Here are some things that anecdotally helped me as a non-native speaker in EA (although I consider myself relatively fluent), followed by some of my thoughts for native speakers (after the numbered list).
1. You mention:
I often just nod as if I understand what is being said because I fear that by asking âCan you repeat that, please?â I will be perceived as stupid and slow in a community that values time, effectiveness, high-value actions, and reason. I understand that this is mainly my own issue, and I am working on improving my language skills, but I think that something might be done on the other side too.
I strongly feel (90%) that asking for clarifications/âexplanations usually makes someone look smarter and more interested, and we donât do this enough. It seems to me that people consider it a strong signal that youâre actually listening, interested in what the other person is talking about, and youâre actually trying to understand what theyâre saying. Also, at EAGx sometimes even proficient English speakers didnât know what a word meant (examples: MC/ââmaster of ceremoniesâ and âmarqueeâ, apparently theyâre British words), asking for clarifications on those gives useful feedback to speakers on what terms are more common.
Anecdote: the only such case where I think people might have thought less of me was when I asked what a ToC was, and after that asked what a Theory of Change was, in a course where the material that week was about Theories of Change, and I hadnât read any of it. Ooof. I still think that I counterfactually looked less stupid by asking, since I was more able to follow the discussion.
I know this doesnât help much (âbe less shyâ is not great advice) but I think in EA asking for clarifications usually makes you look smarter, at least counterfactually.
2. Try to have talks in quiet places, Iâm still surprised by how much easier it is for me to hold a conversation in English in a quiet place compared to a crowded place. I feel barely any difference in Italian. I think spending 5 minutes moving to a quieter table, a quieter room, or outside is worth it for me. Even for a 30-minute conversation. (To âabuse IT jargon every two sentences to express easy conceptsâ: I find the SNR counterintuitively important when speaking in English)
3. Focus even more than you normally would on the person youâre speaking with (I think this is good advice in general). I found that making a conscious effort to ensure that my interlocutor has 110% of my attention helped immensely. (Related, I expect all usual conversation tips to be even more useful in a second language).
4. Alcohol makes both speaking and understanding much harder. The effect for me is like 10x higher in English than in Italian.
5. (Maybe) if a conversation is especially important, consider asking if you can record it. I found that at EAG people were surprisingly open to this (as long as I promised not to share), but I donât know if itâs because they would have been uncomfortable saying no.
As a minor point, I want to push back a tiny bit on asking native speakers to do things for us. Iâm a bit afraid it would add a trivial inconvenience for native speakers to talk to non-native speakers, and increase instead of reduce the EA English-native âbiasâ. (Which I agree can be a thing, as another non-native speaker told me once: ânative speakers just take up more spaceâ). As an anecdote: one of the most valuable conversations I had (if not the most valuable) was with a very popular/âsenior EA at EAG, who had just had an absurd amount of 1-1s that day and was visibly pretty tired. Iâm afraid that if they also had to think âLorenzo is not a native speaker, Iâll need to pay attention to thatâ, they would maybe have scheduled their last 1-1 of the day with a native speaker instead :/â. Iâm afraid that in day-to-day interactions it could make an even larger difference.
In general, I, very personally, would not want most people to apply the post recommendations when talking to me, unless after 5-10 minutes the conversation feels limited by the language barrier. Some tips I would personally prefer are: - the one from Kirsten: ârepeat the exact same words in the same orderâ. I sometimes get confused when I ask someone to repeat something, and they say something different. I spend the next 30 seconds trying both to deduce what was the original thing they said in the first place and to follow the conversation at the same time. - âfake an American accentâ heard it from someone at EAGx, if you have a very British accent it might be worth trying for fun. - If you canât understand something I said, please tell me, and donât feel bad. I know my accent is pretty bad, itâs my fault, not yours.
