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How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

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Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#81

Post by im3w1l »

onmobiletemp wrote: post #67
xor1 wrote: post #56

I think the article severely downplays the importance of attractiveness. If the other party finds you attractive, the bar is lowered to the point of you simply being normal/average in terms of intelligence, wit, and whatever else you want to include in your definition of what makes a person "interesting". You basically need to be a vapid idiot to give anyone a bad impression as an attractive person. It's a huge facto…

Please stop, you are wrong. Im attractive and people hate me. Have you ever considered whats its like to be attractive? People are instantly jealous of you and hate you. And they make sure to lay judgement into you -- if you arent whip smart they will tear you down just like anyone else. I know ugly, average looking and good looking people who all do very well with people and in life. It comes down to your intelligen…

Question for you and xor1. Are you talking about going from a 1 to a 5, from a 5 to an 8 or from an 8 to a 10?

My intuition is that at the deformed end of the spectrum, any improvement is going to be 99% positive and that it starts to become more of a mixed blessing as you approach perfection.

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#82

Post by mdekkers »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #57
xor1 wrote: post #56

I think the article severely downplays the importance of attractiveness. If the other party finds you attractive, the bar is lowered to the point of you simply being normal/average in terms of intelligence, wit, and whatever else you want to include in your definition of what makes a person "interesting". You basically need to be a vapid idiot to give anyone a bad impression as an attractive person. It's a huge facto…

Are you for real? Develop substance my friend. The rest is all cosmetic and won't take you far.

He is for real, no doubt. Also he is correct. I have seen this depressingly often. Anecdote from the trenches: A dev team of about 15. They are working an an algorithm that did some language-type matching. One guy was regarded as the expert on the subject, came up with the algorithm, wrote a paper on it that was the basis of his Masters thesis, and essentially the whole company bowed down in front of him. When I joined I quickly learned that he looked good, had a smooth talk, and was far from a good developer. His work was chaotic and his software was ill behaved, stupidly resource hungry, and based on a flawed hypothesis (it provably didn't work well, and made mistakes). There were two issues with this. Firstly, it cost us a fortune in providing the resource to keep his software running and available, and secondly it had a real negative impact on people's lives. The other devs' on the team were aware of this, and many had solid ideas to improve. I worked with some devs after hours to built a solr-based alternative that took a week to build and test (as opposed to the countless man-years that went into this guys algorithm), and I organised a presentation to the CEO (I was senior exec there, and was on the highest level management team). The presentation was a success, and by all metrics what we cobbled together was faster, cheaper, and most importantly, better. We were congratulated on our success, but after a few days the CEO declined to implement the change. I know that the person in question spent a lot of time lobbying against us during this period. The next move we made was to find a US based company that made software that did the exact same thing, had a solid US Government track record (which was important to our client base - mostly US banks) and was ridiculously cheap. To compare, they did what we did on a laptop. We had 4 racks in a colo to do the same thing. Annual licensing cost was a months dev wage. That plan was also deep-sixed.

I personally left shortly after that, but I spent a lot of time wondering why two obviously superior solutions to real problems were ignored. The dev in question was charming, handsome, spent a lot of time worrying about his looks and was a smooth political operator.

Look and impressions matter more. This is just one of many stories, and it is the primary driver behind me setting up my own shop years ago. I cannot stand this kind of idiocy.

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#83

Post by jaequery »

xor1 wrote: post #69
jaequery wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, although I kind of get the gist of what you are saying, I've met plenty of unattractive people who are pleasant to be with. And for whatever reasons, I'm more attracted to talking to these (unattractive) people than some Brad Pitt look-a-likes. They tend to make me feel more at ease. Different strokes for different people I guess.

>And for whatever reasons, I'm more attracted to talking to these (unattractive) people than some Brad Pitt look-a-likes. They tend to make me feel more at ease. I'm actually really interested in why you feel this way, if you could go into more detail.

I might be coming at this from a different angle but I think it comes down to competition. Well, I don't have any scientific proofs per se (bleh) but I think we are generally hard-coded from our DNA to try/want to be the most attractive. It's only when you are well aware it's not a threat, you'd be able to lower your guard down.

Now, if we are talking about opposite sex, then that's a whole another type of conversation.

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#84

Post by ThrustVectoring »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #71
xor1 wrote: post #56

I think the article severely downplays the importance of attractiveness. If the other party finds you attractive, the bar is lowered to the point of you simply being normal/average in terms of intelligence, wit, and whatever else you want to include in your definition of what makes a person "interesting". You basically need to be a vapid idiot to give anyone a bad impression as an attractive person. It's a huge facto…

Attractive is not physical appearance or good looks. Attractive is a culmination of all the factors that can be observed or known that will give a positive impression. It is usually much more important to carry yourself as attractive than to be beautiful. Confidence, honesty, friendliness, integrity, etc all can be assumed by a picture of a beautiful person, but in practice it's body language that portrays these qual…

Yeah, how you carry yourself is a huge part of it. A year of dancing is worth at least a standard deviation of attractiveness, IMO.

And in terms of speech, I think it's much more how you say it than what you say.

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#85

Post by raphar »

superasn wrote: post #73

Oh internet and self-help gurus. Why do you have to be the "best" at everything and get the most of out stuff. It's like those things they teach you that before giving a bad review first start with the good points then add a "but". Sound great in theory but just absurd when you realize someone is doing it to you on purpose. You know you can do all this and create great rapport and win the title for best conversationa…

>Oh internet and self-help gurus. Why do you have to be the "best" at everything and get the most of out stuff.

