Free conversation training
A friend paid me to go to a distant party with them, involving hours of transit. Feeling bad about the huge loss of value this probably constituted for someone or another, I tried to make the best of it by offering conversational advice and practice on the way there. Hopefully increasing the chance that they could happily go solo to parties in future.
I might have been hesitant to advise anyone on conversation, given my own frequent failures at it. But if someone is sufficiently uncomfortable at a party that they are willing to pay me to come, the bar is probably low. So I tried. Here is how the conversation went. (I very much welcome corrections from anyone who actually knows about this topic.)
One thing you can do is play the ‘figure out what the other person is interested in and direct the conversation toward that’ game. Every time the other person says a thing, you try to notice anything in it that might be a clue about what they actually care about. I have never managed to play this successfully, because I always forget that I am trying and end up just having a conversation. But I hear that it might be good.
We tried it. But an immediate difficulty seemed to be that in order to direct a conversation you had to at least implicitly recognize multiple possible next answers, so that you could take the better one. My friend mostly saw one option, so the conversation was entirely out of their control.
We practiced coming up with different next answers, from the same starting point. But somehow theirs all seemed weirdly non-specific to me. If I said I was modeling an intelligence explosion, they would ask ‘how is modeling an intelligence explosion going?’ or ‘When did you start modeling an intelligence explosion?’ or ‘Do you like modeling an intelligence explosion?’, whereas I might have asked ‘What about an intelligence explosion are you modeling?’ or ‘What kind of model?’ or ‘What are you trying to learn about an intelligence explosion?’ or maybe ‘What do you mean by an ‘intelligence explosion’?’, if I didn’t know. My friend’s questions treated ‘modeling an intelligence explosion’ as a sort of black box to be passed around, whereas I would be interested in taking the box apart. I thought I was right here, and objected.
My friend said that inquiring about models and intelligence explosions and such would indicate that they were uninformed or stupid. Presumably a smart person would hear ‘modeling an intelligence explosion’ and know just what it meant, and what the point was, and what kinds of models were likely to be involved.
I objected more—to me, jumping into a topic that someone else brings up, and asking pointed questions to quickly get to the bottom of what is going on and why, is a good indication of intelligence.
They thought this was a weird idiosyncrasy of people I hang out with, and most people wouldn’t be impressed.
I disagreed, but decided that more was at stake anyway. My own procedure of probing that generates questions about the inside of the black box seemed to really be something like ‘keep asking about whatever you are confused about until you are not confused’. And I claim that this is way better for being engaged than asking about the general situation of the black box, taking its contents to be out of bounds. And being engaged is great—for seeming intelligent and informed, for not having a terrible time, for not seeming rude or weird, and even for learning anything from the conversation or getting any kind of gratification from it. I claim. Probably being engaged is easier for almost everyone than me, so maybe this isn’t such a big deal for most. But it sounded like my friend was not very engaged at all, and mostly thinking about seeming okay to a conversation partner.
Another nice thing about a procedure like this, I realize later, is that you don’t have to consciously locate multiple options to be driving the conversation in a particular direction. You just have to search for one option each time, using some sort of confusion-seeking mental state.
My friend agreed to practice my method. Which was more entertaining, but also more like an inquisition. I suggested they add some sort of confirmation that they received the other person’s message, and maybe even encouragement, before getting into the next question. For instance, ‘ah yeah’ or ‘that makes sense’. This distracted too much from composing questions, but we compromised on assenting where appropriate through body language, such as nodding.
I don’t think any of this was helpful at the party in the end, perhaps because there were so many obstacles to party success, or perhaps because it was bad advice. But thinking through some strategic details of conversation was interesting to me.
I also wonder whether perceiving more options in general gives you more freedom and thus more control and power—in conversation, and in life. It seems like it should in the abstract. But maybe it isn’t a big consideration next to others, or maybe it is a misunderstanding because you don’t really need to perceive options—you just need to somehow look in the right place for a good one.