AFAICT, approximately every “how to be good at conversation” guide says the same thing: conversations are basically a game where 2+ people take turns free-associating off whatever was said recently. (That’s a somewhat lossy compression, but not that lossy.) And approximately every guide is like “if you get good at this free association game, then it will be fun and easy!”. And that’s probably true for some subset of people.
But speaking for myself personally… the problem is that the free-association game just isn’t very interesting.
I can see where people would like it. Lots of people want to talk to other people more on the margin, and want to do difficult thinky things less on the margin, and the free-association game is great if that’s what you want. But, like… that is not my utility function. The free association game is a fine ice-breaker, it’s sometimes fun for ten minutes if I’m in the mood, but most of the time it’s just really boring.
Even for serious intellectual conversations, something I appreciate in this kind of advice is that it often encourages computational kindness. E.g. it’s much easier to answer a compact closed question like “which of these three options do you prefer” instead of an open question like “where should we go to eat for lunch”. The same applies to asking someone about their research; not every intellectual conversation benefits from big open questions like the Hamming Question.
I think this is especially important for me/us to remember. On this site we often have a complex way of thinking, and a high computational budget (because we like exercising our brains to failure) and if we speak freely to the average person, they mat be annoyed at how hard it is to parse what we are saying.
We’ve all probably had this experience when genuinely trying to understand someone from a very different background. Perhaps they are trying to describe their inner experience when mediating, or Japanese poetry, or are simply from a different’t discipline. Or perhaps we were just very tired that day, meaning we had a low computational budget.
On the other hand, we are often a “tell” culture, which had a lower computational load compared to ask or guess culture. As long as we don’t tell too much.
Generally fair and I used to agree, I’ve been looking at it from a bit of a different viewpoint recently.
If we think of a “vibe” of a conversation as a certain shared prior that you’re currently inhabiting with the other person then the free association game can rather be seen as a way of finding places where your world models overlap a lot.
My absolute favourite conversations are when I can go 5 layers deep with someone because of shared inference. I think the vibe checking for shared priors is a skill that can be developed and the basis lies in being curious af.
There’s apparently a lot of different related concepts in psychology about holding emotional space and other things that I think just comes down to “find the shared prior and vibe there”.
Hm. This rings true… but also I think that selecting [vibes, in this sense] for attention also selects against [things that the other person is really committed to]. So in practice you’re just giving up on finding shared commitments. I’ve been updating that stuff other than shared commitments is less good (healthy, useful, promising, etc.) than it seems.
Hmm, I find that I’m not fully following here. I think “vibes” might be thing that is messing it up.
Let’s look at a specific example: I’m talking to a new person at an EA-adjacent event and we’re just chatting about how the last year has been. Part of the “vibing” here might be to hone in on the difficulties experienced in the last year due to a feeling of “moral responsibility”, in my view vibing doesn’t have to be done with only positive emotions?
I think you’re bringing up a good point that commitments or struggles might be something that bring people closer than positive feelings because you’re more vulnerable and open as well as broadcasting your values more. Is this what you mean with shared commitments or are you pointing at something else?
Closeness is the operating drive, but it’s not the operating telos. The drive is towards some sort of state or feeling—of relating, standing shoulder-to-shoulder looking out at the world, standing back-to-back defending against the world; of knowing each other, of seeing the same things, of making the same meaning; of integrated seeing / thinking. But the telos is tikkun olam (repairing/correcting/reforming the world)--you can’t do that without a shared idea of better.
As an analogy, curiosity is a drive, which is towards confusion, revelation, analogy, memory; but the telos is truth and skill.
In your example, I would say that someone could be struggling with “moral responsibility” while also doing a bunch of research or taking a bunch of action to fix what needs to be fixed; or they could be struggling with “moral responsibility” while eating snacks and playing video games. Vibes are signals and signals are cheap and hacked.
There’s a general-purpose trick I’ve found that should, in theory, be applicable in this context as well, although I haven’t mastered that trick myself yet.
Essentially: when you find yourself in any given cognitive context, there’s almost surely something “visible” from this context such that understanding/mastering/paying attention to that something would be valuable and interesting.
For example, suppose you’re reading a boring, nonsensical continental-philosophy paper. You can:
Ignore the object-level claims and instead try to reverse-engineer what must go wrong in human cognition, in response to what stimuli, to arrive at ontologies that have so little to do with reality.
Start actively building/updating a model of the sociocultural dynamics that incentivize people to engage in this style of philosophy. What can you learn about mechanism design from that? It presumably sheds light on how to align people towards pursuing arbitrary goals, or how to prevent this happening...
