Social Cache Busting
autodidacts.io
autodidacts.io
A while back I started participating actively on Reddit's r/explainlikeimfive, and this has been my experience — explaining things I (think I) understand in ways that are accessible to laypeople really forces me to confront the sloppier parts of my understanding. If you're a technical person, it's also a great exercise in communication with non-technical people.
I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).
Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.
Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.
Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them. That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.
Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.
First you need someone who actually appreciates you deviating from the script. Most people most times are not seeking anything "interesting" in the sense you might think it
Also, if you'd notice that happening: a good sign you're wasting your time talking to that person.
In a good conversation both (or more) participants get something useful/interesting/funny out of it.
e.g. a friend of mine once met William Shatner and then ran into him again a few months later. When asked "How are you doing?" Shatner answered exactly the same way at both the first and second meeting. I imagine some of this is efficiency since famous people tend to get the same questions over and over again. Tom Wilson even has a business card that answers a lot of these questions [0]
What was more surprising was seeing this in high school. I did a summer program with kids from all over the US. A few months later, I saw one of them at a sports event and, similar to Shatner, he had a canned response. He was from a well to do family and was probably on some kind of "track" to the right college etc. Was still surprising to hear.
If you are curious to see someone busting the cache, there are video compilations of Sean Evans from hot ones asking questions of guests based on deep research and them being incredibly impressed. [1]
Charisma on Command also has a great video on how to ask better question [2]
0 - https://www.upworthy.com/back-to-the-future-actor-has-a-hila...
... and people loving it.
Someone pointed out that Malcolm Gladwell even does "oh, wait, I almost forgot" or "That just reminded me" during his speeches but that it rehearsed and a consistent part of the speech as well.
Similar to how comedians have a "set" that they first put together, polish and then repeat over and over again.
I appreciate them both, so that isn’t meant as a slight to Sean Evans, but rather a compliment of the depth and breadth of both their research and staying power as interviewers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nardwuar
Surprisingly (to me, anyway, as I didn’t know this prior to looking it up for this comment!) Evans even credits Nardwuar specifically as one of his influences in this Brother Ali interview, which would explain a lot of the similarities:
Or it's an indication you are asking the correct questions but that the person you're asking it from anticipated it and is evading. Anyone who has heard a politicians and CEOs take questions from the press know this.
Recently I had a person say a lot without really saying anything because most likely they didn't want me to have some (business related) information.
It's important to be mindful that if there is a cache, there's probably a reason for it.
But only if they're open-minded. I've met many smart people who would rather sound smart than bust their cache.
Same goes for politicians, though there it becomes much more problematic.
If you got this with people that are actually close, there would be a problem.
Followed immediately by: “And how often do people ask you that?”
This is normally already completely novel, but on the off chance it isn’t, you can recurse to higher meta!
I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice when speaking to each other but prompt.
What word would you use for this?
> you probably know what I mean by “hitting the cache”
In addition to simplifying the conversational lives of over-subscribed talkers, this convenient-answer effect also comes into play with propaganda.
People who feel dissonance on some topic are easily convinced to adopt non-answers that they can throw down like cards, to make the dissonance (and challenges) go away.
You may notice that most whataboutisms, jeering dismissals, deflecting responses, etc., are highly recognizable canned answers. Not just irrational answers.
The caching does triple duty:
1. Efficient as easy answers.
2. Efficient followup stoppers, because the person hearing them has already heard (cached) them too.
3. Effective short circuits of internal dialogue.
I find an effective response is to simply ask someone why they parroted something that doesn't make sense or actually mean anything.
And then listen politely to the subsequent pause. I have yet to meet someone with a good response for being called on their unoriginal canned non-response. Judo: obvious parroting and caching naturally undermine their own credibility when you don't play along.
For example, when some people in high positions enjoy privileges, politicians will defend them by talking about their contributions, and the topic shifts from privileges to contributions. Similarly, when a few bad people emerge from a certain ethnic group, politicians will constantly emphasize these few bad people to negate the entire ethnic group and call for action against the group. The most crucial factors should be whether contributions and privileges are commensurate, and the degree of correlation between the ethnic group and individual events. But nobody discusses this.
Even when I'm on one side of the argument, it's just as frustrating to hear my own side just move on to their next pre-written question/response instead of engaging with the underlying issues. I want substantive debate and discussion and possibly consensus, but that's sadly not the reality in most cases of import.
I'm surprised there isn't a term for doing that.
Let's take Bernie Sanders, because he's well-known in Vermont for being happy to go off-script and actually talk to people. During my only personal conversation with him, he was delighted to discover that a small, local event actually served excellent chicken. (Apparently politicians eat a lot of rubbery chicken.)
But at that same event, Bernie was approached by a woman asking some conspiracy-tinged question. And he very gracefully deflected and changed the topic. I think that just about anyone who interacts with the public is likely to pick up some version of this skill eventually.