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Vive-ut-Vivas comments on How to always have interesting conversations - Less Wrong
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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...
Is there a handy description of the technique?
Dunno where your confusion lies, but my point was only that if you spend enough time practicing talking to people, it gets easier, regardless if you're a sorority girl or SIAI research fellow. Everyone can do it.
Everyone can assemble a sorority and large number of recruits that they are expected to speak with in quick succession?
Everyone can find somebody to practice small talk with. The benefit of conversation practice isn't contingent upon doing so in quick succession, but accumulation of conversation experience over time. You can increase your skills very rapidly even without access to the condensed conversational environment of fraternity/sorority recruitment. I don't even recommend participating in that if you can avoid it, since it's a very stressful experience. But it does make you really good at talking to people.
Go to a bar, people are usually there to talk. Interestingness varies considerably, of course. If you work, make small talk with your coworkers. If you're in school, say hello to the person sitting next to you. Make a habit of doing this wherever you go. That's the best way to practice.
I'm not sure this is perfect advice. For one thing, speaking as a person who enjoys conversation, it can often be deeply uncomfortable when a random stranger tries to start a conversation. I made accidental eye-contact with someone on the subway today and then had to have a conversation about the weather which interrupted mildly productive thoughts.
I agree that in the contexts of school and work this sort of thing might be acceptable. One has to think about the fact that the very worst that happens is that the person indicates they don't want to talk.
One thing I do use as a conversation starter is if someone is holding a book that I've read (in which case I'll comment) or a book I have not read (in which case I'll inquire about it).
Not to me, they aren't.
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 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 appreciate your saying this very much.
This might sound weird, but: internet chat rooms (is that what "Second Life" is for nowadays?). I know chat rooms have a reputation, but I've read that they've been shown to have potential for actually increasing social skills (I'm searching for the relevant article, but I know I read it in a journal over a year ago).
But, you have to be proactive about it. And of course discerning.
a. You have to find the right venue a.1. chat rooms have a reputation for a reason a.2. you need to go to a venue where everyone is not there to talk about what you typically talk about.
b. You have to be conscious about what you are doing:
b.1. not talking to people who are into what you are into (somewhat redundant to a.2.) b.2 you have to be self-aware of the process...what is working, what isn't b.3. you have to try to step out of your "comfort zone" in order to learn new approaches, new social skills, as it were
The thing is, people are there to talk...so, seek out those people, and talk.
I'm not saying it's "easy"...it's just one idea.
Simpler even than an internet chat room are Omegle (text chat with a random stranger) and Chat Roulette (video chat with a random stranger).
Just one social blunder after another.
You're there to talk, they're there to talk, you say hi, and they disconnect. Where is the "blunder" and who is making it?
Of course not, with that attitude! ;) I certainly don't know enough about you to advise you on how you may be sending people the wrong signals in conversation. Do you have any friends that are good conversationalists? Take them with you. That's actually how I learned! "Shadowing" a popular friend is a great way to pick up conversation skill. I'm sure you know someone who's good at this, since popular people, by definition, know lots of people!
Not sure I've ever been "bad" at conversation, but I - like everybody else! - have had to work on improving it by practice.
Anyway, I fear we've drifted a bit from my original point, which was directed towards people who want to talk to other people in a situation where both parties are already willing to talk. Advising on how to talk to people who aren't interested in conversation off the bat will require more thought on my part.
ETA: Hit "comment" too early.
The choice of setting matters a great deal, and a bar is comparatively difficult. As an introvert who had a similar issue starting conversations myself (though I think to a lesser degree), I've found a setting which is much easier: dances, specifically Contra dance but probably any style which has a norm of changing partner after each dance. In that setting, you're repeatedly forced to initiate conversations with women, on a hard deadline, or else you'll have to sit out; but those conversations are short, follow extremely predictable paths, and have no bad outcomes (rejections normally come from a standard list of status-neutral answers). There will typically also be breaks and an afterparty for longer conversations, but if your goal is just to get over difficulty in approaching people and initiating conversations, those are optional.
'Do you want to dance?' Isn't much of a conversation. You can even ask keep the whole process entirely nonverbal by making eye contact and asking for the hand of the girl by offering your own hand.
Loud music also makes it harder to have a good conversation.
This varies by dance style and local custom, but in contra, there are a few minutes of silence for setup and pairing between songs during which there is no music to talk over, and smalltalk is expected.
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. Genuine conversation is procedure-less (or at least practically so. I guess with sufficient processing power and knowledge of all the hundreds of variables you could replicate it, but I think such a feat would be beyond the abilities of the conscious mind).
I used to be extremely introverted. I found talking to people I didn't know very awkward. Even moderate acquaintances were tricky. Then I went to university and made some new friends. Went out. And then just decided to talk to people. Alcohol helped. A lot. Now I am what many would call extroverted, though I still feel, in many ways, like an introvert pretending to be an extrovert.