Pay attention to your own cognition. How exactly are you mapping the semantic content of the paper to an abstract model of what the author means, or to the sociocultural conditions that created this paper? How do these cognitive tricks generalize? If you find a particularly clever way to infer something form the text, check: would your cognitive policy automatically deploy this trick in all context where it’d be useful, or do you need to manually build a TAP for that?
Study what passages make the feelings of boredom or frustration spike. What does that tell you about how your intuitions/heuristics work? Could you extract any generalizable principles out of that? For example, if a given sentence particularly annoys you, perhaps it’s because it features a particularly flawed logical structure, and it’d be valuable to learn to spot subtler instances of such logical flaws “in the wild”.
The experience of reading the paper’s text almost certainly provides some data uniquely relevant to some valuable questions, data you legitimately can’t source any other way. (In the above examples: sure you can learn more efficiently about the author’s cognition or the sociocultural conditions by reading some biographies or field overviews. But (1) this wouldn’t give you the meta-cognitive data about how you can improve your inference functions for mapping low-level data to high-level properties, (2) those higher-level summaries would necessarily be lossy, and give you a more impoverished picture than what you’d get from boots-on-the-ground observations.)
Similar applies to:
Listening to boring lectures. (For example, you can pay intense attention to the lecturer’s body language, or any tricks or flaws in their presentation.)
Doing a physical/menial task. (Could you build, on the fly, a simple model of the physics (or logistics) governing what you’re doing, and refine it using some simple experiments? Then check afterwards if you got it right. Or: If you were a prehistoric human with no idea what “physics” is, how could you naturally arrive at these ideas from doing such tasks/making such observations? What does that teach you about inventing new ideas in general?)
Doing chores. (Which parts of the process can you optimize/streamline? What physical/biological conditions make those chores necessary? Could you find a new useful takeaway from the same chore every day, and if not, why?)
Et cetera.
There’s a specific mental motion I associate with using this trick, which involves pausing and “feeling out” the context currently loaded in my working memory, looking at it from multiple angles, trying to see anything interesting or usefully generalizable.
In theory, this trick should easily apply to small-talk as well. There has to be something you can learn to track in your mind, as you’re doing small-talk, that would be useful or interesting to you.
One important constraint here is that whatever it is, it has to be such that your outwards demeanour would be that of someone who is enjoying talking to your interlocutor. If the interesting thing you’re getting out of the conversation is so meta/abstract you end up paying most of the attention to your own cognitive processes, not on what the interlocutor is saying, you’ll have failed at actually doing the small-talk. (Similarly, if, when doing a menial task, you end up nerd-sniped by building a physical model of the task, you’ll have failed at actually doing the task.)
You also don’t want to come across as sociopathic, so making a “game” of it where you’re challenging yourself to socially engineer the interlocutor into something is, uh, not a great idea.
The other usual advice for finding ways to enjoy small-talk are mostly specialized instances of the above idea that work for specific people. Steering the small-talk to gradient-descend towards finding emotional common ground, ignoring the object-level words being exchanged and build a social model of the interlocutor, doing a live study of the social construct of “small-talk” by playing around with it, etc.
You’ll probably need to find an instance of the trick that works for your cognition specifically, and it’s also possible the optimization problem is overconstrained in your case. Still, there might be something workable.
Some people struggle with the specific tactical task of navigating any conversational territory. I’ve certainly had a lot of experiences where people just drop the ball leaving me to repeatedly ask questions. So improving free-association skill is certainly useful for them.
Unfortunately, your problem is most likely that you’re talking to boring people (so as to avoid doing any moral value judgements I’ll make clear that I mean johnswentworth::boring people).
There are specific skills to elicit more interesting answers to questions you ask. One I’ve heard is “make a beeline for the edge of what this person has ever been asked before” which you can usually reach in 2-3 good questions. At that point they’re forced to be spontaneous, and I find that once forced, most people have the capability to be a lot more interesting than they are when pulling cached answers.
This is easiest when you can latch onto a topic you’re interested in, because then it’s easy on your part to come up with meaningful questions. If you can’t find any topics like this then re-read paragraph 2.
Talking to people is often useful for goals like “making friends” and “sharing new information you’ve learned” and “solving problems” and so on. If what conversation means (in most contexts and for most people) is ‘signaling that you repeatedly have interesting things to say’, it’s required to learn to do that in order to achieve your other goals.
Most games aren’t that intrinsically interesting, including most social games. But you gotta git gud anyway because they’re useful to be able to play well.
