"Uh-oh. I didn't know conversation had rules."
dilbert.com
dilbert.com
Dr. Grandin is herself autistic, and asserts that people along the autism-Asperger's spectrum need to learn the rules explicitly, like actors learning their lines in a play.
For example, I've learned that eye contact is important, and have trained myself to do it subconsciously, but when I'm tired or have just given blood, I stop doing it.
And of course, the rules of conversation vary very widely across the globe. Of particular note is the rules of conversation in Malagasy, where to be polite is to be so oblique that in America folks would think you're being purpusefully rude.
Hey, that's really, really fantastic and useful. I can't believe I've never seen it before.
Are you in linguistics? Care to recommend some more reading, articles, essays?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
You seem to be implying that one of the Wikipedia articles is wrong since it's unlikely that a soccer player would do advanced linguistics research. But you should consider a more likely hypothesis, namely, Wikipedia is correct and Patrick McBride the scholar and Patrick McBride the soccer player are different persons.
Also, in many cases the hypothesis that Wikipedia is correct isn't /very/ likely.
From the link: Quantity of Information
* Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
* Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
This is a great way to talk about interesting things.
First off, yeah, with the people I most value, I talk too much and don't listen enough. Mea culpa, must improve.
On the other hand, perhaps I just need to level up my skill at asking guiding questions, and perhaps I just need to widen my interests, but I frequently have trouble being interested in what people want to talk about. In particular, I often find people want to tell stories about a particular experience they have, for the purpose of complaining about other people, refusing to generalize the experience, and refusing empathize with the person they're complaining about. That's boring!
Perhaps relatedly, I've recently been thinking that maybe I should put a little more work into consciously deciding if a conversant is interesting to me, and then choosing to pursue a boorish strategy or a collaborative strategy appropriately (perhaps erring on the side of collaborative). I've definitely had some totally boring people recently exclaim how fun I am to talk to and how much they'd like to hang out more in the future. Oops. It's probably imprudent, though, to attempt this strategy in groups with more than one other person present.
I think that there are always ways to (gradually!) steer a conversation to what you both find mutually interesting. It is an art, though.
My trick is to pretend I'm doing an interview, where the words "me", "I", "my", etc. aren't appropriate. And where questions work better than assertions or corrections.
I am a very good listener, and enjoy listening at least as much as talking. If you figure out how to get someone monologuing, they'll eventually stumble into territory you find interesting. You just have to 'convince' your conversant that it's OK to dive deeper into a topic. Ask them to elaborate or explain things that sound interesting. Try to show you're interested and intrigued.
This tactic has helped me befriend people I would never have thought twice about if I'd dismissed their casual conversation as uninteresting. People I have absolutely nothing in common with. I've engaged in fascinating, enlightening conversations and lectures on philosophy, programming, design, cooking, life, finance, and more. Some of these conversations were life-changing, and it's all because I pushed the buttons that got people talking deeply about their interests.
He could hack the problem like this: instead of figuring out which type of dancing is impressive directly, just watch reactions. People react to what they think is good dancing, so by watching people he can learn what's considered good dancing.
In the context of Adams' mind experiment there's a problem with this approach: the aliens need to now both there is a goal to dancing or conversing well, and what that goal is. (Which is confounded a bit by there being multiple goals for these activities, and not everybody's going for the same ones in any given context. Two people who just met will want a different thing from conversation than two friends shooting the shit.)
However, Adams' rhetorical questions (though not, I think, his mind experiment itself) have a flaw: people with Asberger's syndrome generally know what the goal of those activities is (or at least, what they want out of it), but are unable to judge whether they're actually achieving those goals (since they have a hard time gauging other peoples reactions as you suggest).
This fits with the mind experiment though. Suppose the aliens figure out that conversation and dancing have goals - even what those goals are. The alien still can't tell who the good conversationalists or dancers are without understanding things like human body language, vocal inflection, or subtle word choice - which is nearly the same set of problems people with Asberger's have.
I think it's much tricker than you said. Those are just a variety of small details, and there are many more in the same general category. But that doesn't stop it from working. It's very noisy data whatever you do. The difficulty may approach that of learning English while you're there. That could take a decade, who knows. Children learn English faster than that, but we do lots of things to help them, but OTOH the alien is super smart and has computers to analyze patterns in the language.
(Of course if the alien does pick up English, these context problems become pretty small.)
I took the original question to be about the fact that what constitutes a good dance move is arbitrary. That's a fundamental problem. How do you figure out something that's just an arbitrary convention? Well, the solution is to look at the people who decide it.
