Ask HN: Best tips for holding great conversations with liberal arts alumni? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best tips for holding great conversations with liberal arts alumni?

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I'm attending a university alumnus dinner, being the only CS-student there.

After my PhD in EE, when I started my graduate work in Linguistics I had quite a shock to see how different they thought and argued (and then I took a course in the philosophy of department, that's a different story altogether).

My advice would be: Try to get the most out of meeting with them. It's easy to look down on the "soft sciences", but you'll be surprised at the insights you may learn. You should not use jargon, even if it sounds mundane to you, they won't understand it and think you're doing it deliberately to look clever.

Thank you for the advice!

Also, I should mention that I am indeed fascinated by the multitude of topics that other have studied, but that I don't know anything of. That's the problem, I believe: I want to get past the mundane "So what is that?" sort of questions.

Try to keep it going; all you can do is hold your half of the conversation. If you don't know what something is, try to relate it to something you do know -- if the other person is holding up their end, they'll work with you and you'll have a decent conversation.

Edit: It's really the same as holding a conversation with, say, someone who's in a technical profession you don't know about, or a family member you haven't met for a long time. We liberal arts majors aren't aliens!

I disagree, not with liberals arts majors not being aliens part, but this being the same as talking to someone from any technical profession you don't know about. In my experience, the thinking process thought and praised in liberals arts fields is in some respects quite different from that in any technical field, as to sometimes be a real impediment in communication.

One example from a topic I worked on: author attribution using stylometry. To a CS (or EE or whatever) the thought that you can take a corpus composed of writings from various authors and train classifiers to differentiate the unique styles of each would be mundane. To some English majors, such a strong structuralist approach would border on sacrilegious (remember Prof. Keating's reaction to such an approach to judge poetry in Dead Port's Society). Each approach has something to be said for it but it has to be done delicately, otherwise polite discussion becomes impossible.

If/when you need to disagree/contradict them frame it in a way that is not like you are the authority.

Generally, it's probably better (more polite) to say "I am pretty sure it's actually..." or, "I always thought it was .." even when you know 100%.

Wikileaks is probably a good topic of conversation (politics and technology).

This. Conversation is a give-and-take. Simply declaring that the other person is wrong and that you are right makes people less open to continue talking to you, as it makes you seem combative.

Just approach it like you would any other conversation. Ask questions about their lives - everyone likes to talk about themselves. Make jokes. Try not to be nervous. Be yourself. There is no need to act differently just because you're talking to liberal arts alumni.

Assume you are below average: http://sivers.org/below-average

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