Hmm, the ‘making friends’ part seems the most important (since there are ways to share new information you’ve learned, or solve problems, beyond conversation), but it also seems a bit circular. Like, if the reason for making friends is to hang out and have good conversations(?), but one has little interest in having conversations, then doesn’t one have little reason to make friends in the first place, and therefore little reason to ‘git gud’ at the conversation game?
Er, friendship involves lots of things beyond conversation. People to support you when you’re down, people to give you other perspectives on your personal life, people to do fun activities with, people to go on adventures and vacations with, people to celebrate successes in your life with, and many more.
Good conversation is a lubricant for facilitating all of those other things, for making friends and sustaining friends and staying in touch and finding out opportunities for more friendship-things.
The skill in such a game is largely in understanding the free association space, knowing how people likely react and thinking enough steps ahead to choose moves that steer the person where you want to go, either into topics you find interesting, information you want from them, or getting them to a particular position, and so on. If you’re playing without goals, of course it’s boring...
I think that “getting good” at the “free association” game is in finding the sweet spot / negotiation between full freedom of association and directing toward your own interests, probably ideally with a skew toward what the other is interested in. If you’re both “free associating” with a bias toward your own interests and an additional skew toward perceived overlap, updating on that understanding along the way, then my experience says you’ll have a good chance of chatting about something that interests you both. (I.e. finding a spot of conversation which becomes much more directed than vibey free association.) Conditional on doing something like that strategy, I find it ends up being just a question of your relative+combined ability at this and the extent of overlap (or lack thereof) in interests.
So short model is: Git gud at free association (+sussing out interests) → gradient ascend yourselves to a more substantial conversation interesting to you both.
It’s becomes more interresting when the people constrain their output based on what they expect is true information that the other person does not yet know. It’s useful to talk to an expert, who tells you a bunch of random stuff they know that you don’t.
Often some of it will be useful. This only works if they understand what you have said though (which presumably is something that you are interested in). And often the problem is that people’s models about what is useful are wrong. This is especially likely if you are an expert in something. Then the thing that most people will say will be worse what you would think on the topic. This is especially bad if the people can’t immediately even see why what you are saying is right.
The best strategy around this I have found so far is just to switch the topic to the actually interesting/important things. Suprisingly usually people go along with it.
Good question. Some differences off the top of my head:
On this forum, if people don’t have anything interesting to say, the default is to not say anything, and that’s totally fine. So the content has a much stronger bias toward being novel and substantive and not just people talking about their favorite parts of Game of Thrones or rehashing ancient discussions (though there is still a fair bit of that) or whatever.
On this forum, most discussions open with a relatively-long post or shortform laying out some ideas which at least the author is very interested in. The realtime version would be more like a memo session or a lecture followed by discussion.
The intellectual caliber of people on this forum (or at least active discussants) is considerably higher than e.g. people at Berkeley EA events, let alone normie events. Last event I went to with plausibly-higher-caliber-people overall was probably the ILLIAD conference.
In-person conversations have a tendency to slide toward the lowest denominator, as people chime in about whatever parts they (think they) understand, thereby biasing toward things more people (think they) understand. On LW, karma still pushes in that direction, but threading allows space for two people to go back-and-forth on topics the audience doesn’t really grock.
Not sure to what extent those account for the difference in experience.
Totally understand why this would be more interesting; I guess I would still fundamentally describe what we’re doing on the internet as conversation, with the same rules as you would describe above. It’s just that the conversation you can find here (or potentially on Twitter) is superstimulating compared to what you’re getting elsewhere. Which is good in the sense that it’s more fun, and I guess bad inasmuch as IRL conversation was fulfilling some social or networking role that online conversation wasn’t.
I have similar tastes, but, some additional gears:
I think all day, these days. Even if I’m trying to have interesting, purposeful conversations with people who also want that, it is useful to have sorts of things to talk about that let some parts of my brain relax (while using other parts of my brain I don’t use as much)
on the margin, you can do an intense intellectual conversation, but still make it funnier, or with more opportunity for people to contribute.
I understand, for someone with a strong drive to solve hard problems, there’s an urge for conversations to serve a function, exchange information with your interlocutor so things can get done. There’s much to do and communication is already painfully inefficient at it’s best.
The thing is, I don’t think the free-association game is inefficient, if one is skilled at it. It’s also not all that free. The reason it is something humans “developed” is because it is the most efficient way to exchange rough but extensive models of our minds with others via natural language. It acts a bit like a ray tracer, you shoot conversational rays and by how they bounce around in mental structures, the thought patterns, values and biases of the conversation partners are revealed to each other. Shapes become apparent. Sometimes rays bounce off into empty space, then you need to restart the conversation, shoot a new ray. And getting better at this game, keeping the conversation going, exploring a wider range of topics more quickly, means building a faster ray tracer, means it takes less time to know if your interlocutor thinks in a way and about topics which you find enlightening/aesthetically pleasing/concretely useful/whatever you value.