How people react to stuff, like what they say, is not arbitrary. There's a method to it that you can figure out, unlike dancing which arguably doesn't have a method (I'm not taking sides on that, I just interpreted the problem to be to assume dancing hasn't got a logical method to it).
The whole thought experiment is a bit weird, because the range of dancing skills on display in the typical nightclub in all the parts of the world I've been to recently is really not that large.
Personally, I wish my CS program taught me to speak more at a conversation setting (as opposed to "raise your hand to speak" classroom). I spent the first 3 years of my career unable to get a word in at meetings.
I find that the children respond far better if I use their names when talking with them - but this is short snippets of talk (maybe 30s) with longer (20+min) gaps between. I always introduce my self by given-name and am surprised by how many of them remember me months later.
Partly I use their names as an attempt to remember them, partly to ease any discomfort or reluctance they have communicating with me and partly because I find it awkward starting a conversation or getting someone's attention without using their name.
For example, he points out that most people never accept blame for anything. From CEOs to convicts, we generally blame our failures on circumstances or other people. So with this in mind, he gives ways of steering people away from errors without raising their self-defense mechanisms or forcing them to admit that they're wrong. After all, do you want to defeat and humiliate them, or do you want to help them?
Indeed, the reason I liked the book was that generally, it DIDN'T seem fake. It encourages you to genuinely care about people. And says that, as it happens, this actually works better, too.
My view is hacking your personality is no different then improving your coding skills. It is just another skill set and there are advantages that can be derived from improving it. And, as you point out, personality isn't something that can be directly changed.. Thats called 'faking it'. No, personality means changing deeper things, like learning to care for people (or learning to care for yourself). Plus... Compared to coding it is a skill set that is far more useful and influential (unless you get really lucky...)
I'd be really interested in a book that outlines the rules for a relationship... It would be nice to have something authoritative to point to when disagreements crop up.
1. People do note if you are interested or not. Speaking all the time mostly equals to being self-centered. Making questions all the time can certainly please a self-centered person, but not those who note subtleties: getting a disinterested or a stock question is the same repelling as domineering.
2. People are adaptive and notice patterns. A good way to be boring is to do the same pattern in conversations. Try to seduct a girl by just making questions to her. (Where do you live; Are you stydiyng or working; etc.) That doesn't work.
3. Those who follow such too simple rule can easily be abused: a lot of people complain to others and search for those who'd just listen. They can never get enough, and what's worse they don't value you.
You have to be able to tell some words of support, but also, to not become a moral drainage to someone, you need to LEAD. This is a complicated thing, so I don't extend it here.
5. Making questions takes skill. Questions may be stupid, irritating, insulting or nerdy and boring. There's no boolean choice, to speak or to make questions, as it is presented in the article.
6. A good story teller is better than a good question maker. This also takes skill and the sense of what's a good place to which story.
For talks as an entertainment, which is my primary concern here, the difficulty is in INVOLVING THE interlocutor's PERSONALITY. Consider 2 questions one might ask:
(a) Do you think Paris Hilton's recent behavior is acceptable? (b) What would you do if you were Paris Hilton? (her father, brother, etc)
The second one lets the inerlocutor imagine oneself in an interesting situation and involves the personality. This thing is rare, I do value it high; too many talks happen in the upper atmosphere without involving you, and too many people don't get it and don't try to involve others, thinking that just smiling or being joyful, or flattery is the key. Though, this also takes skill, and I suppose that if you try too hard, people can get bored even of being _tried_ to involve: we all are good at noticing patterns.
The problem is that some people have overly sensitive radars, so we tend to pick up the noise along with the signal. On top of that we have a questioning nature, and we don't like to follow a rule based on its face value, we end up lingering in doubts on the universality of the rule, or its moral justifications. Other times we hold a rule in contempt, seeing it as cliche. All these get in the way when a social exchange demands you to apply the rules swiftly without thinking.
Similarly, with those maxims about communication it's as if everyone is striving for a genuine meaning. However, if you take things to their limit there is nihilism everywhere.
The aliens, asper people, and 3/4's of everyone could just be unaware but also just rejecting the conventional notions of conversation.
One of my first exposures to real-life Americans was riding a bus in London with a bunch of American tourists who kept saying "Ooooooooohhh, look at all those _peeeeoplee!" as if they were shocked that one of the major streets in one of the world's largest cities should have a lot of people on it.
Humans are a social animal, and if you're not convinced of that, study the psychological effects of feral children and solitary confinement.