I have a lot of trouble finding the motivation to talk with people in real time. I keep wishing that they would write down their ideas as a blog post or such, so I can read it and think about it at my leisure, with Internet access handy to check out any factual claims, etc., and figure out whether what they're saying makes any sense.
As far as I can tell, most people, while engaging in real-time conversations, do not feel this discomfort of having insufficient time and resources to verify the other participant's claims (or for that matter, to make sure that one's own speech is not erroneous). Is it because they are too credulous, and haven't developed an instinctive skepticism of every new idea that they hear? Or do they just not take the other person's words seriously (i.e., "in one ear, out the other")?
If you aren't afraid of making mistakes you can learn and grow MUCH faster than if you are.
If you aren't afraid of noticing when you have made mistakes you can learn and grow MUCH MUCH faster than if you are.
The main thing though is that once you have learned an average amount the more you learn the less typical your thought patterns will be. If you bother to learn a lot your thought patterns will be VERY atypical. Once this happens, it becomes wildly unlikely that anyone talking with you for more than a minute without feedback will still be saying anything useful. Only conversation provides rapid enough feedback to make most of what the other person says relevant. (think how irrelevant most of the info in a typical pop-science book is because you can't indicate to the author every ten seconds that you understand and that they can move on to the next point)
"Even aside from that, what is the point of learning faster, if you end up learning a lot of facts and ideas that aren't true?". Your Bayes Score goes up on net ;-)
I agree that fearing making and not noticing mistakes is much better than not minding mistakes you don't notice, but you should be able to notice mistakes later when other people disagree with you or when you can't get your model of the world to reach a certain level of coherence. This is much faster than actively checking every belief. If a belief is wrong and you have good automatic processes that propagate it and that draw attention to incoherence from belief nodes being pushed back and forth from the propogation of the implications of some of your beliefs pushing in conflicting directions, you don't even need people to criticize you, and especially to criticize you well, though both still help. I also think that simply wanting true beliefs without fearing untrue ones can produce the desired effect. A lot of people try to accomplish a lot of things with negative emotions that could be accomplished better with positive emotions. Positive emotions really do produce a greater risk of wireheading and only ...
Let me try a Hansonian explanation: conversation is not about exchanging information. It is about defining and reinforcing social bonds and status hierarchies. You don't chit-chat about the weather because you really want to consider how recent local atmospheric patterns relate to long-run trends, you do it to show that you care about the other person. If you actually cared about the weather, you would excuse yourself and consult the nearest meteorologist.
Written communication probably escapes this mechanism - the mental machinery for social interaction is less involved, and the mental machinery for analytical judgment has more room to operate. This probably happens because there was no written word in the evolutionary context, so we didn't evolve to apply our social interaction machinery to it. A second reason is that written communication is relatively easily divorced from the writer - you can encounter a written argument over vast spatial or temporal separation - so the cues that kick the social brain into gear are absent or subdued. The result, as you point out, it is easier to critically engage with a written argument than a spoken one.
You don't chit-chat about the weather because you really want to consider how recent local atmospheric patterns relate to long-run trends, you do it to show that you care about the other person.
No, you chat about the weather because it allows both parties to become comfortable and pick up the pace of the conversation to something more interesting. Full-on conversations don't start in a vacuum. In a worst case scenario, you talk about the weather because it's better than both of you staring at the ground until someone else comes along.
You seem to have an oddly narrow view of human communication. Have you considered the following facts?
In many sorts of cooperative efforts, live conversation (possibly aided by manual writing and drawing) enables rapid exchange of ideas that will converge onto the correct conclusion more quickly than written communication. Think e.g. solving a math problem together with someone.
In many cases, human conversations have the goal of resolving some sort of conflict, in the broad Schellingian sense of the term. Face-to-face communication, with all the clues it provides to people's inner thoughts and intentions, can greatly facilitate the process of finding and agreeing upon a solution acceptable to all parties.
