was from a farm, and cows <> links.) After a thorough discussion of cows, we wrote a dictionary of cow-delineated concepts. ("A bison is a type of cow that...") We then translated the cow terms 1:1 into telephony terms. Then, interestingly, we had to spend weeks enforcing those terms with[in] our individual groups until they adapted.

Perhaps a way to summarize my story is to say: it is difficult for people to go directly from the Common Ground of their group to form a Common Ground with people from other groups. Rather, it took moving to ground that was uncommon for all to find a new, shared common ground.

I quite like that, as it says as much about organizational management and (human) team building as it does about LLMs talking to each other.