The article's content is ok. But what called my attention was that every single paragraph links to a source, author or better: an amazon book page. Its like the index page of a book on the subject!

pd: 15 mbyte & 420 requests to load the page

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#86

Post by hamandcheese »

xor1 wrote: post #69
jaequery wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, although I kind of get the gist of what you are saying, I've met plenty of unattractive people who are pleasant to be with. And for whatever reasons, I'm more attracted to talking to these (unattractive) people than some Brad Pitt look-a-likes. They tend to make me feel more at ease. Different strokes for different people I guess.

>And for whatever reasons, I'm more attracted to talking to these (unattractive) people than some Brad Pitt look-a-likes. They tend to make me feel more at ease. I'm actually really interested in why you feel this way, if you could go into more detail.

- If it's a very attractive girl I am talking to/hitting on, I am generally more self conscious about my appearance, making it harder to relax during the conversation. I feel that any misstep in my talking will immediately make them disinterested in me.

- There's the stereotype that attractive people are boring/dumb/narcissistic since they can use their attractiveness as a crutch. I am definitely guilty of passing this judgement on people.

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#87

Post by onmobiletemp »

I started paying attention to people and discovered a lot of this on my own over the course of three years. At some point i realized that whenever i talked to someone their eyes would glaze over and their face would go stony. Then theyd talk to someone else and their eyes would become focused and their face alive and animated. Laughter. I figured out this was because they didnt care about what i was saying or about my opinions. So i tried various things and looked at their eyes. Sometimes their eyes would become alive again and i could tell they cared. Slowly you learn what people want to hear. And its so true about smiling and body language, people feel uncomfortable if you dont project wellbeing. What you need to understand is that there is no logic in any of it. Humans are machines and the algorithms that they employ for attention and emotion are surprisngly uniform and very unintuitive for autists like me and you. Dont worry about the logic of whats hapenning, just think of what their algorithm is doing. Its verry dificult because you cant verify what people are thinking, you cant debug it and you cant start over -- you have to guess a lot. Overall people want to see big smiles and confident body posture. If you are slouched over people dont like it. If you stand up straight you will be amazed at how differently you are percieved. But it all has to be genuine. If youre trying to manipulate and understand people in a clinical way you will fail. All you need is a genuine desire to bond with people and the patience to pay attention to what seems to work and what doesnt.

I should also add that for me, and probably for most people like me, the process of figurimg out what people like and dont like is also partly a process of self discovery. Im not the kind of person thats in touch with himself. Discovering how your words impact other people will also teach you about how your mind, conciously or otherwise, reacts emotionally to the words of others. Overall ive been genuinely excited to learn about myself amd others and use that wisdom to help enjoy the presence of other people. For me its been a very productive process of growth and discovery. I think framing the problem of interpersonal relations within that context instead of the cringey, manipulative context of internet social tips really helped.

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#88

Post by xor1 »

jaequery wrote: post #83
xor1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And for whatever reasons, I'm more attracted to talking to these (unattractive) people than some Brad Pitt look-a-likes. They tend to make me feel more at ease. I'm actually really interested in why you feel this way, if you could go into more detail.

I might be coming at this from a different angle but I think it comes down to competition. Well, I don't have any scientific proofs per se (bleh) but I think we are generally hard-coded from our DNA to try/want to be the most attractive. It's only when you are well aware it's not a threat, you'd be able to lower your guard down. Now, if we are talking about opposite sex, then that's a whole another type of conversati…

I am going to assume that you don't consider yourself to be exceptionally attractive. Correct me if I'm wrong.

So, with that assumption, if you were able to wake up tomorrow morning and be on par with a "Brad Pitt" lookalike, how do you think that your reaction to interacting with them would change? What about with the other group of people that you currently prefer to engage with? After thinking about that, would you still prefer that things remain as they are?

>Now, if we are talking about opposite sex, then that's a whole another type of conversation.

This matters too, of course, unless you don't plan to interact with them at all in a professional environment :)

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#89

Post by xor1 »

hamandcheese wrote: post #86
xor1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And for whatever reasons, I'm more attracted to talking to these (unattractive) people than some Brad Pitt look-a-likes. They tend to make me feel more at ease. I'm actually really interested in why you feel this way, if you could go into more detail.

- If it's a very attractive girl I am talking to/hitting on, I am generally more self conscious about my appearance, making it harder to relax during the conversation. I feel that any misstep in my talking will immediately make them disinterested in me. - There's the stereotype that attractive people are boring/dumb/narcissistic since they can use their attractiveness as a crutch. I am definitely guilty of passing th…

>- If it's a very attractive girl I am talking to/hitting on, I am generally more self conscious about my appearance, making it harder to relax during the conversation. I feel that any misstep in my talking will immediately make them disinterested in me.

See you in HR's office.

Re: How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)

#90

Post by thirdsun »

aryehof wrote: post #51
rrherr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! My favorite tactic to get people talking about themselves comes from Paul Ford: Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: “Wow. That sounds hard.” Because nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult. I once went to a party and met a very beautiful woman whose job was to help celebrities wear Harry Winston jewelry. I could tell that she was disappointed to be…

So in return for being "liked" by that woman, the listener had to pretend to be interested in her talk entirely about herself for half an hour? Where she wasn't interested enough to even ask the listeners name? Sounds like a way to raise her self-esteem at the expense of yours.

> So in return for being "liked" by that woman, the listener had to pretend to be interested in her talk entirely about herself for half an hour?

If the intention was indeed to get the other person to tell something about themselves I'd say it's a fair and successful approach. Plus, you could be genuinely interested in the other person's 30 minute talk. The idea that the interest has to be fake seems to be your conclusion.

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