A good bullshit detector heuristic is usually more than enough to identify claims that can't be taken at face value, and even when red flags are raised, often it's enough to ask your interlocutor to provide support for them and see if the answer is satisfactory. You'll rarely be in a situation where your interlocutors are so hostile and deceptive that they would be lying to your face about the evidence they claim to have seen. (Even in internet discussions, it's not often t
most people, while engaging in real-time conversations, do not feel this discomfort of having insufficient time and resources to verify the other participant's claims (or for that matter, to make sure that one's own speech is not erroneous).
Conversation is not about information.
This is related to a crazy idea I once had of preparing a "canned conversation" or a conversation tree that you could use to start a conversation with a random person on the subway and walk away leaving them a singularitarian.
This seems like something that natural conversationalists already do intuitively. They have a broad range of topic about which they can talk comfortably (either because they are knowledgeable about the specific subjects or because they have enough tools to carry on a conversation even in areas with which they are unfamiliar), and they can steer the conversation around these topics until they find one that their counterpart can also talk comfortably about. Bad conversationalists either aren't comfortable talking about many subjects, are bad at transitioning from one subject to another, or can't sense or don't care when their counterpart doesn't care about a given topic.
The flip side of this is that there are 3 ways of improving one's conversational ability: learning more about more subjects, practicing transitions between various topics, and learning the cues for when one's counterpart is bored or uninterested by the current topic. Kaj focuses on the second of these, but I think the other two strategies ought not be forgotten. It's no use learning to steer the conversation when there are no areas of overlapping interest to steer to, or when you can't recognize whether you are in one or not.
This is actually great advice. Not to scare anyone away (since I know the point is to have interesting conversation....), but the techniques discussed are essentially identical to what they teach during sorority recruitment practice. (I assume it's the same for fraternities, not that anyone cares). During recruitment, each girl will talk to hundreds of potential recruits in a short amount of time and has to be a very skilled conversationalist in order to assess the personality and interests of the other person. You're taught to steer very basic small talk ("What's your major?" "Where are you from?") into directions to find something unique and interesting about the person, and you only have a couple minutes to do it. They practice this for many, many hours a day leading up to recruitment. After a few weeks of this, you really can talk to anybody about anything.
The point of the post is to make conversations interesting, so you need to be able to steer the talk from mundane to something better, without making the other person feel like they're being pulled to one of your pet topics. Best way to do this is practice. Improv comedy is actually a related (and equally practicable) skill, interestingly enough...
Go to a bar, people are usually there to talk.
Not to me, they aren't.
If you work, make small talk with your coworkers.
I already do that, but don't become better automatically by doing so. (Plus, they're engineers who, like me, are generally not neurotypical.)
Seriously, have you ever actually been bad at conversation and tried out your own advice? You're speaking exactly like someone who's never had a problem with this and so doesn't know what barrier such a person has to cross.
Until you can specify an actual procedure you can reasonably expect to work, you're just telling me to eat cake when I'm low on bread. If I could follow your advice, I wouldn't need it.
You're speaking exactly like someone who's never had a problem with this
You're speaking exactly like someone who intends to keep their problem. It looks like people are trying to give you some advice, and perhaps they're not doing great at that right off the bat, but maybe you could help them help you?
Your "conversation" here goes something like this - statement, statement, statement, statement, rhetorical question, statement, most of it with an undercurrent of agression. Here is a concrete suggestion: ask a question. "So you're saying opening a conversation comes easily to you, can you give me some examples of lines you've used?"
Or maybe "Here's what typically happens to me when I try to start a conversation, can you help me figure out what I'm doing wrong or what I should do differently?"
Sorry, you're right -- I'm speaking out of frustration regarding a) people's inability to explain (remember my upcoming article), and b) the past instances of let-them-eat-cake sociality advice. Vive-ut-Vivas isn't the first extrovert to do so here, and she won't be the last. I will try to be more productive with future replies.
