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A key to smalltalk is to understand the game that's being played. When you're talking about something technical, the point is to discover and deliver useful ins

A key to smalltalk is to understand the game that's being played. When you're talking about something technical, the point is to discover and deliver useful insights on the subject at hand. When you're doing smalltalk, the point is to make the other feel comfortable and accommodated, to entertain, and be entertained. Therefore, it's more about trying to understand what the other person is feeling (this is usually a matter of looking at body language, imagining what's going on in their lives) then it is about delivering useful insight. Usually, if in doubt, listening attentively and trying to work out what makes the other person tick is a productive strategy.

mcv 8y ago
I've often felt like an alien anthropologist in conversations. Even if I was aware of the game and saw what's going on, I wasn't part of it. I needed an extra processing step that made me always too late to say the right thing. I'm suddenly wondering if my problem might be related to my youngest son's speech problem. When he was 3, he couldn't speak sentences; his sentences were just 3 meaningful words in a row. He never babbled, unlike his best friend, who always babbled in long, incoherent Trumpian sentences. He got special speech therapy for half a year which helped immensely, and now, at 4, he makes excellent sentences, if a bit staccato and clumsy, and certainly without any kind of natural flow. He never babbles, though. I think his Markov chain is broken and he replaced it with an rule based system that he reworked to produce language.
- pasabagi 8y ago
  I have a feeling that an alien anthropologist approach is ultimately better than the reactive approach - I grew up with an autistic brother who was nonetheless socially capable, simply through distilling social problems into a set of hard rules. Sometimes you get edge cases and he gets into trouble, but for 90% of the time, he was actually way more socially able than I was, simply by having a better-formed understanding, less overwhelmed by immediacy and assumptions. You need a degree of alien anthropology to be able to respond to what's really important in a conversation - an extremely socially capable deaf friend of mine pointed out, for instance, that body language is more important than verbal content in most casual interactions. These kind of insights are kinda hard to gain from a neurotypical, non-deaf perspective like mine, because you're a bit like a fish that doesn't realize he's swimming in water.
  - mcv 8y ago
    Oh, body language! My 4 year old son is extremely expressive with his face and posture, possibly because of his verbal problems. Even when he could barely talk at all, he was very good at expressing what he wanted or needed. He's so expressive that I've always thought he should become an actor. My older son, who is verbally very strong, is often nearly expressionless.

mcv 8y ago

I've often felt like an alien anthropologist in conversations. Even if I was aware of the game and saw what's going on, I wasn't part of it. I needed an extra processing step that made me always too late to say the right thing. I'm suddenly wondering if my problem might be related to my youngest son's speech problem. When he was 3, he couldn't speak sentences; his sentences were just 3 meaningful words in a row. He never babbled, unlike his best friend, who always babbled in long, incoherent Trumpian sentences. He got special speech therapy for half a year which helped immensely, and now, at 4, he makes excellent sentences, if a bit staccato and clumsy, and certainly without any kind of natural flow. He never babbles, though. I think his Markov chain is broken and he replaced it with an rule based system that he reworked to produce language.

pasabagi 8y ago
I have a feeling that an alien anthropologist approach is ultimately better than the reactive approach - I grew up with an autistic brother who was nonetheless socially capable, simply through distilling social problems into a set of hard rules. Sometimes you get edge cases and he gets into trouble, but for 90% of the time, he was actually way more socially able than I was, simply by having a better-formed understanding, less overwhelmed by immediacy and assumptions. You need a degree of alien anthropology to be able to respond to what's really important in a conversation - an extremely socially capable deaf friend of mine pointed out, for instance, that body language is more important than verbal content in most casual interactions. These kind of insights are kinda hard to gain from a neurotypical, non-deaf perspective like mine, because you're a bit like a fish that doesn't realize he's swimming in water.
- mcv 8y ago
  Oh, body language! My 4 year old son is extremely expressive with his face and posture, possibly because of his verbal problems. Even when he could barely talk at all, he was very good at expressing what he wanted or needed. He's so expressive that I've always thought he should become an actor. My older son, who is verbally very strong, is often nearly expressionless.