Yeah it sucks, search by free association is hillclimbing (gets stuck in local optima) and the contemporary media environment and political culture is an illustration of its problems.
The pattern itself is a local optimum, it’s a product of people walking into a group without knowing what the group is doing and joining in anyway, and so that pattern of low-context engagement becomes what we’re doing, and the anxiety that is supposed to protect us from bad patterns like this and help us to make a leap out to somewhere better is usually drowned in alcohol.
Instead of that, people should get to know each other before deciding what to talk about, and then intentionally decide to talk about what they find interesting or useful with that person. This gets better results every time.
But when we socialise as children, there isn’t much about our friends to get to know, no specialists to respectfully consult, no well processed life experiences to learn from, so none of us just organically find that technique of like, asking who we’re talking to, before talking, it has to be intentionally designed.
Yeah it sucks, search by free association is hillclimbing (gets stuck in local optima) and the contemporary media environment and political culture is an illustration of its problems.
The pattern itself is a local optimum, it’s a product of people walking into a group without knowing what the group is doing and joining in anyway, and so that pattern of low-context engagement becomes what we’re doing, and the anxiety that is supposed to protect us from bad patterns like this and help us to make a leap out to somewhere better is usually drowned in alcohol.
Instead of that, people should get to know each other before deciding what to talk about, and then intentionally decide to talk about what they find interesting or useful with that person. This gets better results every time.
But when we socialise as children, there isn’t much about our friends to get to know, no specialists to respectfully consult, no well processed life experiences to learn from, so none of us just organically find that technique of like, asking who we’re talking to, before talking, it has to be intentionally designed.