I understand your frustration. I should have made it clear that I wasn't attempting to help people who are trying to get to the barrier of making small talk in the first place; I was directing my advice to those who are interested in making the transition from small talk to interesting conversation. You're right that I haven't been particularly helpful in addressing that first point. I think that with some reflection I might be able to give decent advice on that topic, but that will require more introspection.
I haven't been particularly helpful in addressing that first point. I think that with some reflection I might be able to give decent advice on that topic, but that will require more introspection.
I appreciate your saying this very much.
I think that one of your main problems may be that you're thinking of conversation as something it isn't. There is no procedure for success.
You can't create a procedure that maps out every branch in a conversation tree, no. But I think you are underestimating the ritualization and standardization of social activity. There really are patterns in how people do things. There are considerable norms, rules, and constraints. People who are intuitively social (whether they became that way earlier or later in life) may have trouble articulating these patterns.
Within these constraints, there are infinite ways to behave, and you can be as spontaneous as you want. Intuitively social people experience social interaction to be natural and spontaneous because their intuitions keep them within those constraints.
Conversation is "procedureless" in the same sense that musical improvisation is "procedureless." You can't map out the rules for improvisation in advance. But there are some chords that work well (or badly) after others that you can know in advance. You can know whether you are in a major or minor key, and if you have the concept of major/minor mode and key, then i...
Hey, not to sound intimidating or anything, but it's a sad fact that while Michael Vassar and I have gigantic webs of precomputed original ideas, we can also generate original ideas in real time.
Sort-of. I can generate original ideas in real time IF by real time you mean 'thinking about my ideas when I'm speaking and half thinking half listening when the other person is speaking". That's not the best conversational dynamic though. It's better when I actually allow/create pauses between listening to the other person and thinking (the opposite dynamic from my more common mode of interrupting the other person). If my thoughts are a few seconds ahead of my words much of the time when I'm talking I'm more likely to be able to spare enough attention to notice the other person's feelings. Likewise, if I'm fully listening to them I'm more likely to catch nuances and deepen my understanding faster. Also, my thoughts are partially transparent. If I'm not fully listening the person is likely to get that impression, not feel understood, make less effort to understand me, and waste conversational time by repetition in order to ensure that they are understood.
A gigantic web of precomputed ideas also has a bigger border area where you can generate new ideas with relatively lightweight combination and modification of the existing ones.
I've heard of a similar strategy once discussed as part of pickup, I believe - I can only pull up a vague memory right now, but the thought was something along the lines of this. If a woman says she "just moved away from her family in San Francisco to have more freedom," each word of that can be a hook into an interesting conversation. What was moving like? What's her family like? Why did she want to move away from them? What's it like in San Francisco and how is it different here? What kind of freedom was she looking for? etc.
I've been working on using that type of conversation as well to avoid awkward pauses and keep interesting conversations going.
Writing out a list of topics and connections is good but it's only one part of a conversation. You should also consider various reasons for having a conversation. For instance: passing the time, relieving anxiety, developing a relationship, maintaining a relationship, exchanging information, keeping updated on important information, debating a substantive point, getting someone to relax before asking them for something, being polite, making someone feel welcome, resolving a conflict. And when people have different goals for a conversation, it can be unc...
My advice, if you want to become a good conversationalist, is just to crank up the amount of time you spend having conversations. If you are really serious, you could consciously review conversations after the fact, to try to find patterns and see where you could have improved.
What's the link between visiting fellows and the weather?
My advice, if you want to become a good conversationalist, is just to crank up the amount of time you spend having conversations.
I can think of three people I know for whom that does not work. Not because they do not think they have opportunities for conversations, not even because they have opportunities but do not take advantage of them, but because they do, and put a great deal of effort into it, and yet I can see that it is not working for them. They are getting little in return for their efforts, because they are all doing it wrong, each in their own way. Whatever they need to be doing instead, having more conversations isn't it.
Advice is good if it works for the person it is addressed to. It is bad if it does not. General advice like "talk to people more" cannot be expected to generally work any more than an appendectomy will work for every case of abdominal pain. An appendectomy will work only for someone whose problem is a diseased appendix.
