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I loathe talking to people who rehearse the conversation ahead of time. They invariably don’t respond to what I actually said but rather change what I said to l
by c0pium 3y ago
I loathe talking to people who rehearse the conversation ahead of time. They invariably don’t respond to what I actually said but rather change what I said to line up with what they practiced in the mirror. Or they say some version of “I expected you to say foo, to which I would have responded bar”. Cool story, but totally irrelevant.
If you don’t have an answer at the time just say so and follow up later. Waiting for your turn to talk is disrespectful and painful to watch.
- chris_wot 3y ago“Waiting for your turn to talk is disrespectful and painful to watch.” I’m not following… surely you don’t mean interrupt the person speaking?
- rawgabbit 3y agoCitizen asks a question, "Why are rents increasing so rapidly?" Politician sticks to his prepared talking points and riffs for fifteen minutes about something else. Citizen feels disrespected.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoYears ago I went to a thinktank event on drone policy, and the congressmen they brought in spent 15 minutes saying that we needed to start discussing the important conversation of beginning to plan our policy creation dialog. Nothing but hot air.
- bluGill 3y agoMany politicians over practice that. They need to have prepared talking points on everything. This often is different talking points on the same issue for different crowds: how you talk to religious fundamentalists about abortion is not how you talk to queer crowd - you will need to convince someone in one of the above crowds that despite one disagreement you are still worth voting for. Of course everything is impossible and you will offend someone (I used abortion as an example where you cannot win and so will want to skip), so it is tempting to avoid that: many politicians have plants who are asking a prepared question, always avoiding the hard issues while making a big deal about something small.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoSometimes you can tell that someone is not listening and thinking about what you said, but has their own statement ready and is simply waiting until they have a chance to say it.
- KaiserPro 3y agoYeah, this is where empathy comes in. You need to read the person/people. I should have been more clear, its more of a template, than a stock answer. Having a cache of information is not the same as "not listening". You still need to listen and respond to the subject at hand. For example, you are having a meeting about door handles. You know there is a problem about the placing, but also one person is keen on changing the material because they like brass more. However brass is more expensive, so the team needs to agree a threshold at which it becomes practical to change to brass. Now, if you had fresh in your cache a list of reasons why brass might be useful, and why its not, you can be prepared to counter or boost "that one brass Guy"'s point of view. You don't go in and say "brass is shit yo" the subject might not come up.
- jghn 3y ago> I should have been more clear, its more of a template, than a stock answer That and also there's no rule that says a person who is generating responses ahead of time has to stick to exactly one possibility. When preparing for conversations it's important to walk down multiple paths at multiple branch points. To the point you've been raising in this thread it is about being prepared to be sharp in a conversation, not to railroad the other person and/or come across like a politician on the Sunday AM talk shows.
- electrondood 3y ago> You still need to listen I think you missed this part of the parent comment.
- recursive 3y agoI think you loathe talking to people who do it badly. Doing it well is like playing live jazz. You can practice the song, but if you don't listen to what your bandmates are doing, your awesome rehearsed solo is going to be bad.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]