nehrlich

Logical implication: if good conversation is based on having aligned reality coefficients, then we could also expect that you can have good conversations with people that you don't know, but whose worldview matches yours pretty well just randomly. Which is true! I've had that happen!

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Definitely. I've had that happen as well. And as I think I noted in the original reality coefficients bit, you can have good conversations with people on specific topics where your coefficients align, even if you violently disagree in other areas.

The thing that is new, at least to me, is the idea that conversation is a method for working out a common language, for slowly aligning reality coefficients. As my last couple posts indicate, I'm trying to convert myself into realizing that life is not static but dynamic, that I shouldn't just accept things as they are, but should continue to push on things because I can change them. It's just slow. So if I don't get along with somebody initially, I can't necessarily just dismiss them from consideration. There's the possibility of investing the time to get our language and coefficients aligned. It's more painful with people that start out more different. But possible.

As an example, after the 12 of us got re-hired by Sciex, we spent a solid week straight in a conference room trying to get our language and expectations aligned between the biologists and the engineers. Like 9-5 every day in that room, arguing, because when the biologists said something like "platform" they meant something _completely_different_ than what the engineers heard. Of course, if I hadn't been getting paid, I don't know if I'd ever sit and argue all day for a whole week. But it does provide an existence proof of aligning language even among fairly different people. Anyway.

I've also got an undercurrent of a new core idea, which I think will be the centerpiece of my "This I believe" essay, which is the concept that the most important thing is connecting people. And figuring out how and why that happens is therefore one of the most important things to think about. And that's why I'm interested in social software, even though it's fuzzy right now. I mean, I know that people are important, but I was trying to articulate this whole social software space to somebody in New York who knew nothing about it and realized that it's all about people. All technology is about people, and anybody that forgets that is doomed to make really bad technology that only geeks use :)

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It's interesting to me that I have a different answer about why friends make better conversation partners. My answer: I trust my friends; random strangers are people I'm only going to open up to if I either know it's extremely unlikely I'll ever meet them again (common in cities, but I don't live in one, and haven't really lived in one in ten years), or if there's some reason for expecting them to respect confidence.

Among my friends, in many cases, I don't share a clean worldview with them, but I do believe that we're capable of acknowledging differences smoothly. I think that's essential in a multicultural society.

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Your point about trust is a very good one. There are things I won't talk about with strangers, obviously.

And I probably over reached with the aligning of world views thing. I think my original point was about alignment of language, and then I got excited and tried to extend it. You are right in that it's possible to have good conversations with people who don't agree with you. I think you will have better conversations as you get to know them, though, because you will both understand what the other means when they say something. I mention this in the other comment I made today, but it takes time to figure out what assumptions the other person is bringing to the conversation, and how those assumptions affect what they think and say. And without investing the time to align language, people will often talk right past each other, and it's not a conversation, it's just noise - no information is getting transferred. Something like that.

In other words, I'm retreating from my overbold statement, and setting up a new line of rhetorical defense, and now I'll poke at it for a bit to see how it holds up :)

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