Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

(Getting to the point:) I once heard a perfect explanation of the small talk phenomenon. It's like two modems establishing a link: they send to each other signals that are intended to asses how the line behaves, how well the other side hears you, and what it supports. Thus small talk may never be a pithy conversation: its purpose is to be a formal, predictable, zero-surprise exchange. Skipping it and going straight to the point may result in a badly botched communication attempt.

View on HN

It's like letting a cat sniff your hand or get used to your presence. We're smelling each other out at a subconscious level.

And more concretely, you're determining someone's values before offending them. Through small talk you might discover they're more conservative. Maybe they're hippies at heart. Maybe they hate dark humor, maybe they love it.

If you know those things, you can choose which serious conversations you'd like to have and which you'd better avoid. Plus the process of sniffing each other out means there's more baseline trust going in.

It's a great analogy, I'd add that there's a lot of variety of hippies you can't just project the leather vest and bell bottoms and call it a day.

Robin Dunbar argues that human speech did not evolve due to the need to coordinate hunts better or transport complex abstract ideas but as a more efficient way to build bonds than grooming.

From that perspective lots of communication make (more) sense. The signal always carries emotions in a way. Bandwidth is limited and parts are reserved. Some can control more of it for logic and argument. Speech seems to be trust and relationship building.

edit: Typo

Indeed human speech by pure bits is incredibly lousy. But you know why it's so hard to do STT and even TTS? Emotions, accents, interrogatives etc. You don't capture just counting information theoretic bits in words.

I mean Ryan gosling face has 0 bits of information in blade runner and yet we know he's pretty sad and emo.

And just like old modems, sometimes the handshake takes forever, makes everyone uncomfortable, and still fails to establish a useful connection.

It could be. Or maybe she just wanted to enjoy his company for a while, fly around in the clouds until she had to make her final approach and make sure to stick the landing.

That's a nice anecdote. The other (sort of parallel) utility it has, is smoothly steering the conversation towards deeper topics that you both find interesting to talk about, in the exploratory sense, finding common grounds etc. You just poke around, until some interesting coincidence pops up. But this is more for conversations that do not have a clearly known point or objective beforehand.

> its purpose is to be a formal, predictable, zero-surprise exchange

You might want to revise that as "no unpleasant surprises and minimal surprises in general".

People will always surprise you, but we prefer pleasant surprises.

Indeed. There may be surprises (a new joke!), but no, so to say, meta-surprises: the list of topics is known not to surprise or offend. Current weather, light jokes, general news about recent movies, mentions of sports events in passing, superficial talk about how weekends went, etc.

If somebody gets into discussing the current state of a low-pressure weather system, or talk about the finer points of the difference between the theatrical release version and the director's cut of a recent movie, or compare batting averages across decades, etc — it's not small talk any more, it's geeking out :)

The metaphor I use is we have lot of distinct ideas or topics. Consider them as gold nuggets. Then through these glue sentences we flatten these gold nuggets creating a big foil or fabric which are laid on top of each other and they intermingle. This allows us to remember the same main ideas across multiple scenarios. That's how our brain works most of the time. The stronger match is Hopfield-style associative memory

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

-- David Foster Wallace

Love this comment, it's simultaneously very nerdy and very non-nerdy at the same time. Well done!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com