> Why is face-to-face required for "group reasoning"?

Because it raises the bar on starting a meeting. And it keeps half the meeting from being muted/camera-off and totally zoned out.

If your meeting attendees are zoned out, they either need to be held accountable for not being attentive, or they shouldn't have been invited in the first place.

I agree, but with WFH its so easy to invite the entire team. I found the number of meetings I attend has skyrocketed in WFH - most would be better off with 1/3 of the attendants who took time to prepare instead of the whole team just to gather info.

It’s a round-trip latency difference. Standing in the same room, we can get perhaps 100, but certainly 50, responses in an hour from a small group. Video conferencing might be 15% less and that relatively slight difference is already frustrating. In asynchronous written form, it probably takes 3 days to get 100 “turns” and maybe a week or more if there’s timezone “smear”. The written async responses can be higher quality on average, but where reaching consensus in minimal wall clock time is important, face-to-face wins.

Why is Slack “better” than physically mailed correspondence? It’s roughly the same phenomenon, just on an even shorter timescale (including that Slack isn’t better for everything).

If you're a proponent of written communication- you'll argue that 100 'turns' of written communication will have significantly more valuable discussion than 100 turns in a meeting. Most of the turns in a meeting can usually be avoided by a google search beforehand

Totally true. There are many cases where even 2 or 3 turns of written comms beats 100 of spoken (and I'm one of the biggest proponents of written work and async work at my company).

But there are situations where speed of alignment matters more than the specific direction of alignment and other situations where the nature of humans requires a live, synchronous discussion. I couldn't build a relationship with my family using only written feedback and requests.

You want high and fast bandwidth between the different brains.

Me writing something in my cocoon for 15 minutes, then someone reading that and replying what is wrong with that is not very efficient.

Just throwing some thoughts in the open air and others responding to that, crystallizes much faster.

Same with giving feedback about user interfaces. It's so much easier to just walk to someone's desk and point at what you think should be changed. You can interact instantly.

That is not to say that I don't see the value in written communication, documentation and having a log of what happened. It's very much a trade-off.

What crystallizes may have been reached quickly but there is no guarantee it is the best possible choice given all the known and unknown unknowns that the experts may have not considered.

Then there is also the hierarchy of expert advice to consider where a room of experts some who are more senior (or louder or more convinced about their rightness) might push you towards a worse outcome than a well thought through option.

I feel a decision taken “live” with the help of experts needs to be viewed with more skepticism than less.

> a decision taken “live” with the help of experts

Maybe we are talking past each other, because in that case I might agree.

I'm talking about the case with only experts present. I know about A but not so much about B, the other person knows about B but not so much about A. We sit together and try to come up with the best technical solution.

Calls are even lower latency, you skip the "walk to their desk" bit.