There is also sightly different and essential skill that is required for business leaders, politicians, spokes persons etc. You should only say what you to need to say, but never get to the point or answer the specific question asked.
> food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation
It's usually the source of new topics when I'm at lunch. People inevitably order something different that looks good, or have a funny story they're reminded of when they see something.
Meals where the topic veers into food preferences and lengthy comparisons to other food that was eaten another time make me want to leave my body. But it’s such a common default in mixed groups.
So is archive.org. They take down articles when journalists ask them too and block legal sites from being archived. It is more likely for archive.org to take down or make inaccessible a piece of content than archive.is.
> They take down articles when journalists ask them too
They take them down when their respective author / copyright holder wants them down. That wouldn't apply in this case where the author wants them up, but a DNS infrastructure might cause the links to fail.
I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it. Some people want an immutable copy of a page that they can reference in case it gets changed or taken down in the future.
>Not sure what this refers to.
For example you can't even see 4chan's homepage. For such a notable site in internet history, it is a shame that it is not publicly archived by them.
> I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it. Some people want an immutable copy of a page that they can reference in case it gets changed or taken down in the future.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Sure, archive.org may not meet your perfect definition of an archive, but it does see itself as an archive that's preserving things for the future. My understanding is archive.is explicitly rejects that role (e.g. IIRC, they make silent changes to pages, their ownership is opaque, and they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow).
> Yes, the word “archive” in the title is misleading. The main purpose is to hold up ephemeral web pages for latecomers. Shots taken more than a few days ago have almost no visits.
There is one documented case of this and it was in response to harassment. My usage of archival doesn't involve me harassing the person who is graciously offering that service to me so it is outside of my threat model. This is actually a case of letting perfect be the enemy of good. I frequently archive posts where the owner may want them to be removed so what archive.org allows is against my threat model against the archive. They are not the same.
>they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow
I already gave you an example of how they made the archive of 4chan disappear out of the blue with no warning. Archive.org is no better in this respect of archives going away with no warning.
Ultimately everything is temporary so if you really care about backing something up you should do it yourself. I believe both these sites do give you a download option to save the pages locally.
> For example you can't even see 4chan's homepage.
That's likely the same thing, the 4chan admins asking IA to omit them.
> I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it.
Being able to preserve material depends on their surviving.
I hope whoever is running na.me (the domain registration was renewed a month ago) is preparing to register domains like joe.random.na.me if you can demonstrate a registration of joe.random.name, for an affordable amount.
Post was good but I was more interested in his blog posts from 2002 since he was posting every month at the time when Billy Beane took the A’s to victory. I’ve read Moneyball so figured there might’ve been more of a reaction.
I don't think it's that people online need to have more unstructured discussion, or "not get to the point" -- it's that there's no real sense of community in a lot of online spaces. Why would I spend a bunch of time idly having Seinfeldian conversations with strangers with whom I have no rapport or continuity? The vast majority of people who will read my social media comments will be completely invisible to me. All the years of commenting and interacting online have predictably resulted in precisely zero lasting relationships.
If the point of not getting to the point is to build trust, then there has to be a relationship in which that trust is invested. Otherwise, not getting to the point is just more invitation for someone to take issue or dismiss what you're saying, to divert the discussion, or to completely miss the actual points you want to discuss.
The trick though is to gravitate towards places where there is a community and where you end up talking to a few of the same people. HN's probably not going to be it, an IRC channel, Discord, forum, etc, where you keep talking to the same dozen regulars is much better.
I had so many good times doing this when I was younger, on IRC and Forums back in the late 90s, early 00s. I haven't had much luck since then though unfortunately.
Any advice for finding the smaller communities? I've been trying to join larger more public communities to make the initial connections with people but mostly I find that they are either ghost towns with thousands of people but no one is active, or they are so active it's just noise that no one is really keeping up with
The problem is exacerbated by the rhetorical approach of saying "i don't understand" when people really mean " i disagree" , or "i prefer".
Contemporary rhetoric nearly always prefers passive-aggressive positions. People don't want to be pinned down to a position. They refuse to disagree, even over uncontroversial positions.
"I don't understand why you want to paint the shed blue" . Look, I explained it with 3 paragraphs. It's totally acceptable for you to want red, but it's frustrating to hear you say you don't understand why I'm proposing blue.