Not wishing to speak for Silas, but it looks to me like this. You believe that:
I have the firm belief that no one becomes good at conversation, dating, or any social skill without the equivalent of "creeping out 20[0] people in a row"
If you believe that you are not good at conversation, then you are speculating without practical experience. If you believe you are good at conversation, then by your account you must have gone through your 200 people. Silas is challenging you to share your experience of doing so -- I presume as a check on whether you really believe it, or merely believe that you believe it.
Creeping out 200 people in a row is like suggesting you can't learn to ride a bicycle without breaking a few bones. It's way excessive. Even creeping out 20 people in a row (Silas' figure, which you chose to amend upwards, which argues against this being idle hyperbole) is an absurdity. By the time you're creeping someone out, you're already way off course.
Thankyou for sharing your introspective experience. I'm always interested in how the human brain works and I find that the more I am able to instantiate the model of 'human' for a specific person the more I am able to empathize, comprehend their meaning and cross the inferential gap when trying to express my thoughts in a way that translates accurately.
I too have a particularly active inhibitor in my brain, although through experiences and active personal development have significantly reduced the negative effects. The challenging part was removing the maladaptive inhibitions while keeping the 'perfectionism' benefits that for me came hand in hand with that overactive system.
Thank you for the pointers to those three "supplements"; I didn't know that such effective anti-anxiety substances were available OTC in the US! I've tried some supplements that "support positive mood" via effects on neurotransmitters, but not the ones you've listed; I'll have to check them out.
I should clarify somewhat what I am suggesting the supplements can be useful for.
Aniracetam
Very safe. As in, it is more or less impossible to overdose on the stuff and it isn't going to mess you. ...
As you may have gathered from previous interactions with me and others here, I'm generally careful about my phrasing when I do give advice: I normally preface it with "Here is what I recommend" or the like. I wasn't giving you advice yet, but collecting information prior to giving advice.
I asked about Improv because it points out one specific thing I think you're doing wrong: you're often "blocking" as the improv jargon calls it. I would recommend you learn about (and practice) "yes and".
Your answer to my question is "blocking" in a synctactically typical manner: "yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting". "Yes, but" when what you're looking for in conversation is "yes, and". You're telling me in an oblique way ("lost brain cells") that Toastmasters wasn't a satisfactory experience for you, without giving me an opening for further conversation on that topic.
You could have phrased that in a thousand other ways more inviting of further conversation. Example: "Yes, I did try Toastmasters, and I was bored out of my mind; why did you ask, and what were you thinking I should h...
I'm not sure I would unreservedly recommend books I find this way, because they aren't all full of things I wholeheartedly endorse. They're usually experiments prompted by a sense of personal inadequacy and some of them are kind of embarrassing, but.... here are some books I found in roughly the way I recommended to Silas and what I think of them now:
When I was having difficulties navigating casual not-really-friendly acquaintances with other women (like in the workplace) where I couldn't just avoid people who gave me bad vibes, I found Catfight to be reasonably helpful. I decided on this over various books about "queen bees" that seemed unscientific and possibly amoral... but I haven't read any of those to justify the impression. This book helped me flesh out some details in a pet theory of mine about the way the "aesthetics of signaling" are a major locus of negotiation in real-world socially-embedded virtue ethics. I liked it a lot for that reason, though the text didn't contain the theory explicitly.
When I was trying to figure out what I should be thinking (when planning for retirement) or saying (when my parents brought up investing), I discovered a cla...
Though there is great ethical value in helping people avoid influence techniques, I contend that there is also great ethical value in teaching people how to influence others. I argue that social skills (of which social influence is a subset) are distributed inequitably in society, and that this result is unjust. Some people are dramatically better at social influence (status, etc...) than others knowingly or unknowingly, due to different personality traits and upbringings. There are the haves, and the have-nots in the area of social skills.
The only way for social equality to exist is for people to be in the same bracket of social skills (and social influence ability). We can't make things equal, but we can compress the disparity between the top and the bottom, so the people at the bottom aren't getting stomped on so badly.
