How to always have interesting conversations

"Even aside from that, what is the point of learning faster, if you end up learning a lot of facts and ideas that aren't true?". Your Bayes Score goes up on net ;-)

I agree that fearing making and not noticing mistakes is much better than not minding mistakes you don't notice, but you should be able to notice mistakes later when other people disagree with you or when you can't get your model of the world to reach a certain level of coherence. This is much faster than actively checking every belief. If a belief is wrong and you have good automatic processes that propagate it and that draw attention to incoherence from belief nodes being pushed back and forth from the propogation of the implications of some of your beliefs pushing in conflicting directions, you don't even need people to criticize you, and especially to criticize you well, though both still help. I also think that simply wanting true beliefs without fearing untrue ones can produce the desired effect. A lot of people try to accomplish a lot of things with negative emotions that could be accomplished better with positive emotions. Positive emotions really do produce a greater risk of wireheading and only wanting to believe your beliefs are correct, in the absence of proper controls, but they don't cost nearly as much mental energy per unit of effort. Increased emotional self-awareness reduces the wireheading risk, as you are more likely to notice the emotional impact of suppressed awareness of errors. Classic meditation techniques, yoga, varied life experience and physical exercise boost emotional self-awareness and have positive synergies. I can discuss this more, but once again, unfortunately mostly only in person, but I can take long pauses in the conversation if reminded.

just chiming in ten years after the fact to remark that you could flip the page when this happens.

You are certainly correct, and I think what you say reinforces the point. Building comfort is a social function rather than an information exchange function, which is why you don't particularly care whether or not your conversation leads to more accurate predictions for tomorrow's weather.

Wei_Dai:

I typically find myself wanting to verify every single fact or idea that I hadn't heard of before, and say either "hold on, I need to think about that for a few minutes" or "let me check that on Google/Wikipedia".

But this seems to me, at the very least, irrationally inefficient. You have a finite amount of time, and it can surely be put to use much more efficiently than verifying every single new fact and idea. (Also, why stop there? Even after you've checked the first few references that come up on Google, there is always some non-zero chance that more time invested in research could unearth relevant contrary evidence. So clearly there's a time-saving trade-off involved.)

It's not that I think people are deceptive but I don't trust their memory and/or judgment. Asking for evidence isn't that helpful because (1) they may have misremembered or misheard from someone else and (2) there may be a lot more evidence in the other direction that they're not aware of and never thought of looking up.

Sometimes, yes. But often it's not the case. There are good heuristics to determine if someone really knows what he's talking about. If they give a positive result, what you've been told in a live conversation is only marginally less reliable than what a reasonable time spent googling will tell you. This is an immensely useful and efficient way of saving time.

Also, many claims are very hard to verify by googling. For example, if someone gives you general claims about the state of the art in some area, based on generalizations from his own broad knowledge and experience, you must judge the reliability of these claims heuristically, unless you're willing to take a lot of time and effort to educate yourself about the field in question so you can make similar conclusions yourself. Google cannot (yet?) be asked to give such judgments from the indexed evidence.

I think we covered that [signaling elements of live communication] in an earlier discussion. :)

Yes, but you've asked about the motivations of typical people. For everyone except a very small number of outliers, this is a highly relevant factor.

But why do people find random elements in the environment interesting?

Are you asking for an answer in everyday human terms, or an evolutionary explanation?

In this particular context, it should be noted that human conversations whose purpose is fun, rather than achieving a predetermined goal, typically have a natural and seemingly disorganized flow, jumping from one topic to another in a loose sequence. Comments on various observations from the environment can guide this flow in interesting fun-enhancing ways, which is not possible when people are just exchanging written messages at a distance.

I was mainly talking about conversations like the ones described in Kaj's post, where the participants are just "making conversation" and do not have any specific goals in mind.

Always have a goal. "Just making conversation" doesn't count. That's a high-level description of the activity that leaves out the goal, not a description of something that actually has no goal. Your goal might be "learn from this person", "let this person learn from me", "get to know this person", "get an introduction to this person's friends", "get into bed with this person", or many other things, or even at the meta-level, "find out if this is an interesting person to know". Unless your efforts are about something, the whole activity will seem pointless, because it is.

I typically find myself wanting to verify every single fact or idea that I hadn't heard of before, and say either "hold on, I need to think about that for a few minutes" or "let me check that on Google/Wikipedia".

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who had the same urge?

