"Stupid" questions thread

gothgirl420666

r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.

I like this idea! I feel like the current questions are insufficiently "stupid," so here's one: how do you talk to strangers?

One of the most simple lessons that I got a lot of milage out of is: don't be afraid to state the obvious. A lot of conversations and human interactions are more about the positive vibe that's being created than about the content. (Somewhat less so in these circles.)

1Richard_Kennaway13y

I'd like to ask an even stupider one: why do people want to talk to strangers? I've had a few such conversations on trains and the like, and I'm not especially averse to it, but I think afterwards, what was the point of that? Well, that passed the time. *It would have passed anyway.* Yes, but not as quickly. At least the train eventually arrives.

1ChrisHallquist13y

While it's probably good not to have a crippling fear of talking to strangers, it's not something I really do unless I have a specific reason to. Like, a week ago I met a girl on a bus with a t-shirt that said something about tuk-tuks, which told me she'd probably been to southeast Asia and therefore probably interesting to talk to, so I commented on the shirt and that got the conversation rolling. Or if I'm at a meetup for people with shared interests, that fact is enough for me to want to talk to them and assume they want to talk to me.

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