Either the haves must give up their social skills, or the have-nots must attain more social skills. The first solution is impossible. With their higher social status, the haves can't be forced to do so, and they will scoff at requests to disarm out of the goodness of their hearts. The cool kids aren't going to change how they do things no matter how much the unco...
If you're extroverted by nature, you probably have no experience in making yourself extroverted, and so are unqualified to give advice. You can teach by example, though.
I notice this pattern a lot. Naturally talented singers can't teach you how to sing because they don't know it. If you don't perceive the obstacles that your students claim to face, you have no business teaching, no matter how good you are at the activity itself. A lot of harmful advice to introverts (like the dreaded "just be yourself") comes from people such as you. I say that as a former introvert who successfully changed :-)
My most useful conversation strategy is the question. Being naturally curious helps, but it really is a universal tool, good for any topic.
Questions are great, but they have certain limitations:
If you are beginning a conversation with some who you don't know well, they may not give you very extensive or useful answers to your questions.
You can only ask so many questions in a row before you are interviewing them. Worse, it looks low status.
For people who over-rely on questions, they often ask a question, get a short or one-word answer, and then ask another questions, getting the same type of answer. After about 3 or 4 of these, the conversation is dead in the water.
The solution is to limit the amount of questions you ask until the other person becomes invested in the conversation enough to give you real answers. The PUA Juggler advises asking less questions and making more statements. Making statements engages the other person, and unlike questions, don't require the other person to reciprocate, avoiding the interviewing, chasing, or badgering dynamics that questions can cause. Making statements gives the other person information about the kind of person you are, which helps them decide if they want to open up to you. Of course, statements still need to be related someone to the current conversational context, ...
Most of the people that I want to have conversations with have some topics that they can talk about enthusiastically at the drop of a hat, if only they could find someone interested. Today I was talking with someone who really likes chemistry, and I learned why it is that some molecules (like lipids) are hydrophobic and others (like ammonia) are hydrophilic. I didn't expect to learn this, but I wanted to keep the conversation going, so I just asked, thinking that maybe it would become interesting. And it worked! That conversation kicked ass!
This works for all sorts of subjects. Does someone love gardening? Say something about soil drainage, and it'll open the floodgates, starting what could be a fascinating conversation. The other person's obscure interests make for great conversation topics because they usually don't get to talk about it with anybody else.
The trick is finding those obscure interests. A lot of people seem embarrassed to be interested in weird stuff, and don't advertise it. It's socially okay to be interested in gossip and whether or not Lady Gaga has a penis (hint: no), but usually less okay to be interested in database denormalization and homoerotic Stargate SG-1 fanfiction. I'm hoping that the Internet will magically change this somehow, but until then, does anybody have hints for finding another person's weird interests?
As Dale Carnegie says: Ask questions and get the other person talking. People love to talk and so the great conversationalist is really the great polite inquisitioner and listener.
Nice, but I have my own theory on what makes a person interesting to be around :-)
Reddit has a section called AMA, short for "ask me anything". The karma scores and comment counts for each topic may be used as rough indicators of how much that topic interests regular people. My impression is that you get the biggest response by posting something like "I am a highly paid prostitute, AMA" or "I killed two men, AMA". Transhumanism and RPG books probably wouldn't score much.
You won me in the first paragraph and your description of Vassar's psyche.
I could promptly visualize his curious face investigating the walls, wrinkles between his eyes while he tries to draw mental connections between 11 different sources before coming up with an "Aha!", followed by an elegant (normally accurate) explanation he'll be pleased to share.
Developing over Rain: if you have time, you are curious and can make the other person at ease, questions will take you miles into the conversation. You'll learn, and the other person will be pleased...
However, I also agree with JoshuaZ: inane subjects are a problem. One should not fake curiosity, and all subjects are not equally interesting. If the person only talks about something you don't give a damn, faking interest wastes time and poisons your soul.
