There are three types of conversations:
- “strong” conversations
- ”fun” conversations
- ”nice” conversations
- bad conversations
Having some mix of (1), (2) and (3) is healthy and good. (4) should be avoided.
strong conversations
A strong conversation is characterized by discussing live topics. Generally this means you have some questions, and the answers matter to you because you will change the way you act in an important way upon resolving the question. The question generally only needs to be live for one person — the question is important to the other party just in virtue of being important to the first party. Here are some strategies for facilitating such conversations:
- Decide at start of conversation whether to have a fun or strong conversation.
- Good environment. e.g., maybe on a walk or while eating.
- While cooking or otherwise multi-tasking is generally sub-optimal.
- Good questions:
- “What’s been on your mind?"
- "What’s been troubling you lately?"
- "What’s an important uncertainty that you’d like to resolve?"
- "What obstacles have you been facing lately?”
- Personally introspecting about above questions so you have good answers.
Probably trickiest part about having strong conversations is setting up times for them to happen and being prepared with live topics.
Example of strong conversation topics that have been interesting for me in the past:
- What’s the point of research?
- What makes the universe good
- How should I spend my life? (e.g., career)
advice
Asking for advice / help about things important to you is a good type of strong conversation. Note that sometimes such a conversation can be extremely short but very valuable.
Some examples of good advice that I’ve received lately:
- You should practice your presentation for your interview 10 times.
- Here are some math problems to help you prepare for a technical interview.
- You should treat yourself well.
Some evidence that this counts as strong conversations is that it results in big action diffs, and takes the form of someone challenging my status quo way of doing things (possibly at my request but still).
fun conversations
In fun conversations your goal isn’t to decide on some new course of action or come to some new realization about the universe. It’s just to connect with other people — to hear their story. Here are some questions that are good for facilitating fun conversations:
- Give me advice about something random, e.g., what should I get my sister for her bday?
- ”NJeopardy” — pick some random topic, e.g., “What does Brandon want for xmas?” and have people tell possibly real guesses or possibly fictitious humorous responses for this.
- What are your similarities and differences to person X?
- This is a classic. You can modify by adding a modifier “wrt Y”.
- Tell me about your name.
- Tell me about your research
- What is something that went really well recently?
- What hobbies are you pursuing recently? How are these going?
- What are you looking forward to doing?
- Are there any projects you really wish you could work on right now but aren’t?
- Tell me about your family. How’s X doing?
- How similar would people say you are to your parents? Are they correct?
- Tell me your life story.
- What is a small localized moment that’s been very impactful in your life? (i.e., butterfly moment).
- E.g., Alek applying to PRIMES at a friend’s encouragement.
If you’re having trouble with these topics with someone less talkative, it can be productive to have enthusiastic anecdotes / rants that you share to set the vibe. Also sharing things that I’ve learned, or ideas that I’ve heard is a great way to understand ideas better and can be interesting.
nice conversations
This means 关心 people. It’s good to do the basics — asking after projects, health, feelings.
A 关心 technique that I enjoy, but currently underutilize (although I’m of course mostly writing this as a reminder to myself to update until I’m not undertilizing this technique) is writing people nice letters. This can be as simple as sending my philosophy TA a one sentence email (“I’m writing to thank you for your feedback on my essays about eliminating “weasel words” — This is improving my writing in a satisfying way!”) or as elaborate as writing a one paragraph note on a piece of paper, putting this in an envelope and sending it with instructions not to be opened until some date months in the future!
I often have thoughts for tiny nice things that I could do, and then engage in self betrayal — i.e., I say “oh but that might be awkward”. But I have a policy of overriding such signals sent by avoid_discomfort.cpp — because my brain is often wrong.