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A while back I read Never Eat Alone [0], and found it to be fruitful for framing casual social interactions. Additionally, most other people do not look forwar
by wonder_er 9y ago
A while back I read Never Eat Alone [0], and found it to be fruitful for framing casual social interactions.
Additionally, most other people do not look forward to "mindless smalltalk with strangers". Since it's possible that everyone in the group shares equal anxiety about being there, you can provide a gift to them by asking pointed questions. If it's easy for them to answer, and gives something interesting for everyone else to listen to, it's actually a lot of pressure off the whole group.
The go-to question I use is:
what's the best book you've read in the last year or so? Why?
Note: This works for me because I am a voracious reader, and am always on the hunt for more good books, so if they can make a good book recommendation, I benefit. YMMV.
Since not everyone reads, that question can be amended to "best movie/tv show/documentary".
I'm often the new guy in certain work situations, and that question has saved me a lot of discomfort.
good luck!
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H6JBFOS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H6JBFOS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
- trentmb 9y agoTotally off topic- why is it people always use "voracious" to describe their reading habits?
- forkLding 9y agoHungry for information and hungry for more books
- ellius 9y agoThis is actually an everyday way of expressing a scientifically observed fact. Studies of highly intelligent people suggest that they have a “rage to learn”: they greedily and even obsessively search out new information.
- chickenfries 9y agoIt's funny how some adjectives always seem to be followed by certain nouns, huh? I think about this whenever I heard about "bodies strewn on the street" on the news. Reading (and watching) seems to be compared to eating all the time: - I devoured that book - I binged that season Then there's that term, "consumption" which seemingly applies to every piece of media.
- knight17 9y agoSimilarly, I have observed 'abject' going with 'poverty', usually.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dswalter 9y agoYou're looking for the linguistic term 'collocation,' and these are good examples of idiomatic usage of English. Further, words located in proximity with each other is a big part of the distributional hypothesis: "you shall know a word by the company it keeps". This is in turn a key component of how language models like word2vec or GloVe can be effective.
- jacobolus 9y agohttps://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy....
- philwelch 9y agoThere is a "veritable cornucopia" of these phrases.
- dominotw 9y agoThis has the danger of someone rambling for like 10 minutes about some book and everyone else is just waiting for him/her to finish. I hate people who tell "stories" in big groups , so rude. I prefer quick back and forth where everyone gets a chance to speak. Lots of people overestimate how interesting their story is to other people. I want to know how to tell people who monopolize group discussion to shut the fuck up so others can speak.
- wonder_er 9y ago100% agree. There are members of my family that, if allowed to contribute a sentence, often go on to dominate the conversation for minutes, despite the very obvious boredom and displeasure of everyone else in the conversation. If you come up with an answer to how to tell a conversational monopolist to shut up... please, please share it. I usually just walk away, but that doesn't improve the situation for everyone else.
- pcunite 9y agoOne thing that helps me is knowing that these people are Quality Time (according to the Five Love Languages book). Don't confuse Quality Conversation with Time. The best way to stop them is to identify the time that has gone by. I don't have perfect method yet.
- wonder_er 9y agoHah! That's a good book. My wife and I have running jokes about imaginary love languages. She's pretty sure "chocolate" is a love language. I agree.
- executesorder66 9y agoI just interrupt them, by asking someone else in the group their opinion on what was just said. Rude? Yes, but not as rude as taking over the conversation for longer than you should.
- 9y ago
- Fnoord 9y agoI like your suggestion but I am not sold on you asking about what someone's favorite documentary is in work situations. You generally want to avoid discussing politics in work situations. How do you cope with that? Has it ever lead to awkward situations?
- wonder_er 9y agogood question. I pretty actively try to avoid discussing politics, because... well, it's rarely fruitful. Talking/debating pretty much never convinces anyone of anything. If you want to change someone's mind on something, step 1 tends to be "deeply understand why they think a certain thing", and not only is this totally at odds with casual work conversation, it's not actually appropriate in the vast majority of work relationships. Anyway - gentle redirects out of political topics usually work for me. If they say something like "I just watched a documentary about {bad group} doing {bad thing}, and that's why Trump is an idiot", I'd try something like "oh, where did you see that? Was it on Netflix, or cable TV?" If they say Netflix, then "oh, cool. I just saw a video on how Netflix caches content and uses this thing called a 'chaos monkey' to preempt catastrophic outages. It's really clever... the way they use it is..." Just pick a non-political element out of the conversation, and drive into that. Usually works.