146 points by surprisetalk35 days ago | 47 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
> It sounds like a contradiction that someone could learn something new by answering a question. Isn’t that just spitting out something they already know?
A while back I started participating actively on Reddit's r/explainlikeimfive, and this has been my experience — explaining things I (think I) understand in ways that are accessible to laypeople really forces me to confront the sloppier parts of my understanding. If you're a technical person, it's also a great exercise in communication with non-technical people.
I view it as: each time you answer the same question you are forced to reincorporate everything you’ve learned since the last time you’ve answered it. Which makes you reassess your chain of thought and maybe come to a different conclusion. And thereby learning something new.
Same thing happened in the Usenet days. Comp.lang.c regulars spent years answering the same pointer questions. By 2000 most of them could write K&R-level explanations blindfolded. Teaching the same thing repeatedly builds a kind of crystallized fluency you can't get any other way.
I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).
Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.
Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.
Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them.
That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.
Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.
In my experience, breaking the script goes wrong more often than well.
First you need someone who actually appreciates you deviating from the script. Most people most times are not seeking anything "interesting" in the sense you might think it
That matches what I've found too. The success rate depends heavily on whether the other person is in a genuinely curious state versus task-mode. Trying it cold in a checkout line almost always lands weird. Works much better in low-stakes situations where both people are already slightly bored.
> But if you’re talking to a performer, and they have a fake, glassy-eyed smile, and go through all the correct motions, while obviously being totally checked out, you’re not asking the right questions.
Or it's an indication you are asking the correct questions but that the person you're asking it from anticipated it and is evading. Anyone who has heard a politicians and CEOs take questions from the press know this.
I've seen this with both famous and regular people.
e.g. a friend of mine once met William Shatner and then ran into him again a few months later. When asked "How are you doing?" Shatner answered exactly the same way at both the first and second meeting. I imagine some of this is efficiency since famous people tend to get the same questions over and over again. Tom Wilson even has a business card that answers a lot of these questions [0]
What was more surprising was seeing this in high school. I did a summer program with kids from all over the US. A few months later, I saw one of them at a sports event and, similar to Shatner, he had a canned response. He was from a well to do family and was probably on some kind of "track" to the right college etc. Was still surprising to hear.
If you are curious to see someone busting the cache, there are video compilations of Sean Evans from hot ones asking questions of guests based on deep research and them being incredibly impressed. [1]
Charisma on Command also has a great video on how to ask better question [2]
Someone pointed out that Malcolm Gladwell even does "oh, wait, I almost forgot" or "That just reminded me" during his speeches but that it rehearsed and a consistent part of the speech as well.
Similar to how comedians have a "set" that they first put together, polish and then repeat over and over again.
Your mention Hot Ones reminded me of Nardwuar, who has been doing similar “social cache busting” interviews of musicians and other celebrities for literally as long as the Hot Ones guy has been alive.
I appreciate them both, so that isn’t meant as a slight to Sean Evans, but rather a compliment of the depth and breadth of both their research and staying power as interviewers.
Surprisingly (to me, anyway, as I didn’t know this prior to looking it up for this comment!) Evans even credits Nardwuar specifically as one of his influences in this Brother Ali interview, which would explain a lot of the similarities:
Around the time I started my compsci studies, I noticed that my friends respond to certain questions in a very predictable way. I even ended up experimenting with how I present my question and what words I use, but seldom did I manage to "bust the cache". My takeaway at the time was that friendships consist of predictable actions and conversations, and I wasn't particularly fond of it. Looking back, I don't mind it as much, and enjoy the fact that I can have a predictable experience with a person I know.
Implies that people are always fine with having their cache busted and actually want to have a genuine conversation with you. Some aren't and will react negatively if you try.
That's a convenient filter but it assumes you have the luxury of walking away. What about colleagues, family, or people you depend on professionally? "Just find someone more interesting" only works when the relationship is optional.