On:
Be aware and try to control the voice inside of your head (which I am highly confident is there even if you donât want to admit it[2]) that says âugh, this person who clearly isnât understanding me seems slow and stupid. I donât want to waste my time with themâ
Embarrassingly, Iâm also guilty of something related to this. On one occasion I think I greatly overestimated how strongly English fluency would correlate with achieving results, and overestimated the counterfactual impact of helping someone with a project because I thought their English was worse than mine. On a separate occasion, I greatly underestimated the impact of a different opportunity because I thought being a non-native speaker would limit any contribution I could make. So in general I now consciously try to update less on English fluency when making predictions.
Thanks for the comment, Lorenzo. A few random counterpoints to what you said, some positive and some critical.
1. On point one I donât share at all your confidence, quite the opposite. I would like thatâi.e. that by asking for clarifications Iâll look smarter - but my impression is that on a deep and untrained-by-system-2 level, you will be perceived as the dumb foreigner who doesnât understand for a long time, letâs say for the first few years in which you interact daily with native English speakers. To find out whoâs right should we try to test our points in an anonymous survey, by asking native speakers about their actual thoughts in situations like that?
Three things mainly helped me in this sense
A. My baseline self-confidence, especially in social settings, is pretty high, even if I have strong highs and lows. So if I make a mistake and I think I am perceived as dumb for that I will not care too much. This will probably cure my unusual shyness with time. But this is clearly something which is not generalizable and is highly personal
B. Curiously, a meme that I saw actually made a great point. Is the âWe Are Not The Sameâ meme that says âYou speak English because itâs the only language you know. I speak English because itâs the only language you know. We are not the sameâ. Itâs ironic and not a rationalist treatise about the pragmatics of language, but the point is: why should I feel embarrassed by my linguistic mistakes when I am the one making extremely high cognitive work to learn another language as an adult?
C. On the same note, a more serious argument. By trying to learn another language I am doing at the same time something nice and compassionate and extremely clever: I am trying to be a citizen of the world without being an arrogant prick, escaping the localistic mindset in which I grow up and I am squeezing my brain to his max capacities every day. I am the one who is doing the native speakers a favour by trying to learn their language, not the opposite. By thinking about that the âoh gosh I am a stupid dumbassâ sensation doesnât disappear, but itâs mitigated a lot.
2. I donât know what an SNR is. And thatâs what I was talking about: itâs great to have internal jargon and all, but assuming too much about how much the other person knows doesnât facilitate the conversations and poses a barrier at the entrance that is too high. Having said that, this definitely helps in formal occasions like EAGs, but I donât think itâs particularly valuable in day-to-day interactions, like when you hang out with EAs as a normal human being (e.g. grabbing a coffee/âa bear? Going to a party?). But for formal settings in which you can schedule meetings, one-on-ones and using Calendly thatâs great advice that I subscribe 100%.
3. Totally agree. Itâs cognitively demanding and a bit frustrating, especially when it seems like you are the only one putting that much effort into being more aware, but itâs worthwhile.
4. I am almost alcohol-free and I canât relate that much, since my mental state hardly changes when I drink socially (e.g. a couple of cocktails? Half a bottle of wine?). I might feel a liiiitle bit tipsy, but overall the differences are barely noticeable from the inside. On a general note, I think itâs great advice to drink as little as possible in general: all the common sense views about alcohol (e.g. it makes you less shy) are bullshits and not based on actual data. But, I mean, my guess is that changing the brits attitude toward drinking will be a particularly difficult endeavour.
5. Uhm, I understand itâs something that may be perceived neutrally by some experienced rationalists EAs, but if we use the average person as a probabilistic base rate to forecast the potential reaction of anyone in a real setting in front of a similar question I am highly confident the reaction would be negative and youâll be perceived as a weirdo, lowering even more your social value in the setting (âforeigner which doesnât understand my language and that waste my timeâ + âweirdo who wants to record what I sayâ). So before asking something similar, I would need to be super confident about how much I am calibrated to the other personâs mindset. I think too much time in EA we just avoid taking into consideration how normal life is outside our bubble.
