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Daniel_Burfoot comments on How to always have interesting conversations - Less Wrong
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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?
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.
That is good advice.
A friend of mine video taped his conversations with people. (By which I mean, there was a video recording of some event, and he left it on following, to capture his social interactions.) In this way, he was able to see not just things he said, but also gauge people's reactions to his body language. He said it was difficult to watch at first, but had a huge benefit to his social skills.
Video taping may not be the preferred way to go about it, but there is something to be said for reflection. While you are unlikely to get better without practice, merely sinking time into conversation won't necessarily help, and may harm you. Without analyzing your attempts, even if it's only a brief list of what went well and what didn't, you may be practicing and learning bad habits. 100 ungraded math problems doesn't make you better at math, and 100 uncoached squats may injure you.
Take a few moments after conversations to assess at least what went well and what didn't. If you have access to an honest friend, you can do even better. Converse with a third party (your friend can participate or merely be near enough to observe) and run a sort of post-conversation analysis later. Treat it like any other skill you're serious about learning. I've seen this help more than one struggling introvert.
The Visiting Fellows program is in California, which has a different weather than my native Finland. (There should possibly have been some intermediate node like "California" between "Weather" and "Visiting Fellows".)
Good idea. Also, if you're suffering from malnutrition due to poverty, just crank up the amount of cake you eat. If you are really serious, hire a dietician to figure out what you're missing in your nutritional needs.
The people that aren't good at conversation are the ones that don't have easy opportunities to increase the number of conversations.
I don't think that's true. Who doesn't have easy opportunities to increase their number of conversations, other than a total shut-in? People are everywhere, and therefore, so are potential conversations. You might not have the most interesting conversation with the guy standing behind you in line at the bank, but the only way to get better at conversation is practice, like the OP said.
Starting a conversation with a completely random stranger generally takes skill to begin with. Potentially creeping out 20 people in a row is not an acceptable risk -- unless you'd like to bear it for me?
Also, others who have posted on the topic [1] said that if I'm at a low skill level at this, I shouldn't practice on people in captive situations, like being in line at the bank. Which of you should I believe?
[1] can't find the link right now, and I can't even mention one of the people's names
Well, full disclosure: I'm a really extroverted person, so I apologize if I may be trivializing the art of small talk. That's definitely not my intention, since I want to make it clear that it's a skill that is to be learned. Also, the conversational nuances are a bit different if you're chatting up someone of the opposite sex versus just making small talk with a random stranger. I'm only talking about the latter, I don't claim to have any helpful advice regarding the former. ;) I'm assuming that's what the "captive situation" thing refers to.
Generally, people like to talk. Sometimes they don't. You might be a brilliant conversationalist and run into someone who's pissed off and doesn't want to talk, so you shouldn't take that personally. You can pick up cues about people as to how amenable they are to conversation; if they're avoiding all eye contact with everyone in the area, that's a bad sign. If you make eye contact and smile, that's a good sign. If you're not practiced at small talk, you start with the smiley people. Practice talking to people who are good at conversation; observe the way they steer conversations and what their mannerisms are.
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 :-)
Yeah, I didn't realize I was entering into a discussion on how to acquire extroversion! I admit, I'm unqualified there. But I definitely do have experience, and advice to give, on how to steer conversation toward interesting topics for both individuals interested in having a conversation, which is what I thought we were talking about in the first place. :)
What cousin_it said, times a thousand. Harsh, but true.
Ability to do something does not imply ability to teach it. It just means you've reached Level 1. Until you can imagine what it was like to be without your skill, and the mental steps you went through going out of that state, you will be forever giving advice that assumes away the problem.
It helps if student and teacher are both clear on what the subject being taught actually is in the first place, and which level everybody is starting at. The fact remains that just because you're not good at making small talk doesn't mean that the opportunity isn't there, everywhere. Either way, in order to get better, you will have to practice, regardless of how difficult it is to get to the point of even being able to practice. Kaj Sotala's post wasn't about how to talk to random strangers, but how to get to interesting conversations with someone you're already talking to. It's a bit unfair to accuse people who are here to help with that issue of not being helpful on a related, but different one.
Perhaps, but your advice required the ability to successfully start conversations, since you were suggesting to talk to random people:
It's true that practice is necessary, but not just any practice will suffice. And following the practice recommendations you gave would not be helpful unless the problem were mostly solved to begin with.
Well, the entire topic of the original post was contingent upon already being in a situation of engaging in small talk with someone. The LW meet-up, for example. If you are already able to start conversation with someone, but wanting to skill up in steering the conversation into interesting avenues, Kaj Sotala's post should be very helpful. Being able to make small talk does not at all imply skill in having interesting conversation.