Or to use a different metaphor, starting with a depth-first search and never running a breadth-first search will lead to many false negatives. There are many minds out there that can help you in ways you won’t know in advance.
So if the hard problems you are working on could profit from more minds, it pays off to get better as this. Even if it has not much intrinsic value for you, it has instrumental value.
Hope this doesn’t come across as patronizing, definitely not meant that way.
Part of the problem is that the very large majority of people I run into have minds which fall into a relatively low-dimensional set and can be “ray traced” with fairly little effort. It’s especially bad in EA circles.
Then I misunderstood your original comment, sorry. As a different commenter wrote, the obvious solution would be to only engage with interesting people. But, of course, unworkable in practice. And “social grooming” nearly always involves some level of talking. A curse of our language abilities, I guess. Other social animals don’t have that particular problem.
The next best solution would be higher efficiency, more socializing bang for your word count buck, so to speak. Shorter conversations for the same social effect. Not usually a focus of anything billed as conversation guide, for obvious reasons. But there are some methods aimed at different goals that, in my experience, also help with this as a side effect.
Ok but how do you deal with the tragedy of the high dimensionality of context-space? People worth thinking with have wildly divergent goals—and even if you share goals, you won’t share background information.
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.
One blind spot we rationalists sometimes have is that charismatic people actually treat the game as:
“Can I think of an association that will make the other person feel good and/or further my goal?”. You need people to feel good, or they won’t participate. And if you want some complicated/favour/uncomftorble_truth then you better mix in some good feels to balance it out and keep the other person participating.
To put it another way: If you hurt people’s brain or ego, rush them, or make them feel unsure, or contradict them, then most untrained humans will feel a little bad. Why would they want to keep feeling bad? Do you like it when people don’t listen, contradict you, insult you, rush you, disagree with you? Probably not, probobly no one does.
But if someone listens to you, smiles at you, likes you, has a good opinion of you, agrees with you, make sense to you. Then it feels good!
This might sound dangerously sycophantic, and that’s because it is—if people overdo it! But if it’s mixed with some healthy understanding, learning, informing then It’s a great conversational lubricant, and you should apply as needed. It just ensures that everyone enjoys themselves and comes back for more, counteracting the normal frictions of socialising.
There are books about this. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” recommends talking about the other person’s interests (including themselves) and listening to them, which they will enjoy.
So I’d say, don’t just free associate. Make sure it’s fun for both parties, make room to listen to the other person, and to let them steer. (And ideally your conversational partner reciprocates, but that is not guaranteed).
But speaking for myself personally… the problem is that the free-association game just isn’t very interesting.
Hm, I think this really does change when you get better at it? This only works for people you’re interested in, but if you have someone you are interested in, the free association can be a way to explore a large number of interesting topics that you can pick up in a more structured way later.
I think the statement you summarized from those guides is true, just not helpful to you.
Another view would be that people want to be good at conversation not only because they find it fun but there is utility in building rapport quickly, networking and not being cast as a cold person.
I do find the ice breaky, cached Q&A stuff really boring and tend to want to find an excuse to run away quickly, something that happens often at the dreaded “work event”. I tend to see it as almost fully acting a part despite my internal feelings
At these things, I do occasionally come across the good conversationalist, able to make me want to stick with speaking to them even if the convo is not that deep or in my interest areas. I think becoming like such a person isn’t a herculean task but does take practice and is something I aspire too
This is more from a professional setting though, in a casual setting it’s much easier to disengage from a boring person, find shared interests and the convos have much less boundaries
Finally, the speed at which you communicate vibing means you’re communicating almost purely from System 1, expressing your actual felt beliefs. It makes deception both of yourself and others much harder. Its much more likely to reveal your true colors. This allows it to act as a values screening mechanism as well.
I’m personally skeptical of this. I’ve found I’m far more likely to lie than I’d endorse when vibing. Saying “sure I’d be happy to join you on X event” when it is clear with some thought that I’d end up disliking it. Or exaggerating stories because it fits with the vibe.
I view System-1 as less concerned with truth here, it is the one that is more likely to produce a fake-argument in response to a suggested problem. More likely to play social games regardless of if they make sense.
Oh yes, if you’re going on people’s words, it’s obviously not much better, but the whole point of vibing is that it’s not about the words. Your aesthetics, vibes, the things you care about will be communicated non-verbally.