Exactly, for a busy celebrity, having a canned answer is a polite way to acknowledge a fan and give them a little thrill. They don't have time for a genuine, heartfelt conversation with everyone they meet.
Stuttering John used to do this back on Howard Stern by asking celebrities questions that were far out of the expected gamut at red carpet events. This was all for shock/comedy value, but "who are you and what makes you famous" type questions can really throw celebs off script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0hENpnMXk
I delight in asking novel and meaningful questions. I have a particularly weakness for meta questions; my favourite general-purpose one is, following some banal question: “How often do people ask you that?”
Followed immediately by: “And how often do people ask you that?”
This is normally already completely novel, but on the off chance it isn’t, you can recurse to higher meta!
Ah, I overcame this by not using easily recognizable for the theme words but descriptions. It forces people to actually process the input.
I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice when speaking to each other but prompt.
For a while I have wanted to create a lookup table that maps concepts people describe using computer metaphors to their biological/ecological/??? equivalent, which in some cases might be more accurate, or at least more fresh.
> you probably know what I mean by “hitting the cache”
In addition to simplifying the conversational lives of over-subscribed talkers, this convenient-answer effect also comes into play with propaganda.
People who feel dissonance on some topic are easily convinced to adopt non-answers that they can throw down like cards, to make the dissonance (and challenges) go away.
You may notice that most whataboutisms, jeering dismissals, deflecting responses, etc., are highly recognizable canned answers. Not just irrational answers.
The caching does triple duty:
1. Efficient as easy answers.
2. Efficient followup stoppers, because the person hearing them has already heard (cached) them too.
3. Effective short circuits of internal dialogue.
I find an effective response is to simply ask someone why they parroted something that doesn't make sense or actually mean anything.
And then listen politely to the subsequent pause. I have yet to meet someone with a good response for being called on their unoriginal canned non-response. Judo: obvious parroting and caching naturally undermine their own credibility when you don't play along.
I don't think anyone is born like that. Politicians are trained for it. I remember a podcast where they talked about Al Franken and how it was difficult to get him to stop answering questions. The goal: one, maybe two or three talking points at any given time and no matter what question anyone asks, it is your job as a politician to give a non answer and pivot to the point of the day.
Yes, I realize how easily language can be manipulated.
For example, when some people in high positions enjoy privileges, politicians will defend them by talking about their contributions, and the topic shifts from privileges to contributions. Similarly, when a few bad people emerge from a certain ethnic group, politicians will constantly emphasize these few bad people to negate the entire ethnic group and call for action against the group. The most crucial factors should be whether contributions and privileges are commensurate, and the degree of correlation between the ethnic group and individual events. But nobody discusses this.
Often they will just talk around a question too. They will be asked if they will give everyone free ice cream if elected, and they will just talk about how great ice cream is, how important ice cream is, etc, but never actually answer the question.
This is a basic survival skill in politics, and not just for scandals.
Let's take Bernie Sanders, because he's well-known in Vermont for being happy to go off-script and actually talk to people. During my only personal conversation with him, he was delighted to discover that a small, local event actually served excellent chicken. (Apparently politicians eat a lot of rubbery chicken.)
But at that same event, Bernie was approached by a woman asking some conspiracy-tinged question. And he very gracefully deflected and changed the topic. I think that just about anyone who interacts with the public is likely to pick up some version of this skill eventually.
But does it actually work? The assumption seems to be that the topic-switch lands — but most people I've talked to find it transparently evasive. Has anyone tracked whether deflection improves or damages a politician's approval ratings with undecideds?
In online communication you'll soon need to develop a skill for busting AI proxy which most people will have in front of their messaging ingestion pipeline.
A while back I started participating actively on Reddit's r/explainlikeimfive, and this has been my experience — explaining things I (think I) understand in ways that are accessible to laypeople really forces me to confront the sloppier parts of my understanding. If you're a technical person, it's also a great exercise in communication with non-technical people.