On your point regarding the trivial inconveniences, I push back strongly. Honestly, I will probably not feel comfortable in a social context which doesnât have the willingness to adjust its informal rules to become more welcoming of diversity, starting from the use of language. So if by kindly asking EA native speakers to do some small things which would make my life easier I annoy them and if this is not cost-effective for them to at least try to listen to me I would rather keep up hanging out with EAs. I can do my part, do outreach, partecipate a bit, but I will never feel that I am part of the movement. Fortunately my impression is that you might be wrong here and on average EAs will not consider being more inclusive a cost.
I mostly agree with last points, advices and considerations.
On 1. (asking for someone to repeat makes you look dumber/âsmarter) I would be interested to bet on this, but I worry that replies to a poll would be biased in my favour (as you said, system 2 and system 1 could disagree). It might also depend a lot on details and context, but if you are also interested we can try to operationalize a bet!
On 2. (SNR) it was meant to be a tongue in cheek self-deprecating joke about using too much jargon, sorry it didnât come across that way! (I was thinking of Signal-to-Noise-Ratio , basically a way to repeat what I previously wrote with random jargon). I agree this point doesnât apply much to parties and crowded social settings.
On 5. (Recording conversations) agree, depends a lot on context.
On the trivial inconveniences, I am conflicted. I guess I defer to others with more experience in the community.
In general I would be curious to hear tips for non-native speakers from native speakers. Sometimes I feel that the language situation is as uncomfortable for one group as it is for the other, and I wonder what we could do to make it better.
In terms of trivial inconveniences /â perception and gratitude for the work people are doing to speak English, one other small note: there may be more native English speakers than you realize who have spent periods speaking another language?
In EA contexts, itâs pretty much always the case that the shared level of English between myself and my conversation partner is higher, since my Spanish is around a B2 level and my French around B1⊠but I have spent ~6 months each in countries that speak those languages and know itâs hard!
Iâve gotten feedback before when Iâm speaking too quickly, and Iâve always been grateful for it. Do you have any other suggestions for how native English speakers can indicate willingness to receive feedback â I sometimes worry about making people self-conscious by drawing attention to their (good but non-native) level of English, but maybe adding something in my EAG bio like âI know it can be exhausting to speak English all day if youâre not a native speaker, please tell me to slow down if Iâm speaking too fast!â would be helpful?
Your points B and C are so right, btw! As a native English speaker, I canât speak any second language nearly as well as most non-native English speaking EAs. Iâm super impressed with all of you, and far from thinking youâre stupid or slow, interacting with you makes me feel stupid because I couldnât discuss highly technical things in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin...
As a side and personal comment, I donât like too much the tendency in EA to link to articles when trying to make a point. Years ago I hung out a bit with Objectivists, both in person and online. Something that frustrated me a lot was that, for every question I asked, they linked (if online) or referred (if offline) an article from Ayn Rand or from Leonard Peikoff, saying âread thisâ. Instead of linking articles, I think itâs way better to try to explain ourselves in our own words.
P.s. I am referring to this passage
As a minor point, I want to push back a tiny bit on asking native speakers to do things for us. Iâm a bit afraid it would add a trivial inconvenience for native speakers to talk less with non-native speakers, and increase instead of reduce the EA English-native âbiasâ
I think the point is well made by Lorenzo, as someone who understands what the linked text is referring to and doesnât need to click on the link. I think it is good that the link is there for those who do not know what he meant or want clarification.
In general I think it is a bad idea to demand more work from people communicating with youâit discourages them from trying to communicate in the first place. This is similar to the trivial inconvenience point itself.
To be fair mine regarding the link-to-articles tendency is not a well-formed opinion, just something Iâve felt during some online and offline conversations. Especially from other fellow rationalists, when they quote a Scottâs article or an obscure post on the sequences when not absolutely needed.
By the way, I think itâs also a bad idea to demand more work from people you are communicating with, like informally requesting them to read a full article instead of trying to explain your point in plain terms.
Letâs put it this way: we can have the privilege to link/ârefer to articles/âconcepts in our bubble because we kinda know what weâre talking about and we are people who like to spend time reading, but what if we have to communicate with someone who is from outside the bubble? We will not have that privilege and we will have to explain ourselves in plain terms. Itâs not a trivial inconvenience: if we donât exercise our ability to reduce the inferential distance (yes, I am guilty of the same sin) between âusâ and âothersâ starting from ourselves we will always be unable to communicate our ideas properly.