AFAICT, approximately every “how to be good at conversation” guide says the same thing: conversations are basically a game where 2+ people take turns free-associating off whatever was said recently. (That’s a somewhat lossy compression, but not that lossy.) And approximately every guide is like “if you get good at this free association game, then it will be fun and easy!”. And that’s probably true for some subset of people.
But speaking for myself personally… the problem is that the free-association game just isn’t very interesting.
I can see where people would like it. Lots of people want to talk to other people more on the margin, and want to do difficult thinky things less on the margin, and the free-association game is great if that’s what you want. But, like… that is not my utility function. The free association game is a fine ice-breaker, it’s sometimes fun for ten minutes if I’m in the mood, but most of the time it’s just really boring.
Even for serious intellectual conversations, something I appreciate in this kind of advice is that it often encourages computational kindness. E.g. it’s much easier to answer a compact closed question like “which of these three options do you prefer” instead of an open question like “where should we go to eat for lunch”. The same applies to asking someone about their research; not every intellectual conversation benefits from big open questions like the Hamming Question.
I think this is especially important for me/us to remember. On this site we often have a complex way of thinking, and a high computational budget (because we like exercising our brains to failure) and if we speak freely to the average person, they mat be annoyed at how hard it is to parse what we are saying.
We’ve all probably had this experience when genuinely trying to understand someone from a very different background. Perhaps they are trying to describe their inner experience when mediating, or Japanese poetry, or are simply from a different’t discipline. Or perhaps we were just very tired that day, meaning we had a low computational budget.
On the other hand, we are often a “tell” culture, which had a lower computational load compared to ask or guess culture. As long as we don’t tell too much.
Generally fair and I used to agree, I’ve been looking at it from a bit of a different viewpoint recently.
If we think of a “vibe” of a conversation as a certain shared prior that you’re currently inhabiting with the other person then the free association game can rather be seen as a way of finding places where your world models overlap a lot.
My absolute favourite conversations are when I can go 5 layers deep with someone because of shared inference. I think the vibe checking for shared priors is a skill that can be developed and the basis lies in being curious af.
There’s apparently a lot of different related concepts in psychology about holding emotional space and other things that I think just comes down to “find the shared prior and vibe there”.
Hm. This rings true… but also I think that selecting [vibes, in this sense] for attention also selects against [things that the other person is really committed to]. So in practice you’re just giving up on finding shared commitments. I’ve been updating that stuff other than shared commitments is less good (healthy, useful, promising, etc.) than it seems.
Hmm, I find that I’m not fully following here. I think “vibes” might be thing that is messing it up.
Let’s look at a specific example: I’m talking to a new person at an EA-adjacent event and we’re just chatting about how the last year has been. Part of the “vibing” here might be to hone in on the difficulties experienced in the last year due to a feeling of “moral responsibility”, in my view vibing doesn’t have to be done with only positive emotions?
I think you’re bringing up a good point that commitments or struggles might be something that bring people closer than positive feelings because you’re more vulnerable and open as well as broadcasting your values more. Is this what you mean with shared commitments or are you pointing at something else?
Closeness is the operating drive, but it’s not the operating telos. The drive is towards some sort of state or feeling—of relating, standing shoulder-to-shoulder looking out at the world, standing back-to-back defending against the world; of knowing each other, of seeing the same things, of making the same meaning; of integrated seeing / thinking. But the telos is tikkun olam (repairing/correcting/reforming the world)--you can’t do that without a shared idea of better.
As an analogy, curiosity is a drive, which is towards confusion, revelation, analogy, memory; but the telos is truth and skill.
In your example, I would say that someone could be struggling with “moral responsibility” while also doing a bunch of research or taking a bunch of action to fix what needs to be fixed; or they could be struggling with “moral responsibility” while eating snacks and playing video games. Vibes are signals and signals are cheap and hacked.
There’s a general-purpose trick I’ve found that should, in theory, be applicable in this context as well, although I haven’t mastered that trick myself yet.
Essentially: when you find yourself in any given cognitive context, there’s almost surely something “visible” from this context such that understanding/mastering/paying attention to that something would be valuable and interesting.
For example, suppose you’re reading a boring, nonsensical continental-philosophy paper. You can:
Ignore the object-level claims and instead try to reverse-engineer what must go wrong in human cognition, in response to what stimuli, to arrive at ontologies that have so little to do with reality.
Start actively building/updating a model of the sociocultural dynamics that incentivize people to engage in this style of philosophy. What can you learn about mechanism design from that? It presumably sheds light on how to align people towards pursuing arbitrary goals, or how to prevent this happening...