[...]
a. learn in the meta level (observe the dynamics of the conversation, or try to figure out his/her behavior);
I recast the problem with solution 'a'.
Instead of faking interest in a boring topic, what I am doing is being genuinely interested in the person talking about that topic. From that view, every question I ask in such a conversation is not to learn about the topic itself, but the person who's talking about it. What's their mental process for examining the situation? Why do they find it interesting? How much does it affect their thoughts on other subjects? Do they have life rules that can be gleaned from 'common wisdom' in their area of interest? It's all part of my goal for such events: enjoy the person's company, and try to get them to enjoy mine, by understanding who they really are.
Over a long period of time, this has helped to normalize my social interactions. That is, I can appear normal when I want to.
I'll put in a plug for Toastmasters, which is a global organization which can help introverted people become less so. There is likely a nearby meeting or two you can find at www.toastmasters.org. It's low-cost, and you can usually visit for free to see if it's something you would like.
Briefly, it affords you the opportunity to give 5-minute speeches in front of a group in a supportive atmosphere. There are also shorter or longer speaking opportunities during the meeting, which often runs 1 hour.
First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have.
I do this by running conversations with other people in my head. (Of course, this wasn't my conscious intent, but it probably does make me a better conversationalist.) In general, I'm far more conscious of signaling considerations during my head-conversations, and they frequently feature me being far more bold, frank, and controversial than I would be in normal everyday speech. Also, I typically imagine myself conversing with people I perceive as being less intelligent than me that I'd like to impress.
I don't have this problem at all. I have much more the opposite problem, interacting with people who have zero interest in any interesting discussions but want to talk about inane subjects. No, I don't want to hear about what celebrity is cheating with whom. No, conversations should not also be repetition of some TV show you found funny. Etc. Etc. My general solution (which isn't a good one) is to just try to avoid the people who aren't willing to have interesting conversation topics.
Edit: I should add that there are some complicating factors. I try to d...
I challenge you to define them, and will donate $10 to a charity of your choice if your definition gets a karma score of at least 3 points.
No cheating by naming your charity before you reach the target, or by sock-puppeting.
In contrast, D&D rules don't connect to other topics in any strong way.
I doubt that. Before I had finished the paragraph, things that came to mind included board games, what underlying skills transfer between different board games and RPGs (from empirical evidence, they exists and are large), what the appeal of roleplaying a fictional character it is, which different desires roleplaying versus powergaming satisfy, what makes a character attractive to roleplay, what makes a roleplay performance fun, what makes a D&D setting enticing, how to create an enticing D&D setting, whether the most fun is had when the DM does a good job of almost killing the characters (as someone told me), and more. These, of course, give hooks to combinatorial game theory, personality, improv acting, fiction writing, and fun theory. With the possible exception of personality (though it's a small leap to MUDs and the Bartle 4, so probably not an exception), all of these play quite important roles in D&D.
I suppose I'm muddying it a bit since some of those things are connected to D&D but not directly to D&D rules, though your original post simply mentioned D&D.
Knowledge is connected enough that I'd be quite impressed if anyone could find (or, heck, invent) a topic which fails criterion 4.
What's your experience with the process? Does it actually helps you to have better conversation or is the argument mainly that it should help?
I find that meta-conversation can make a good default for small talk in the absence of inspiration to talk about anything else in particular, but that has the disadvantage of seeming a bit strange when talking to people you do not know very well, which is the situation in which the problem is most likely to arise in the first place.
Kaj, this seems like a valuable approach (and it's a pity I didn't get to chat with you - RPG design has been on the forefront of my thoughts lately, and I inevitably think of the Kalevala (and fabbing and ip law by extension) when I go to a LW meetup, as Michael Vassar is the only other person I've met who has any familiarity with it!)
I've done this before with high success at general social events. However, I find myself doing it wrong sometimes, and LW meetups are one of the best examples of why: assuming other people have limited interests. Because the...
Good post. One little editorial comment:
(If that isn't showing properly, use this direct link to the picture.)