But, again, I havenât thought about this issue properly so I reserve to myself the faculty to take some time to refine or abdicate my arguments.
Here are some things that anecdotally helped me as a non-native speaker in EA (although I consider myself relatively fluent), followed by some of my thoughts for native speakers (after the numbered list).
1. You mention:
I strongly feel (90%) that asking for clarifications/âexplanations usually makes someone look smarter and more interested, and we donât do this enough. It seems to me that people consider it a strong signal that youâre actually listening, interested in what the other person is talking about, and youâre actually trying to understand what theyâre saying. Also, at EAGx sometimes even proficient English speakers didnât know what a word meant (examples: MC/ââmaster of ceremoniesâ and âmarqueeâ, apparently theyâre British words), asking for clarifications on those gives useful feedback to speakers on what terms are more common.
Anecdote: the only such case where I think people might have thought less of me was when I asked what a ToC was, and after that asked what a Theory of Change was, in a course where the material that week was about Theories of Change, and I hadnât read any of it. Ooof. I still think that I counterfactually looked less stupid by asking, since I was more able to follow the discussion.
I know this doesnât help much (âbe less shyâ is not great advice) but I think in EA asking for clarifications usually makes you look smarter, at least counterfactually.
2. Try to have talks in quiet places, Iâm still surprised by how much easier it is for me to hold a conversation in English in a quiet place compared to a crowded place. I feel barely any difference in Italian. I think spending 5 minutes moving to a quieter table, a quieter room, or outside is worth it for me. Even for a 30-minute conversation. (To âabuse IT jargon every two sentences to express easy conceptsâ: I find the SNR counterintuitively important when speaking in English)
3. Focus even more than you normally would on the person youâre speaking with (I think this is good advice in general). I found that making a conscious effort to ensure that my interlocutor has 110% of my attention helped immensely. (Related, I expect all usual conversation tips to be even more useful in a second language).
4. Alcohol makes both speaking and understanding much harder. The effect for me is like 10x higher in English than in Italian.
5. (Maybe) if a conversation is especially important, consider asking if you can record it. I found that at EAG people were surprisingly open to this (as long as I promised not to share), but I donât know if itâs because they would have been uncomfortable saying no.
As a minor point, I want to push back a tiny bit on asking native speakers to do things for us.
Iâm a bit afraid it would add a trivial inconvenience for native speakers to talk to non-native speakers, and increase instead of reduce the EA English-native âbiasâ. (Which I agree can be a thing, as another non-native speaker told me once: ânative speakers just take up more spaceâ).
As an anecdote: one of the most valuable conversations I had (if not the most valuable) was with a very popular/âsenior EA at EAG, who had just had an absurd amount of 1-1s that day and was visibly pretty tired. Iâm afraid that if they also had to think âLorenzo is not a native speaker, Iâll need to pay attention to thatâ, they would maybe have scheduled their last 1-1 of the day with a native speaker instead :/â. Iâm afraid that in day-to-day interactions it could make an even larger difference.
In general, I, very personally, would not want most people to apply the post recommendations when talking to me, unless after 5-10 minutes the conversation feels limited by the language barrier.
Some tips I would personally prefer are:
- the one from Kirsten: ârepeat the exact same words in the same orderâ. I sometimes get confused when I ask someone to repeat something, and they say something different. I spend the next 30 seconds trying both to deduce what was the original thing they said in the first place and to follow the conversation at the same time.
- âfake an American accentâ heard it from someone at EAGx, if you have a very British accent it might be worth trying for fun.
- If you canât understand something I said, please tell me, and donât feel bad. I know my accent is pretty bad, itâs my fault, not yours.
On:
Embarrassingly, Iâm also guilty of something related to this.
On one occasion I think I greatly overestimated how strongly English fluency would correlate with achieving results, and overestimated the counterfactual impact of helping someone with a project because I thought their English was worse than mine.
