Good conversations have lots of doorknobs (2022)

why not use "affordances"? it's the correct word, and even though it's low-frequency, wouldn't that pull people into the article?

On a quick skim, my interpretation is that the article critiques the classic (but simplistic) advice that asking questions and letting the other person talk more than you is the key to having a good conversation, especially to ensuring that the other person is happy with the conversation.

The classic advice is basically a caution against being a boring monologuer. And it has its merit. But this is an extra "level 2 conversationalist" lesson. It's the old: "OK remember those rules you learned in level 1? Here's when you can break them".

Th affordance analogy is that you want to give yourself and your conversation partner an abundance of options and opportunities for good conversation. Asking questions often is a way of doing that, but it's not the only way, and not all questions are equally helpful.

I think this framework explains why the best presentations aren't the ones packed with the most information. Like a slide full of bullet points feels kind of like a frictionless wall to me - there's nothing for the audience to grab onto. But a slide with one provocative question, or a single surprising statistic, is covered in doorknobs. It gives people something to mentally reach for.

The flip side: slides designed by committee oftem tend to remove all the doorknobs. Every bold claim seems to gets softened, every interesting aside gets cut for time, etc., until you're left with something that nobody can disagree with but nobody finds very interesting either.

The articles employs the concept of Affordances, which comes largely from JJ Gibson, a brilliant psychologist who studied perception.

I used to teach a course on Gibson... so I'd like to clarify what he meant by affordances, which is a bit more powerful of an idea than presented in the article

His insight was that how you perceive something is not objective, but subjective. Or as he would say, the subjective turns out to be objective reality. So affordances reflects the fact that how you relate to something is in terms of what it affords you. A good example: An excellent downhill skier sees a near vertical drop as easy-peasy and not dangerous. The same skier learning to snowboard pulls up at this veritable cliff and says, holy shit, that's steep! Same physical world changes depending on how you relate to it on the present circumstances

JJ Gibson used such ideas to overthrow the object reality idea of perception, suggesting that perception is inherently a being-in-the-world phenomenon, not an objective knowing of the world (that exists, but is secondary and stripped of subjective experience).

Interesting to read that people like that you answer in milliseconds to their questions or suggestions.

I very often interrupt people when eagerly fitting into a conversation. That happens almost automatically and sometimes I apologize and say, sorry i was interrupting what you are saying... Often they don't continue where they got interrupted but don't seem annoyed.

Maybe it has to do with those emerging doorknobs i noticed and couldn't resist in grabbing.