(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. This 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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
Thanks to whoever posted this 11yo gem. I've never read it. Its humbling and encouraging to see someone willing to post his fumblings even in his 50's. I feel like he'd been lambasted or mocked had he posted this today on substack or twitter.
As a younger man I was more of the "Just say what you mean, get straight to the point" kind of guy. I think what changed for me is that I learned that people are often much more interesting than their opinions. Going to someone wanting one-word answers to everything (outside of a work context) can become very impersonal and extractive. Its reductionist. It's assuming you're the only one with deep thoughts, conflicted feelings on certain topics, and interesting opinions.
Looks like someone just learned of "ice breaking" for the first time.
All those "ice breaking" exercises you do at work? It's started by like people like the author. They don't have a clue exactly how it should come about. (at least the author understands the concept but still dangerous to implement it at offices as they don't really dig it yet. but it's been 11 years for him so should be better by now)
The author comes as one of those awkward people who gets to the points without any "softening". You seens those people. The author is exactly that kinda person. Annoying but at least don't waste your time. But not great as a close friend but OK as an acquitence.
> There are many, many more people who are clueless about how to behave in online conversations than there are people who are clueless about how to behave in offline ones. How I came to be the flipside of that, I don’t know.
I tried to use "logical" sense here for comments as but acts like the author because I am semi-anonymous here. IRL, I am as cordial and courteous as possible. and try not to shove "logic" into someon's face.
Anyways, glad to see someone understanding the point of ice-breaking late in life (better late than never, thus kudos).
I think a more helpful frame is seeing this less as a practice of rhetoric and to instead see it as a practice of emotional maturity.
When you speak with someone, you likely are not aware of everything that is going on with their current emotional state. If they're having a good day or bad, if they even have had the time to build insight on it, what's nagging at them, etc. You may also not know where their ideologies, ethics, morality, etc are since these are only really shared with the ones close to them. And even then these shift and ebb especially if someone is at a formative time of their life (eg a college student).
So every initial conversation is a little back-and-forth of mapping this out, warming up, and saving the deeper stuff for later. It's a trust-building exercise where you suss out if someone will be receptive, if they'll validate your experience of the world or if they're more likely to be closed off and dismissive. Because the latter hurts and that hurt can last longer than you expect.
I personally don't find small talk rejuvenating and used to get bored of it quickly. I think the thing that irked me was that I always saw myself as open-minded and receptive and it felt like a waste of time, just get to the point, etc. But these days I'm keenly aware that we're not all at the same place internally and someone may have had some less-than-ideal experiences they're still holding onto. I can be sympathetic to that even if it means I'm bored for a few minutes of my day - it's really the least that I can do.
Being trustworthy and being perceived as trustworthy aren't the same thing. I think a lot of us who dislike small talk forget that the other person hasn't necessarily had a chance to establish the former yet.
To me the article and the comments read as cope. To me personally, and I just mean to me personally I don’t see any value in smalltalk and I don’t enjoy it. And when I do smalltalk I feel bad after it, like I’ve wasted my time. I enjoy learning, exchanging problems, fixing problems together, sports, exercise lifting, reading good books and I would rate myself 8.5/10 happy in life.
But smalltalk is for me nothing useful and ranks along, maybe better off time as tv shows or scrolling. But I don’t think there is inherent value after checking out compability.
I started to enjoy small talking when I stopped thinking about it as some special ritual. E.g. I have friends who are for the lack of a better word "weather nerds" and their interests rubbed off me. Since I now find weather interesting, every time someone starts a small talk about the weather, it is a chance to either learn some data point, check on my own knowledge of the subject, etc. I love when older or well travelled people start to reminescence about weather in different times or locations -- I can immediately try to solve a small puzzle in my mind -- "wait, why exactly is there so much cold wind in this region exactly?"
I can find many things interesting, the world is fun to explore.
Maybe its eastern european culture thing, but I feel during smalltalks people pretending to be interested in you while you pretend to be interested in them. And this tbh drains a lot of energy because you are socially forced to participate hearing bullshit(noone honest about how their day went) and lowkey lying(because you also cant be honest if your day is shit).