Pay attention to your own cognition. How exactly are you mapping the semantic content of the paper to an abstract model of what the author means, or to the sociocultural conditions that created this paper? How do these cognitive tricks generalize? If you find a particularly clever way to infer something form the text, check: would your cognitive policy automatically deploy this trick in all context where it’d be useful, or do you need to manually build a TAP for that?
Study what passages make the feelings of boredom or frustration spike. What does that tell you about how your intuitions/heuristics work? Could you extract any generalizable principles out of that? For example, if a given sentence particularly annoys you, perhaps it’s because it features a particularly flawed logical structure, and it’d be valuable to learn to spot subtler instances of such logical flaws “in the wild”.
The experience of reading the paper’s text almost certainly provides some data uniquely relevant to some valuable questions, data you legitimately can’t source any other way. (In the above examples: sure you can learn more efficiently about the author’s cognition or the sociocultural conditions by reading some biographies or field overviews. But (1) this wouldn’t give you the meta-cognitive data about how you can improve your inference functions for mapping low-level data to high-level properties, (2) those higher-level summaries would necessarily be lossy, and give you a more impoverished picture than what you’d get from boots-on-the-ground observations.)
Similar applies to:
Listening to boring lectures. (For example, you can pay intense attention to the lecturer’s body language, or any tricks or flaws in their presentation.)
Doing a physical/menial task. (Could you build, on the fly, a simple model of the physics (or logistics) governing what you’re doing, and refine it using some simple experiments? Then check afterwards if you got it right. Or: If you were a prehistoric human with no idea what “physics” is, how could you naturally arrive at these ideas from doing such tasks/making such observations? What does that teach you about inventing new ideas in general?)
Doing chores. (Which parts of the process can you optimize/streamline? What physical/biological conditions make those chores necessary? Could you find a new useful takeaway from the same chore every day, and if not, why?)
Et cetera.
There’s a specific mental motion I associate with using this trick, which involves pausing and “feeling out” the context currently loaded in my working memory, looking at it from multiple angles, trying to see anything interesting or usefully generalizable.
In theory, this trick should easily apply to small-talk as well. There has to be something you can learn to track in your mind, as you’re doing small-talk, that would be useful or interesting to you.
One important constraint here is that whatever it is, it has to be such that your outwards demeanour would be that of someone who is enjoying talking to your interlocutor. If the interesting thing you’re getting out of the conversation is so meta/abstract you end up paying most of the attention to your own cognitive processes, not on what the interlocutor is saying, you’ll have failed at actually doing the small-talk. (Similarly, if, when doing a menial task, you end up nerd-sniped by building a physical model of the task, you’ll have failed at actually doing the task.)
You also don’t want to come across as sociopathic, so making a “game” of it where you’re challenging yourself to socially engineer the interlocutor into something is, uh, not a great idea.
The other usual advice for finding ways to enjoy small-talk are mostly specialized instances of the above idea that work for specific people. Steering the small-talk to gradient-descend towards finding emotional common ground, ignoring the object-level words being exchanged and build a social model of the interlocutor, doing a live study of the social construct of “small-talk” by playing around with it, etc.
You’ll probably need to find an instance of the trick that works for your cognition specifically, and it’s also possible the optimization problem is overconstrained in your case. Still, there might be something workable.
Some people struggle with the specific tactical task of navigating any conversational territory. I’ve certainly had a lot of experiences where people just drop the ball leaving me to repeatedly ask questions. So improving free-association skill is certainly useful for them.
Unfortunately, your problem is most likely that you’re talking to boring people (so as to avoid doing any moral value judgements I’ll make clear that I mean johnswentworth::boring people).
There are specific skills to elicit more interesting answers to questions you ask. One I’ve heard is “make a beeline for the edge of what this person has ever been asked before” which you can usually reach in 2-3 good questions. At that point they’re forced to be spontaneous, and I find that once forced, most people have the capability to be a lot more interesting than they are when pulling cached answers.
This is easiest when you can latch onto a topic you’re interested in, because then it’s easy on your part to come up with meaningful questions. If you can’t find any topics like this then re-read paragraph 2.
Talking to people is often useful for goals like “making friends” and “sharing new information you’ve learned” and “solving problems” and so on. If what conversation means (in most contexts and for most people) is ‘signaling that you repeatedly have interesting things to say’, it’s required to learn to do that in order to achieve your other goals.
Most games aren’t that intrinsically interesting, including most social games. But you gotta git gud anyway because they’re useful to be able to play well.
