2008
70 posts under this date.
There are many useful tips for improving your conversation, from the “take advantage of freely offered details” to the “ask open-ended questions”, but the true secret of it, I think, was offered by Scott Adams in his wonderful little book, God’s Debris:
“What topic interests you more than any other?”
“Myself, I guess,” I confessed.
“Yes, that is the essence of being human. Any person you meet at a party will be interested in his own life above all other topics. Your awkward silences can be solved by asking simple questions about the person’s life.”
“That would be totally phony,” I said. “First of all, it would be like interrogating him. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly pretend to be interested in the answers. If he turns out to be some shoe salesman living with his mother in Albany, my eyes will glaze over.”
“ It would seem phony to you while you asked the questions, but it would not seem that way to the stranger. To him it is an unexpected gift, an opportunity to enjoy one of life’s greatest pleasures: talking about oneself. He would become more animated and he would instantly begin to like you. You would seem to be a brilliant and talented conversationalist, even if your only contribution was asking questions and listening. And you would have solved the stranger’s fear of an awkward silence. For that he will be grateful.”
“That solves the stranger’s problem, but I have to listen to this guy drone on about himself. The cure is worse than the disease.”
“Your questions to the stranger are only the starting points. From there you can steer him toward the thing you care about most—yourself.”
“Wouldn’t he want to talk about himself instead of me?”
“When you find out how others deal with their situations it is automatically relevant to you,” he said. “There will always be parallels in your life. Find out what you and he have in common, then ask how he likes it, how he deals with it, and if he has any clever solutions for it. Perhaps you both have long commutes, or you both have mothers who call too often or you both ski. Find that point of common interest and you will both be talking about yourself to the delight of the other.”
Also valuable is this sideline:
“You think casual conversation is a waste of time.”
“Sure, unless I have something to say. I don’t know how people can blab about nothing.”
“Your problem is that you view conversation as a way to exchange information,” he said.
“That’s what it is,” I said, thinking I was pointing out the obvious.
“Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect.
Philosophical experiment: everytime you hear a purpose or goal, rephrase it in terms of the underlying need or desire using the word “itch”. Report.
could is bigger than is
math is bigger than physics
science is the attempt to find among the could what is
PS1: We need a word for philosophical stanzas, for loosely sequential aphorisms.
PS2: Twitter and Jaiku are the best named webapps ever. Making their naming even more remarkable, the service they so coolly describe, microblogging, is so new and difficult to explain.
Have only read 3 quotes of it and it may already be one of my favorite books ;)
Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.
There’s a universe of potential, Lindsay, think of that. No rules, no limits.
Life moves in clades. A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It’s happened to other successful animals, and now it’s humanity’s turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.
As part of our WUXMs (Weekly User Experience Meetups, a tiny event of fine people), Chris crafted Tonight Radio, a very cool mashup to listen to the bands playing in town tonight, this week, this month; the idea is to make it easier to find and sample new cool bands to go watch live.
I was going to wait announcing it until I got my Caltrain timetable redesign finished but today Tonight Radio won mashup of the day and I couldn’t hold any longer.
For the longest time back in Mexico I had this idea of turning one of the rooms in the house into a media room but I could never explain, let alone convince, anyone else in the house. I was thus happily surprised with this article in the NYT on how pimped up, hi-tech rec rooms are coming into their own. The encroachment of media—technology mediated culture—on our civilization, and particularly our generation, is nothing short of amazing.
The Fowlers worked with Ms. Kole’s firm to transform their den with a wide-screen TV, pool table, loungy furniture and a workstation with computers. “It’s so different than when I was growing up,” said Ms. Fowler. “I never wanted to be caught dead at home.”
Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture and urban planning at U.C.L.A., sees several factors behind teenagers’ willingness to stay home. “There is a rise in home technology, all your friends are online, and there are far fewer safe, interesting public spaces to hang out in,” she said. “All of these things come together, and parents start creating houses within houses for their teens.”
Surprisingly deep insights can be had ruminating about, you know, stuff.
...life is not about stuff; it’s about possibilities, which the right tools can enable.
Imagine the life you want to live. I cannot think of a sentence that has had more impact on the lives of people I have worked with. ... When clutter fills your home, not only does it block your space, but it also blocks your vision.
Get rid of the trash to make room for the treasures. Let the things that are important take center stage.
The biggest change in attitude this book made in my life was to teach me not to generate false relevance by “organizing” stuff I don’t want or will never need. Organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love – it’s not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to manufacture makebelieve meaning.
For my sister, Alex, who will start her Economics major this July
Economists are philosophers of human action.
They’re close to psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethicists.
But psychologists focus on the mind behind the human action, neurologists focus on the underlying brain, sociologists on the surrounding society, anthropologists on the enveloping culture. Ethicists focus on the aesthetics of human action, on what human action should be.
Economists, on the other hand, focus on the actions themselves, on trying to understand them in their own terms. They ask questions like:
What patterns does human action follow? What different kinds can we usefully distinguish? Why are these actions taken? What are the goals behind these actions? What would the consequences be of these actions? Why do these actions have these consequences? In other words, what is the interplay between goals, conditions, actions, and consequences? If someone took these actions what actions are others expected to take? How will these actions affect others? What are the best actions to take given these goals? How best to organize and coordinate human action? What are the limits of human action? How to improve human action?
Free trade is when a trade doesn’t need the consent of anyone but the traders.
A trader is an owner of property to be traded.
The above definitions after this inspiring but somewhat muddled definition of free trade. I particularly like the second, satellite definition because it safeguards the first: If you want to contort a party into a trade and still call it free, having to specify exactly what it is this party owns can make the contortion clearer—all sorts of patronizing, noble-sounding words can be used to camouflage deception, but to own is a very strong word that makes us pay attention and rightly so.
It’s claimed that government is a legitimate party in sex trade (say, prostitution) because it has to defend public morals, clients and prostitutes, but what is it that gov’t owns? Clients’ and prostitutes’ bodies and money? Public morals? Gov’t is also claimed a legitimate party to international trade (say, immigration) in the name of protecting domestic industry, but what is it that gov’t owns? Domestic industry? Employers’ or employees’ time and money?
Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:
I waited seven years to forget just enough—so that when I tried to remember, I could do it thoroughly. There are only a few things to remember now, and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.
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