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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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This is not something I think a lot about, but it's something I happen to have been thinking about recently due to an exchange I had in the old SSC sub. The thought I had at the time was:
The idiomatic "what do you do?" is like, level 2 small talk. If level 0 is "I accidentally made eye contact with a stranger in the grocery store so I'm going to slightly nod my head with a flat smile," and level 1 is "some weather we're having, eh?" then "what do you do?" is an invitation to become acquainted, in the sense of becoming acquaintances. It's the first step to finding some connection or commonality beyond momentarily shared physical space. And yes, it is natural to wish to be impressive in such moments, especially if you're hoping to develop the relationship to level 3 small talk (friends relating recent but otherwise trivial experiences) or beyond (I don't know what level "married people small talk" is, but it's up there somewhere).
But jumping straight to "I program with PEP8 in mind" may actually discourage further conversation, if they don't know (or care) what PEP8 is. This is what might be called the autist's mistake--answering a question literally instead of using the opportunity to signal interest (or lack of interest) in further conversation. Level 2 small talk proceeds as a series of proffered openings. For example, "I'm a programmer" can be met with
or
Whereas "I program with PEP8 in mind" offers a narrower choice:
or
That you recognize the possibility of "sounding like a tool" suggests you grasp the problem reasonably well, but I think you've been too quick to dismiss simpler answers as "having no information value at all." The information people are seeking first, when making small-talk, is not exactly the same as the information they have explicitly requested, but that doesn't mean there is no value in it. The first piece of information you have to establish with others is whether you are mutually interested in developing a relationship (even just as acquaintances). Delivering a low-resolution picture of yourself, initially, allows others to decide whether they want to know more. And once they want to know more, you can give them a higher-resolution picture without sounding like a tool.
Or in other words--stop trying to impress everyone. Keeping yourself out of naked dominance contests will actually enable you to win dominance contests by default down the line.
(I myself have incredibly "basic"--in the most adolescent, pejorative sense--geek hobbies. Where I get to feel like a special snowflake is after I've established myself as fulfilling several low-value stereotypes, while showing great interest in the things others do. It helps them feel superior to me, which softens the blow and helps me to appear humble (I am not, in fact, humble) when they inevitably discover that my education, employment, family situation, etc. is actually quite enviable, in stark violation of the expectations they'd established of me. This is deliberate on my part--sociologists long ago found that the people we tend to like the most are people who we started out not liking, who later succeeded in changing our opinion of them. Conversely, the people we like the least are people who we started out liking, who later lost our good opinion. People who you like and merely continue liking, or who you dislike and continue disliking, will rarely be your most- or least-liked acquaintances, respectively. There is probably a name for the phenomenon but I no longer remember what it is. Anyway in my experience this also works with people's estimations of social value.)
I can intellectually understand that "what do you do?" is "low-level" communication by all reasonable ways to quantify that. Despite the fact that when I ask it, I actually mean the exact thing that is being asked. So it's not necessary that I am making the 'autist's mistake'. I might just as well be autistic. And not in the Tik-Tok cutesy, "I'm mentally ill" way but in the:
""" If communication as "low level" as this example is difficult for me to navigate with anything more than the bare minimum of mental processing, I might really be helpless in the face of more complex communication. And not only that but the best way I know to deal with it which is a highly decoupled analysis of the situation is just about the worst way to deal with it."""
It's not that I aim to communicate well enough, I want to communicate excellently, And the snake really rears its head when I think of that.
Agreed. But I think mode of interaction, or more aptly, increasingly how my age group tends to socialize is making this harder. For example, In online dating, you have to impress at this instant, right now, or left swipe/unmatch. 'Oh, this one hangout was boring, yeah not happening ever again, we didn't talk that much in college anyways.'
I am not one to want to impress others, My OP might have painted a different picture, but I want to do it because I intuit that for the type of social interactions I wish to have (meeting women, networking events, casting a wide but not deep social net) long term considers might not apply. I want to do it because I think it's what I'd have to do to keep my head above water. I would employ a different strategy if I was looking for long term deep meaningful relationships.
Nonetheless optimizing small talk might be not worth the time compared to optimizing other things (net worth), in this domain.
I too noticed that people who started off disliking me end up liking me more intensely if they do. Why this happens all is a total mystery to me. If it's a thing that happens in general and it's just not my mind playing tricks on me.
Is it an aspect of "I was wrong about them being not so bad/good about that one thing(s), what if there are many more like that?"(And the mind fills in the blanks) Or what, I don't know.
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I’m interested in your codification of the levels of small talk. Was that spur-of-the-moment, or is it from somewhere?
Entirely inspired by @f3zinker's post, in fact, and completely original to me here.
Google suggests I'm far from the first to think along these lines, though at a glance most of the articles out there are "levels of conversation" or "levels of communication" that put "small talk" at the bottom--or they are lists about making "better" small talk. Analytically, talk is "small" when it is about "unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially as engaged in on social occasions" (via Oxford) but the Wikipedia article suggests there are scholars who have explored the subject more deeply (including some culture war inroads on gender and culture differences in small talk).
I may be breaking the analytic concept a little by suggesting attention to "small talk" at different levels of relationship, since most discussions of "small talk" frame it as taking place between strangers or acquaintances rather than between friends or intimates--as Wikipedia suggests that "small talk" especially "helps new acquaintances to explore and categorize each other's social position." But I do think something plausibly characterized as "small talk" occurs frequently between friends and intimates, so I felt like it was probably worth thinking about the matter more inclusively.
That pairs well with my understanding of friendship levels, and how they're all qualitatively different, not just differing in amount of friendship.
Acquaintances have shared attributes,
Friends have shared experiences, and
Intimates (ohana, family and found family) have shared purpose.
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