Hmm, the ‘making friends’ part seems the most important (since there are ways to share new information you’ve learned, or solve problems, beyond conversation), but it also seems a bit circular. Like, if the reason for making friends is to hang out and have good conversations(?), but one has little interest in having conversations, then doesn’t one have little reason to make friends in the first place, and therefore little reason to ‘git gud’ at the conversation game?
Er, friendship involves lots of things beyond conversation. People to support you when you’re down, people to give you other perspectives on your personal life, people to do fun activities with, people to go on adventures and vacations with, people to celebrate successes in your life with, and many more.
Good conversation is a lubricant for facilitating all of those other things, for making friends and sustaining friends and staying in touch and finding out opportunities for more friendship-things.
The skill in such a game is largely in understanding the free association space, knowing how people likely react and thinking enough steps ahead to choose moves that steer the person where you want to go, either into topics you find interesting, information you want from them, or getting them to a particular position, and so on. If you’re playing without goals, of course it’s boring...
I think that “getting good” at the “free association” game is in finding the sweet spot / negotiation between full freedom of association and directing toward your own interests, probably ideally with a skew toward what the other is interested in. If you’re both “free associating” with a bias toward your own interests and an additional skew toward perceived overlap, updating on that understanding along the way, then my experience says you’ll have a good chance of chatting about something that interests you both. (I.e. finding a spot of conversation which becomes much more directed than vibey free association.) Conditional on doing something like that strategy, I find it ends up being just a question of your relative+combined ability at this and the extent of overlap (or lack thereof) in interests.
So short model is: Git gud at free association (+sussing out interests) → gradient ascend yourselves to a more substantial conversation interesting to you both.
It’s becomes more interresting when the people constrain their output based on what they expect is true information that the other person does not yet know. It’s useful to talk to an expert, who tells you a bunch of random stuff they know that you don’t.
Often some of it will be useful. This only works if they understand what you have said though (which presumably is something that you are interested in). And often the problem is that people’s models about what is useful are wrong. This is especially likely if you are an expert in something. Then the thing that most people will say will be worse what you would think on the topic. This is especially bad if the people can’t immediately even see why what you are saying is right.
The best strategy around this I have found so far is just to switch the topic to the actually interesting/important things. Suprisingly usually people go along with it.
...How is that definition different than a realtime version of what you do when participating in this forum?
Good question. Some differences off the top of my head:
On this forum, if people don’t have anything interesting to say, the default is to not say anything, and that’s totally fine. So the content has a much stronger bias toward being novel and substantive and not just people talking about their favorite parts of Game of Thrones or rehashing ancient discussions (though there is still a fair bit of that) or whatever.
On this forum, most discussions open with a relatively-long post or shortform laying out some ideas which at least the author is very interested in. The realtime version would be more like a memo session or a lecture followed by discussion.
The intellectual caliber of people on this forum (or at least active discussants) is considerably higher than e.g. people at Berkeley EA events, let alone normie events. Last event I went to with plausibly-higher-caliber-people overall was probably the ILLIAD conference.
In-person conversations have a tendency to slide toward the lowest denominator, as people chime in about whatever parts they (think they) understand, thereby biasing toward things more people (think they) understand. On LW, karma still pushes in that direction, but threading allows space for two people to go back-and-forth on topics the audience doesn’t really grock.
Not sure to what extent those account for the difference in experience.
Totally understand why this would be more interesting; I guess I would still fundamentally describe what we’re doing on the internet as conversation, with the same rules as you would describe above. It’s just that the conversation you can find here (or potentially on Twitter) is superstimulating compared to what you’re getting elsewhere. Which is good in the sense that it’s more fun, and I guess bad inasmuch as IRL conversation was fulfilling some social or networking role that online conversation wasn’t.
I have similar tastes, but, some additional gears:
I think all day, these days. Even if I’m trying to have interesting, purposeful conversations with people who also want that, it is useful to have sorts of things to talk about that let some parts of my brain relax (while using other parts of my brain I don’t use as much)
on the margin, you can do an intense intellectual conversation, but still make it funnier, or with more opportunity for people to contribute.
I understand, for someone with a strong drive to solve hard problems, there’s an urge for conversations to serve a function, exchange information with your interlocutor so things can get done. There’s much to do and communication is already painfully inefficient at it’s best.