In actual conversation I’d suppress this because I suspect the other person will quickly find it extremely annoying.

One of the nicest things anyone's done in conversation with me is say "hold on, I need a few minutes to think about that," actually go off and think for several minutes, and then come back to the conversation with an integrated perspective. I felt deeply respected as a mind.

People who don't appreciate this sort of thing aren't trying to make themselves understood about something surprising, so I expect that by your values you should care less about making them happy to talk with you, except as a way of getting something else from them.

I seriously wouldn't mind the verification effort if done by a fast googler, and quietly thinking for a few minutes regularly is Awesome for conversation.

I think there's a lot more to insight than true or false.

Hearing a perspective or a personal experience does broaden your knowledge. In the same way that reading fiction can be enlightening -- you are still learning, but using the part of your mental equipment designed for subconscious and tacit social exchange. In my experience, most of the occasions when I changed my mind for the better resulted from hearing someone else's point of view and feeling empathy for it.

Once I realized how unreliable most people's beliefs are, the anxiety of accepting false information interferes too much with this "fun".

Are you sure that you're not being biased here? If people really are so unreliable, even when they are serious and upfront, how do they ever get anything done in practice?

Or could it be that you're failing to employ the standard heuristics for judging the reliability of people's claims? (Note that this also involves judging whether what's been said was even meant to be said authoritatively. People often say things without implying that they believe them firmly and on good evidence.)

Is there some other element of fun conversation that I might be missing?

What's the fun element in board game called "go"? I find that particular game really fun to play, and really interesting, but it seems rather pointless to try to argue if it's "objectively" interesting or fun, or even what specific aspects make it fun and interesting to me. It just is.

You can replace "go" with any fun and entertaining thing that you do. How would you defend that your fun thing against someone who came along and wanted to know, just like you do now, why and how is that fun thing really fun?

Is it because they are too credulous, and haven't developed an instinctive skepticism of every new idea that they hear? Or do they just not take the other person's words seriously (i.e., "in one ear, out the other")?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1yz/levels_of_communication/

Also, willingness to humor the claim other makes for the sake of conversation isn't on that list, as it's neither "not taking other seriously" nor "being too credulous".

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 think I've come up with a reasonable algorithm for determining if a stranger is open to conversation. (Mostly tested on females in New Jersey.) I developed it out of desperation, because, for a while now, if I didn't talk to strangers, I wouldn't be talking to anyone in person except my immediate family.

The algorithm:

• Smile and make eye contact.

• If eye contact is not returned within a reasonable period of time, find someone else. If eye contact is returned, wave.

• If the stranger waves back or shows some other noticeable positive reaction, go ahead and introduce yourself.

The key seems to be the eye contact; as far as I can tell, if someone is willing to make eye contact with you, they're usually willing to talk with you, and making eye contact seems to be inoffensive in most situations. You'll probably get some false negatives, but false positives tend to be worse than false negatives and the false positive rate seems to be almost zero; you usually don't creep people out by deciding to leave them alone.

Also, fan conventions (anime, gaming, etc.) are great places to find people willing to socialize with strangers. And take a camera; people often wear elaborate costumes at these events, and complimenting someone's cosplay outfit has been a good conversation opener for me. (This is me at Otakon 2009.) I've also had some luck talking to fellow customers at bookstores; you know a few really good books you can recommend, right?

Not everyone will agree with me on this, and I know this is controversial. But I have the firm belief that no one becomes good at conversation, dating, or any social skill without the equivalent of "creeping out 20[0] people in a row": it's just that most people make most of their big social mistakes when they're very young (just like most people's middle or high school experiments with romance or sex end up being total disasters). If you're not willing to creep out 200 or so people in a row, you'll never learn.

The "avoid captive situations" comment is not particularly helpful for someone trying to learn social skills. In fact, I'd say it's harmful, because the concern about making people feel uncomfortable is a big part of social anxiety, and social anxiety is what prevents people from developing social skills.

Well, full disclosure: I'm a really extroverted person, so I apologize if I may be trivializing the art of small talk. That's definitely not my intention, since I want to make it clear that it's a skill that is to be learned. Also, the conversational nuances are a bit different if you're chatting up someone of the opposite sex versus just making small talk with a random stranger. I'm only talking about the latter, I don't claim to have any helpful advice regarding the former. ;) I'm assuming that's what the "captive situation" thing refers to.

