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Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

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Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#121
post #5

One of the often repeated pearls of wisdom from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie, is people like to talk about themselves and they’ll like you more if you let them do that in a conversation. I’m paraphrasing. This research seems to counter that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...

Your conclusion about the research counter that is wrong. Here's a direct quote from the paper.

> High-question askers were liked more because they were perceived as more responsive to their partner, confirming Carnegie’s advice to focus on the other person in a conversation.

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#122
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience agrees with my experience of myself. Growing up I was the youngest child in our family friend group and particularly had an older sibling who basically bullied me - I learned to be reticent to speak and was definitely afraid of saying something stupid. When I got a little older (in high school) I eventually got curious about how so many of my peers seemed to converse easily without fear of saying anyt…

Did this realization eventually help you get rid of that internal self-critical voice?

Yes, it's not gone but it has greatly improved. One of the challenges as far as that goes is that much of the time that sort of negative self-talk/belief happens below the verbal/conscious level for me so it's easy for it to be in effect without me realizing it. I've done a number of things over the years that have been helpful but therapy work the last couple of years has led to some notable shifts for me in that area.

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#124

Just a side note, something I've been using lately to monitor how much I talk in meetings is something called Read.ai - https://www.read.ai/ There's a bunch of other neat features, but monitoring talk time is what I use the most. It works in real-time as a bot on Google meet and Zoom (the two platforms I use). I believe it should work on other video platforms as well. Just sign up and it'll start joining meetings on…

bumped into a local-only and feee alternative here on HN: https://unblah.me/ no recording or creep, it just measures how much you talk vs others.

I only tried it once, and it somehow felt like my M1 air couldn’t cope with it and Zoom. But it might have improved since.

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#125
post #5

One of the often repeated pearls of wisdom from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie, is people like to talk about themselves and they’ll like you more if you let them do that in a conversation. I’m paraphrasing. This research seems to counter that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...

I think it highly depends on with whom you are conversing. Extraverts, well, some of them probably could chit-chat with a telephone pole. After working myself out of elective mutism as a teen, I realized I had gotten very physically expressive as a kind of adaptation. As an adult, I invented a slightly cruel game wherein, should I get snagged by one of these kinds of extraverts, I wouldn't say any words, merely react…

I hadn’t thought of formalizing that little game; but I’ve definitely started counting that women can tell me their life story for 1.5hrs and sometimes 3hrs without me finishing much more than “I… I… So you…”.

It’s double-dark: It awakes misogyny in myself (“speaking 95% of the time shows how little importance they give others, and I want room in my relationship”), but it also shows that we have a lot of speech debt towards women (=everyone needs to speak, but not everyone gets their share”).

Your stance is refreshing. You judge everyone! I used to be timid, then went half-extrovert, so it’s encouraging to see there’s room ahead!

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#126
post #5

One of the often repeated pearls of wisdom from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie, is people like to talk about themselves and they’ll like you more if you let them do that in a conversation. I’m paraphrasing. This research seems to counter that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...

I've been unable to behave around people, a need not to harm their feelings, or maybe a fear of expressing my self (trauma based upbringing or something). This means I get locked in with verbal flooders regularly and they indeed seem to love having me around to spill their mind out.

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#127
post #5

One of the often repeated pearls of wisdom from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie, is people like to talk about themselves and they’ll like you more if you let them do that in a conversation. I’m paraphrasing. This research seems to counter that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...

> from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie Implementing the advice in this book too literally makes for very inauthentic sounding conversation. After reading this book, I found it easy to spot other people who had read it and were trying the techniques on me. For example, when someone uses my name 10 different times in a private conversation for no obvious reason, I have a good idea that they’…

it's the kind of book that make people want to game the metric rather than play, it's typical of this era IMO

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#128
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie Implementing the advice in this book too literally makes for very inauthentic sounding conversation. After reading this book, I found it easy to spot other people who had read it and were trying the techniques on me. For example, when someone uses my name 10 different times in a private conversation for no obvious reason, I have a good idea that they’…

Using someone's name is also a good way to make sure you remember it, though. :( To an extent, I agree with you. That said, protocols are also not a bad thing and socializing is almost certainly a learnable skill.

To summarize the book in a line would be, "Pay attention to the other person." There is little formulaic approaches, mostly just advise to stop thinking of yourself throughout the conversation and give the other person attention.

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#129
post #38
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any recs on resources on latest "conversational meta"?

Most of it is garbage!! People talking about conversation, especially online, is total crap. It's all small blogs, and the ones who aren't trying to sell you something are this weird combination of unsure and self-inflated. I agree with ajkjk, people have gotten safe and boring. The only advice I have is to try more, and push the envelope over time. Social restrictions feel intense but yield to sustained (unintention…

This is my Everyone Likes Dogs philosophy. If you meet someone and they tell you they like dogs, they have provided you essentially no new information. The status quo is that everyone, everywhere likes dogs. On the other hand, if someone tells you they hate dogs, now this is new information, that is suddenly quite interesting. How can you not like dogs? Did you have a bad experience? So on and so forth. A memorable tidbit about their personality which makes them less forgettable.

The trick is to find those social cracks where the contrarian viewpoint is interesting but does not make you a pariah. That is, even if you hate dogs, I would advise keeping that one to yourself.

Re: Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

#130
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Don't be snarky. " " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My correction was neither snarky nor a shallow dismissal, but rather a genuine and 100% serious correction of the conclusions that can be responsibly drawn from the research. Ex: We have decades of research on ASD and ADHD that have utterly failed to serve the very large number of people who don’t fit the profile of “young white American boy” to whom that research actually applied because the conclusions were wrongly…

I'm sure you have a substantive point, but the way you communicated it pattern-matched so closely to the snark and shallow-dismissal categories that its substantiveness was more or less lost.

I understand how frustrating it is when there's a point which is well-known (to you) and people ought to be more aware of it. The problem is, when you let that frustration slip into your comment, or indeed dominate it, you end up sending mixed messages to any user who doesn't know the point or why it ought to be well known by now.

It's common in HN comments for people to post something that assumes the state in their own head, and makes sense in that context, but makes little sense to the reader who doesn't have that state in their head. To such a reader, your GP comment comes across as snark and shallow dismissal. The thing to realize is that only a slight minority of the audience—basically, nobody but you—has that same state in their head. Therefore, if you want to be understood, you can't assume it—you have to assume statelessness instead, and bootstrap the context by including the relevant bits explicitly.

It's also common on HN for people to respond to a moderation scolding with a version of what they actually meant and could have posted in the first place. I call this the rebound effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Your reply here is interesting from that angle because it's a partial rebound: it tells us part of the state you have in your head (knowledge of decades of research on ASD and ADHD), but still not enough to really grok your point, and the rest of it is still venting frustration.

It's of course perfectly natural to want to vent frustration when one feels it; the trouble is that this doesn't communicate the information that other people need to understand you, and the frustration itself adds noise to the signal. It also is likely to activate adjacent frustrations that other people feel, and therefore to evoke an unhelpful argument, rather than the curious conversation we want here.

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