On a separate occasion, I greatly underestimated the impact of a different opportunity because I thought being a non-native speaker would limit any contribution I could make.
So in general I now consciously try to update less on English fluency when making predictions.
Thanks for the comment, Lorenzo. A few random counterpoints to what you said, some positive and some critical.
1. On point one I donât share at all your confidence, quite the opposite. I would like thatâi.e. that by asking for clarifications Iâll look smarter - but my impression is that on a deep and untrained-by-system-2 level, you will be perceived as the dumb foreigner who doesnât understand for a long time, letâs say for the first few years in which you interact daily with native English speakers. To find out whoâs right should we try to test our points in an anonymous survey, by asking native speakers about their actual thoughts in situations like that?
Three things mainly helped me in this sense
A. My baseline self-confidence, especially in social settings, is pretty high, even if I have strong highs and lows. So if I make a mistake and I think I am perceived as dumb for that I will not care too much. This will probably cure my unusual shyness with time. But this is clearly something which is not generalizable and is highly personal
B. Curiously, a meme that I saw actually made a great point. Is the âWe Are Not The Sameâ meme that says âYou speak English because itâs the only language you know. I speak English because itâs the only language you know. We are not the sameâ. Itâs ironic and not a rationalist treatise about the pragmatics of language, but the point is: why should I feel embarrassed by my linguistic mistakes when I am the one making extremely high cognitive work to learn another language as an adult?
C. On the same note, a more serious argument. By trying to learn another language I am doing at the same time something nice and compassionate and extremely clever: I am trying to be a citizen of the world without being an arrogant prick, escaping the localistic mindset in which I grow up and I am squeezing my brain to his max capacities every day. I am the one who is doing the native speakers a favour by trying to learn their language, not the opposite. By thinking about that the âoh gosh I am a stupid dumbassâ sensation doesnât disappear, but itâs mitigated a lot.
2. I donât know what an SNR is. And thatâs what I was talking about: itâs great to have internal jargon and all, but assuming too much about how much the other person knows doesnât facilitate the conversations and poses a barrier at the entrance that is too high. Having said that, this definitely helps in formal occasions like EAGs, but I donât think itâs particularly valuable in day-to-day interactions, like when you hang out with EAs as a normal human being (e.g. grabbing a coffee/âa bear? Going to a party?). But for formal settings in which you can schedule meetings, one-on-ones and using Calendly thatâs great advice that I subscribe 100%.
3. Totally agree. Itâs cognitively demanding and a bit frustrating, especially when it seems like you are the only one putting that much effort into being more aware, but itâs worthwhile.
4. I am almost alcohol-free and I canât relate that much, since my mental state hardly changes when I drink socially (e.g. a couple of cocktails? Half a bottle of wine?). I might feel a liiiitle bit tipsy, but overall the differences are barely noticeable from the inside. On a general note, I think itâs great advice to drink as little as possible in general: all the common sense views about alcohol (e.g. it makes you less shy) are bullshits and not based on actual data. But, I mean, my guess is that changing the brits attitude toward drinking will be a particularly difficult endeavour.
5. Uhm, I understand itâs something that may be perceived neutrally by some experienced rationalists EAs, but if we use the average person as a probabilistic base rate to forecast the potential reaction of anyone in a real setting in front of a similar question I am highly confident the reaction would be negative and youâll be perceived as a weirdo, lowering even more your social value in the setting (âforeigner which doesnât understand my language and that waste my timeâ + âweirdo who wants to record what I sayâ). So before asking something similar, I would need to be super confident about how much I am calibrated to the other personâs mindset. I think too much time in EA we just avoid taking into consideration how normal life is outside our bubble.
On your point regarding the trivial inconveniences, I push back strongly. Honestly, I will probably not feel comfortable in a social context which doesnât have the willingness to adjust its informal rules to become more welcoming of diversity, starting from the use of language. So if by kindly asking EA native speakers to do some small things which would make my life easier I annoy them and if this is not cost-effective for them to at least try to listen to me I would rather keep up hanging out with EAs. I can do my part, do outreach, partecipate a bit, but I will never feel that I am part of the movement. Fortunately my impression is that you might be wrong here and on average EAs will not consider being more inclusive a cost.