Generally, people like to talk. Sometimes they don't. You might be a brilliant conversationalist and run into someone who's pissed off and doesn't want to talk, so you shouldn't take that personally. You can pick up cues about people as to how amenable they are to conversation; if they're avoiding all eye contact with everyone in the area, that's a bad sign. If you make eye contact and smile, that's a good sign. If you're not practiced at small talk, you start with the smiley people. Practice talking to people who are good at conversation; observe the way they steer conversations and what their mannerisms are.

It can also mean that they aren't very good at making conversation

In which case, why would I want to make conversation with them? :-)

or even that they're not sure if you're just being polite, and aren't interested in a longer answer. I often refrain from answering people's questions in detail if I think they're just asking to be polite.

Good point, though there's a middle ground between answering with as few syllables as grammatically possible (what I usually do when I wish someone wasn't talking to me in the first place, but I don't want to be excessively impolite) and a long answer mentioning personal feelings and asking a question back.

I challenge you to define them, and will donate $10 to a charity of your choice if your definition gets a karma score of at least 3 points.

Ok, then. Here's my attempt.

Intrinsically interesting topics are topics which satisfy the following criteria:

1) The topic cannot be discussed by an adult human of average intelligence without putting in some cognitive effort and attention. (If you can be busy thinking about another topic while discussing it, then it probably isn't intrinsically interesting). If the topic cannot be discussed by a human of average intelligence then this condition is considered to be met.

2) The topic must have objective aspects which are a primary aspect of the topic.

3) The topic must have some overarching theories to connect the topic or have the possibility of overarching theories explain the topic. Thus for example, celebrity divorces would not fall into this category because they are separate unconnected data points. But differing divorces rates in different income brackets would be ok because one could potentially have interesting sociological explanations for the data.

4) The topic must have bridges to many other topics that aren't simply a variation of the topic itself. For example, AI bridges to programming, psychology, nature of human morality, evolution, neurobiology, and epistemology. In contrast, D&D rules don't connect to other topics in any strong way. There are some minimally interesting probability questions that you can ask if you are writing a quiz for an undergraduate probability course but that's about it. Most of the other topics that it is connected to are still variations of the same topic such as say what a society would look like in a universe that functioned under standard 3.5 D&D rules.

This needs to be tested for predictive power, but I believe the main reason you lost so quickly is that you bet money against another form of utility with no direct convertability. Having equally fungible forfeits on both sides of the bet makes it more symmetrical.

To venture into fuzzier grounds: The other reason I believe the asymmetry of the bet made you lose so quickly is that the average LWer can predict with high confidence that JoshuaZ will choose one of their top 5 charities.

So the nice thing about pajek, and some other network displaying software, is that you can use algorithms that will attempt display things that are closely related to each other closer together. If I were going to produce your graphic I would:

1. Get the graph in memory some how, for one this size I would just set up some hash maps in irb
2. Write a text file where each line consists of two nodes that are connected seperated by a tab.
3. Use the software here: http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/howto/text2pajek.htm to get a pajek file
4. Open it in pajek and preform a physics based layout algorithim
5. Export to png

It's pretty cool what you can get out form this (I made this: http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/56256047/bhtv3d.png Network of bhtv coversations) and there's a lot to be gained by checked out what ends up near the center etc.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'd be glad to help.

To insert myself into your conversation:

One feels that the idea of caching component parts of conversations for use and re-use somewhat misses the point of a conversation in the first place. A conversation is a two-way interaction between real people. It's not a mechanical process, nor a debate, nor is it simply transfer of information. Human interaction isn't just about sharing ideas, it's about making a connection on a personal level.

If human conversation was as it is presented here, autistic people would not have so much trouble understanding normal human interaction. They could simply "follow the script", as it were.

Having a conversation with someone following this method would, I suspect, feel rather unnatural and stilted - almost like a charade.

Sure. You are having to cache each thought with certain assumptions in mind (e.g. group of people that like the singularity, people that tolerate talking about the possibility of computers, people that take fantasy seriously, a person that doesn't seem interested in any of the things that the aforementioned might). If we try to think about these assumptions as variables, attempting to cache for a future conversations quickly leads to combinatoric explosion leaving you with an impossible number of things to think about before. This forces you to consider a small number of cases that may well do more harm then good.

I also don't like cache here because of how static in implies the ideas are. Conversation, and quality thinking, are dynamic and deserve to be let evolve on their own.