Not everyone will agree with me on this, and I know this is controversial. But 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": it's just that most people make most of their big social mistakes when they're very young (just like most people's middle or high school experiments with romance or sex end up being total disasters). If you're not willing to creep out 200 or so people in a row, you'll never learn.
The "avoid captive situations" comment is not particularly helpful for someone trying to learn social skills. In fact, I'd say it's harmful, because the concern about making people feel uncomfortable is a big part of social anxiety, and social anxiety is what prevents people from developing social skills.
Okay, who were your first 200? Please list 50 of the incidents when the venue supervisor asked you to leave or modify your behavior.
Why are you asking that? I'm missing your point.
Not wishing to speak for Silas, but it looks to me like this. You believe that:
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.
You're correct that if you go up to a random person 200 times and start talking, you will probably not creep out all 200. I was exaggerating, which is why I said "the equivalent of" creeping 200 people out: my point was that everyone needs to make lots of awkward mistakes to learn social skills, and that you need to be willing to do so. Silas stated that this wasn't an acceptable risk, and I amended his figure upward to indicate that you have to be willing to deal with even worse outcomes than he was fearing, even if they're unlikely to occur, and that learning conversational skills can be difficult and involve a lot of rejection.
I'm not going to list all my mistakes, but I have certainly made more than 200 awkward comments to people, experienced more than 200 rejections, made people feel uncomfortable more than 200 times, and so forth (though not in a row, admittedly). It doesn't make you "way off course"; it's the only way to learn.
It looks like we're referring to different things by the term "[equivalent of] creeping people out". I agree you will have to make mistakes and get rejections. But I was referring to a specific context for the "creeping out".
Specifically, the problem at hand was that of how to get good at starting conversations with random strangers. The strategy being recommended was one that dismissed the downside of creeping out random strangers (which is often associated with the venue supervisor -- boss, proprietor, conductor, bouncer, whatever -- telling you to stop or leave).
My comment was that, no, doing things that disruptive and creepy, that often, in that short of a period, is not an acceptable risk, and not what you should suggest anyone should do if that's the risk.
(And RichardKennaway confirmed that enduring that kind of social ostracism is way excessive for the skill being learned, so I'm not alone in this assessment.)
You, in turn, were taking "creeping out" to refer to relatively minor goofs in a context where the consequences are much less severe, where you've already done significant deft social navigation around that group, and where those who see the error have good reason to be much more understanding of the goof. While I agree that rejections, mistakes, etc. are to be expected and are part of life, you were equating very different kinds of rejections, and -- like most sociality advisors here -- assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier.
In any case, those are far different kinds of failures than "becoming the creepy guy at the bookstore" or having people get the bouncer to talk to you because of conversational goofs (which has happened to me, so this isn't idle speculation). You have an inaccurate picture of what you were expecting me to go through, so your advice, though relevant for other social skills, was not applicable here, and comes across as -- like Richard noted -- shrugging off the possibility of breaking bones to learn how to ride a bike, as if it's no big deal.
Am I starting to make sense here?
And who modded this down? I'm sorry the comment I made which Richard elaborated on was too brief to make my point, but why shouldn't I have made that comment? Should I not have confirmed that Richard was correctly representing my objection?
I don't care about the loss of karma here, but I want to know why someone deems it "a type of comment I want less of". I get that if I were merely agreeing, it was a waste of space, but since I was the one making the original comment, my agreement and confirmation is informative to the discussion.
Thank you, well said.
I think I've come up with a reasonable algorithm for determining if a stranger is open to conversation. (Mostly tested on females in New Jersey.) I developed it out of desperation, because, for a while now, if I didn't talk to strangers, I wouldn't be talking to anyone in person except my immediate family.
The algorithm:
Smile and make eye contact.
If eye contact is not returned within a reasonable period of time, find someone else. If eye contact is returned, wave.
If the stranger waves back or shows some other noticeable positive reaction, go ahead and introduce yourself.
The key seems to be the eye contact; as far as I can tell, if someone is willing to make eye contact with you, they're usually willing to talk with you, and making eye contact seems to be inoffensive in most situations. You'll probably get some false negatives, but false positives tend to be worse than false negatives and the false positive rate seems to be almost zero; you usually don't creep people out by deciding to leave them alone.
Also, fan conventions (anime, gaming, etc.) are great places to find people willing to socialize with strangers. And take a camera; people often wear elaborate costumes at these events, and complimenting someone's cosplay outfit has been a good conversation opener for me. (This is me at Otakon 2009.) I've also had some luck talking to fellow customers at bookstores; you know a few really good books you can recommend, right?