I mostly agree with last points, advices and considerations.
Thanks for the reply!
On 1. (asking for someone to repeat makes you look dumber/âsmarter) I would be interested to bet on this, but I worry that replies to a poll would be biased in my favour (as you said, system 2 and system 1 could disagree). It might also depend a lot on details and context, but if you are also interested we can try to operationalize a bet!
On 2. (SNR) it was meant to be a tongue in cheek self-deprecating joke about using too much jargon, sorry it didnât come across that way! (I was thinking of Signal-to-Noise-Ratio , basically a way to repeat what I previously wrote with random jargon). I agree this point doesnât apply much to parties and crowded social settings.
On 5. (Recording conversations) agree, depends a lot on context.
On the trivial inconveniences, I am conflicted. I guess I defer to others with more experience in the community.
In general I would be curious to hear tips for non-native speakers from native speakers. Sometimes I feel that the language situation is as uncomfortable for one group as it is for the other, and I wonder what we could do to make it better.
In terms of trivial inconveniences /â perception and gratitude for the work people are doing to speak English, one other small note: there may be more native English speakers than you realize who have spent periods speaking another language?
In EA contexts, itâs pretty much always the case that the shared level of English between myself and my conversation partner is higher, since my Spanish is around a B2 level and my French around B1⊠but I have spent ~6 months each in countries that speak those languages and know itâs hard!
Iâve gotten feedback before when Iâm speaking too quickly, and Iâve always been grateful for it. Do you have any other suggestions for how native English speakers can indicate willingness to receive feedback â I sometimes worry about making people self-conscious by drawing attention to their (good but non-native) level of English, but maybe adding something in my EAG bio like âI know it can be exhausting to speak English all day if youâre not a native speaker, please tell me to slow down if Iâm speaking too fast!â would be helpful?
Your points B and C are so right, btw! As a native English speaker, I canât speak any second language nearly as well as most non-native English speaking EAs. Iâm super impressed with all of you, and far from thinking youâre stupid or slow, interacting with you makes me feel stupid because I couldnât discuss highly technical things in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin...
As a side and personal comment, I donât like too much the tendency in EA to link to articles when trying to make a point. Years ago I hung out a bit with Objectivists, both in person and online. Something that frustrated me a lot was that, for every question I asked, they linked (if online) or referred (if offline) an article from Ayn Rand or from Leonard Peikoff, saying âread thisâ. Instead of linking articles, I think itâs way better to try to explain ourselves in our own words.
P.s. I am referring to this passage
I think the point is well made by Lorenzo, as someone who understands what the linked text is referring to and doesnât need to click on the link. I think it is good that the link is there for those who do not know what he meant or want clarification.
In general I think it is a bad idea to demand more work from people communicating with youâit discourages them from trying to communicate in the first place. This is similar to the trivial inconvenience point itself.
To be fair mine regarding the link-to-articles tendency is not a well-formed opinion, just something Iâve felt during some online and offline conversations. Especially from other fellow rationalists, when they quote a Scottâs article or an obscure post on the sequences when not absolutely needed.
By the way, I think itâs also a bad idea to demand more work from people you are communicating with, like informally requesting them to read a full article instead of trying to explain your point in plain terms.
Letâs put it this way: we can have the privilege to link/ârefer to articles/âconcepts in our bubble because we kinda know what weâre talking about and we are people who like to spend time reading, but what if we have to communicate with someone who is from outside the bubble? We will not have that privilege and we will have to explain ourselves in plain terms. Itâs not a trivial inconvenience: if we donât exercise our ability to reduce the inferential distance (yes, I am guilty of the same sin) between âusâ and âothersâ starting from ourselves we will always be unable to communicate our ideas properly.
But, again, I havenât thought about this issue properly so I reserve to myself the faculty to take some time to refine or abdicate my arguments.