The thing is, I don’t think the free-association game is inefficient, if one is skilled at it. It’s also not all that free. The reason it is something humans “developed” is because it is the most efficient way to exchange rough but extensive models of our minds with others via natural language. It acts a bit like a ray tracer, you shoot conversational rays and by how they bounce around in mental structures, the thought patterns, values and biases of the conversation partners are revealed to each other. Shapes become apparent. Sometimes rays bounce off into empty space, then you need to restart the conversation, shoot a new ray. And getting better at this game, keeping the conversation going, exploring a wider range of topics more quickly, means building a faster ray tracer, means it takes less time to know if your interlocutor thinks in a way and about topics which you find enlightening/aesthetically pleasing/concretely useful/whatever you value.
Or to use a different metaphor, starting with a depth-first search and never running a breadth-first search will lead to many false negatives. There are many minds out there that can help you in ways you won’t know in advance.
So if the hard problems you are working on could profit from more minds, it pays off to get better as this. Even if it has not much intrinsic value for you, it has instrumental value.
Hope this doesn’t come across as patronizing, definitely not meant that way.
Part of the problem is that the very large majority of people I run into have minds which fall into a relatively low-dimensional set and can be “ray traced” with fairly little effort. It’s especially bad in EA circles.
Then I misunderstood your original comment, sorry. As a different commenter wrote, the obvious solution would be to only engage with interesting people. But, of course, unworkable in practice. And “social grooming” nearly always involves some level of talking. A curse of our language abilities, I guess. Other social animals don’t have that particular problem.
The next best solution would be higher efficiency, more socializing bang for your word count buck, so to speak. Shorter conversations for the same social effect. Not usually a focus of anything billed as conversation guide, for obvious reasons. But there are some methods aimed at different goals that, in my experience, also help with this as a side effect.
Ok but how do you deal with the tragedy of the high dimensionality of context-space? People worth thinking with have wildly divergent goals—and even if you share goals, you won’t share background information.
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.
One blind spot we rationalists sometimes have is that charismatic people actually treat the game as:
“Can I think of an association that will make the other person feel good and/or further my goal?”. You need people to feel good, or they won’t participate. And if you want some complicated/favour/uncomftorble_truth then you better mix in some good feels to balance it out and keep the other person participating.
To put it another way: If you hurt people’s brain or ego, rush them, or make them feel unsure, or contradict them, then most untrained humans will feel a little bad. Why would they want to keep feeling bad? Do you like it when people don’t listen, contradict you, insult you, rush you, disagree with you? Probably not, probobly no one does.
But if someone listens to you, smiles at you, likes you, has a good opinion of you, agrees with you, make sense to you. Then it feels good!
This might sound dangerously sycophantic, and that’s because it is—if people overdo it! But if it’s mixed with some healthy understanding, learning, informing then It’s a great conversational lubricant, and you should apply as needed. It just ensures that everyone enjoys themselves and comes back for more, counteracting the normal frictions of socialising.
There are books about this. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” recommends talking about the other person’s interests (including themselves) and listening to them, which they will enjoy.
So I’d say, don’t just free associate. Make sure it’s fun for both parties, make room to listen to the other person, and to let them steer. (And ideally your conversational partner reciprocates, but that is not guaranteed).
Hm, I think this really does change when you get better at it? This only works for people you’re interested in, but if you have someone you are interested in, the free association can be a way to explore a large number of interesting topics that you can pick up in a more structured way later.
I think the statement you summarized from those guides is true, just not helpful to you.
Another view would be that people want to be good at conversation not only because they find it fun but there is utility in building rapport quickly, networking and not being cast as a cold person.
I do find the ice breaky, cached Q&A stuff really boring and tend to want to find an excuse to run away quickly, something that happens often at the dreaded “work event”. I tend to see it as almost fully acting a part despite my internal feelings
At these things, I do occasionally come across the good conversationalist, able to make me want to stick with speaking to them even if the convo is not that deep or in my interest areas. I think becoming like such a person isn’t a herculean task but does take practice and is something I aspire too
This is more from a professional setting though, in a casual setting it’s much easier to disengage from a boring person, find shared interests and the convos have much less boundaries
I predict you would enjoy the free-association game better if you cultivated the skill of vibing more.
I’m personally skeptical of this. I’ve found I’m far more likely to lie than I’d endorse when vibing. Saying “sure I’d be happy to join you on X event” when it is clear with some thought that I’d end up disliking it. Or exaggerating stories because it fits with the vibe.
I view System-1 as less concerned with truth here, it is the one that is more likely to produce a fake-argument in response to a suggested problem. More likely to play social games regardless of if they make sense.
Oh yes, if you’re going on people’s words, it’s obviously not much better, but the whole point of vibing is that it’s not about the words. Your aesthetics, vibes, the things you care about will be communicated non-verbally.