The picture's showing OK here, but it's a little wide so the very right hand edge of it is cut off by the sidebar.
I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. Coming into a social situation with a prepared set of ideas to cover is something a preacher does. Doesn't mean it doesn't have its place for certain situations, but it is not the way to approach having a conversation.
Good conversations are a complicated interaction between people. If you want to have a good one with someone, you need to hold their interest as well as your own. To extend a ridiculous metaphor a little further, cache misses in this context with cost you a bit more than a few hundred cycles,...
Great, now I have several more things to add to my to-do list. Though I guess the proper place for this is what "Getting Things Done" calls the "someday maybe" list...
todo:
Create one of these conversation maps for myself.
Check if there is any way to integrate this with the tag and script system I was already planning to create for my own personal journal/blog/wiki. Even just some clickable links to relevant wikipages would be useful.
Consider adding to the graph a list of unresolved questions in each topic, or interesting insights
Perhaps the mapping method could benefit from some refinement.
You, Kaj, acknowledge that some of these posts may be controversial. This is a good start, but from my experience there is a portion of the population that finds even discussion of personal information unpleasant. The beginning of a fresh relationship is about creating a safe conversational space. Assessing the listener's reaction to your communication. If you truly mean to map future conversations, then a guided walk with specific branch points based on listener attitudes may be helpful.
Howe...
As Dale Carnegie says: Ask questions and get the other person talking. People love to talk and so the great conversationalist is really the great polite inquisitioner and listener.
One of the things that makes Michael Vassar an interesting person to be around is that he has an opinion about everything. If you locked him up in an empty room with grey walls, it would probably take the man about thirty seconds before he'd start analyzing the historical influence of the Enlightenment on the tradition of locking people up in empty rooms with grey walls.
Likewise, in the recent LW meetup, I noticed that I was naturally drawn to the people who most easily ended up talking about interesting things. I spent a while just listening to HughRistik's theories on the differences between men and women, for instance. There were a few occasions when I engaged in some small talk with new people, but not all of them took very long, as I failed to lead the conversation into territory where one of us would have plenty of opinions.
I have two major deficiencies in trying to mimic this behavior. One, I'm by nature more of a listener than speaker. I usually prefer to let other people talk so that I can just soak up the information being offered. Second, my native way of thought is closer to text than speech. At best, I can generate thoughts as fast as I can type. But in speech, I often have difficulty formulating my thoughts into coherent sentences fast enough and frequently hesitate.
Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don't need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I'm sufficiently familiar with, I'm often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.
Below is a preliminary "conversational map" I generated as an exercise. The top three subjects - the weather, the other person's background (job and education), people's hobbies - are classical small talk subjects. Below them are a bunch of subjects that I feel like I can spend at least a while talking about, and possible paths leading from one subject to another. My goal in generating the map is to create a huge web of interesting subjects, so that I can use the small talk openings to bootstrap the conversation into basically anything I happen to be interested in.
This map is still pretty small, but it can be expanded to an arbitrary degree. (This is also one of the times when I wish my netbook had a bigger screen.) I thought that I didn't have very many things that I could easily talk with people about, but once I started explicitly brainstorming for them, I realized that there were a lot of those.
My intention is to spend a while generating conversational charts like this and then spend some time fleshing out the actual transitions between subjects. The benefit from this process should be two-fold. Practice in creating transitions between subjects will make it easier to generate such transitions in real time conversations. And if I can't actually come up with anything in real time, I can fall back to the cache of transitions and subjects that I've built up.
Naturally, the process needs to be guided by what the other person shows an interest in. If they show no interest in some subject I mention, it's time to move the topic to another cluster. Many of the subjects in this chart are also pretty inflammable: there are environments where pretty much everything in the politics cluster should probably be kept off-limits, for instance. Exercise your common sense when building and using your own conversational charts.
(Thanks to Justin Shovelain for mentioning that Michael Vassar seems to have a big huge conversational web that all his discussions take place in. That notion was one of the original sources for this idea.)