What the jump costs you

I've argued mechanism. This chapter and the next are the bill, and this one is your share.

The tail. Every jump loses the part of the sentence you couldn't guess, which is the part with the information in it. The note on the windscreen. The reason the north region dipped, which wasn't the reason you said. Over a day, that's dozens of small facts you didn't get, and you didn't get them from the people who had them, while they were offering.

Being wrong. The guess is right about the shape and wrong about the tail, and when you say the guess out loud, you've committed to it. A fair number of jumps are confident statements of something that turns out to be not quite what the other person meant, and you don't find out, because they said "anyway" instead of correcting you. You go through the week slightly wrong about a number of things, and the people who could have put you right have stopped trying.

The reputation. Youngquist's listeners rated the interrupter as dominant, and that word follows you. In meetings it means your points get discounted, because a point from someone who takes the floor by force is heard as a bid for the floor and not as a point. You may have noticed that ideas you raised in overlap went nowhere, and the same idea raised by someone else, at a finish, got taken up. That's the cost of the reputation, paid in the currency you care about.

People who tell you less. Chapter 12's partner who stopped telling stories, and the friend who goes quiet on the phone. Over years, the interrupter ends up with the least information of anyone in their circle, because everyone around them has learned that the second half of a sentence isn't safe.

The answers you never got. Some of the sentences you jumped on were questions, and you answered the question you guessed, and they never asked the one they had.

And the effort. Holding a thought while pretending to listen is tiring. Guarding the held thought, watching for the gap, launching into it. A conversation run that way is work, and the people who let others finish have a lighter evening than you do, because they're only doing one thing at a time.

None of this shows up on the day. It shows up as a vague sense that people are a bit flat with you, that meetings don't go your way, that your partner doesn't say much. Each of those has a jump somewhere upstream of it.