I don't think there is really such a thing as introverted and extroverted people at all. People are encouraged to think of these things as part of their "essential character" (TM) - or even their biology. And in some medical cases, this is obviously true (such as in autism).
But for most people, it's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of will. People think about worst case scenarios. They think about (as you mention somewhere else in these comments) weirding out a load of people. And maybe you would. But the key, I think, is then to disregard your fear and just talk anyway.
The idea of an extroverted social animal who feels no fear is a false ideal, I think. Everyone will have jokes that fail, everyone has conversations that, the moment they start, you know that this person is really not for you at all. What the "extrovert" does that is different is simply to keep talking anyway.
I obviously don't know about your life, so cannot say anything truly accurate about it. However, from what I see in your posts, I would say than your problem is not ineloquence, but fear of failure.
To be pithy: "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again."
And like I say above, try not to think of it as a procedure or algorithm. Perhaps try what I did: don't try to be an extrovert, but rather think of it as pretending to be one.
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 it will funnel your spontaneity in a direction that will create a harmonious result.
In contrast, a socially unskilled person is like someone improvising with concepts such as "mode" and "key." Their results are practically guaranteed to violate the constraints of what we consider to be good music. This of what happens when an untrained person plinks away at a piano.
While both conversation and musical improvisation are procedureless, there are procedures for learning those things. Musicians practice scales and etudes. Applying the same kind of process to learning social interaction is looked on as strange, because of the false expectation that people should be able to learn it naturally (even if the reason they haven't is because they were locked out of social interaction for years due to bullying and exclusion that was no fault of their own).
Actually, introversation is a component of temperament that does seem to have a biological basis.
I agree that for most people with low social skills probably aren't biologically determined to be quite so bad at socializing. Even though people have different levels of potential due to biology, most people probably don't come anywhere near meeting their potential. But the problem isn't really their will; it's their social development and the associations that they have developed with social interaction.
Someone's present-day social skills are due to an interaction of biological and environmental factors. Temperament on its own generally doesn't determine social skills; instead, their temperament influences social experiences, which determine what level of social skills are learned. In the case of people with low social skills and different temperaments (e.g. introversion), these people generally got that way because their temperament made them "get off on the wrong foot" with their peers socially, often resulting in bullying, exclusion, or abuse. In another peer environment, even an introverted individual could develop social skills just fine.
Actually, there are pretty large individual differences in susceptibility to anxiety. People with lower "anxiety threshold" (i.e. it takes less to make them anxious) really do have things harder. I managed to conquer anxiety at the level of social phobia, but to do I had to recognize certain challenges (and advantages) that my temperament gave me, and learned to cope with them.
This works for some people once they have certain prerequisites for learning from their attempts at socializing. The trick is to get them to those prerequisites.
Certainly there are patterns in social interaction.
However, I think that if you go into social interaction aware of these patterns and meaning to act on them, then this very awareness will in fact ruin your social interaction, because one of the rules of genuine social interaction is that it's free flowing and natural-feeling. If you treat it like a formula, you'll break it.
What evidence do you have for your theory?
I must confess, I don't find your advice helpful either.
See HughRistik's great article and in particular this comment about how much of your own knowledge you can be unaware of if you've never been without it.
"Try, try again" is insufficient to improve. You can try forever without improvement if you can't recognize what you were doing right, and what you weren't. This information doesn't spontaneously unfold from your DNA as a result of being in social situations. And (see below), I have indeed tried again and again and again (edit: sentence wasn't completed in original comment).
I've already done exactly what you suggest, going out, and drinking, and benefitting form the lower inhibitions to talking that come with alcohol. I've done this quite a bit, but I've never seen any of the skill carry over to when I'm not intoxicated. Furthermore, I've pretended to be an extrovert, but it really makes no difference from the inside or on the outside: it doesn't automagically allow me to make conversation where I otherwise wouldn't.
Whatever problems I might have, fear of failure is not among them. It is, at most, fear of that failure cascading into very damaging personal consequences. And given my personal experience, these fears are extremely well-grounded. Nevertheless, I quite often go out to socialize and join groups, actively participate in them, and -- suprise surprise -- I do fail to form relationships or improve social skills, and I fail quite often, to the point where it's no longer a big deal.
I hate to be such a nannering nabob of negativity, but most of what I hear really is ignorant of the problems people like me might actually face, because the advice giver can't conceive of being in that state. I appreciate you trying to help, but, despite your claim to have been an introvert, you advice really sounds like you have not actually been in a position that's informative about this issue, as that would allow you to say more specifically what one has to do to cross the barrier.
I can teach people calculus and trigonometry. I can say a lot more than just, "try, don't be afraid of failure, and show some willpower". Why can't you?