>She recently texted me and said she wanted to talk
This is an asking to ask situation. You can just talk via text messages.
>Eventually, the conversation turned, and we finally got to talking about the thing she wanted to talk about. But that probably at least half an hour into the conversation.
This sounds like a waste of time. Why waste over half an hour on a conversation that can be finished probably within a single minute.
How can you be so stingy with your own daughter? Haven't you ever loved someone enough to give them a half hour of simply sharing their mind without growing impatient?
Its how journalism is supposed to be written where each following paragraph is less important than the one preceding it.
In the military we call this Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). You start with the goal and step back into the details only as requested or if in conflict with the goal of the response.
The article makes some good points about feeling your way into a conversation. It’s just not productive though. You should always get to the point first. The things mentioned in the article are better determined through improved listening skills.
What is wrong with our society that this man remained oblivious—while growing up, forming romantic relationships, starting a family, raising a child to adulthood—of the necessity to cultivate trust and comfort in others before, and throughout, difficult conversations?
This person has and used to prefer a conversation style that is not according to the average population. Outliers should be allowed to exist as long as they are not evil.
> necessity to cultivate trust and comfort in others before,
Con artists are very adept at building up such conversations. So the trust and comfort it builds is superficial.
> Con artists are very adept at building up such conversation
Yeah, and there's chlorine in "mustard gas", so what? That doesn't implicate salt.
> as long as they are not evil
Look I'm not advocating for the guy to be hanged, but I think his "conversational style" is evil, or is the innocuous tip of an evil iceberg. We live in an increasingly atomized society— One in which both casual and intimate relationships are mediated—when not wholly replaced—by machinery controlled by absentee landlords.
> And this, too, was a bit of a revelation to me, that someone would not want to get straight to the point, that someone would need a nice long conversational warmup before they’d feel comfortable enough to be ready to talk about something more uncomfortable. I’m very much a get-to-the-point kind of person. I tend to say what I mean, or nothing at all.
I've worked for a boss like this once - he was the worst boss I ever worked for. There was absolutely no room for nuance in the conversations, no attempt to build rapport or a sense of shared understanding. It was his way or the highway.
Human beings are emotional, not rational actors. The "idle chit-chat" gets the foundations of emotional solidarity in place that make anything else possible. When you try to avoid it, you get an organization slinging daggers at each other because someone had the nerve - the audacity - to tell people what to do over an email without any room for them to respond and feel heard, never mind that, rationally, that's exactly what they were hired to do.
There is, of course, value in getting to the point - but only after you consistently build and assure and rebuild and reassure confidence that everyone is in the same boat together.
> This was a revelation to me. All this time, I assumed that the primary purpose of lunch was lunch.
and
> being an introvert made conversation awkward and laborious for me.
and
> And this, too, was a bit of a revelation to me, that someone would not want to get straight to the point, that someone would need a nice long conversational warmup before they’d feel comfortable enough to be ready to talk about something more uncomfortable.
and
> I never fully understood this before. I feel like everyone else understands it, though, because they act as if they do. But if they do, it must be an intuitive understanding, a grokking, not an explicit fact that people state out loud.
...are all common experiences of people with forms of Autism.
79 comments
[ 0.83 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] threadIt's usually the source of new topics when I'm at lunch. People inevitably order something different that looks good, or have a funny story they're reminded of when they see something.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name#Discontinuation_of_third...
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550772
Here is an archive link of the original blog post:
https://archive.is/zi6qn
Going to post it here in case someone several years from now comes to this thread and wants to read the original blog post.
IIRC, archive.is actually explicitly rejects the idea that they're an actual archive for the preservation of material.
They take them down when their respective author / copyright holder wants them down. That wouldn't apply in this case where the author wants them up, but a DNS infrastructure might cause the links to fail.
> and block legal sites from being archived.
Not sure what this refers to.
I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it. Some people want an immutable copy of a page that they can reference in case it gets changed or taken down in the future.
>Not sure what this refers to.
For example you can't even see 4chan's homepage. For such a notable site in internet history, it is a shame that it is not publicly archived by them.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Sure, archive.org may not meet your perfect definition of an archive, but it does see itself as an archive that's preserving things for the future. My understanding is archive.is explicitly rejects that role (e.g. IIRC, they make silent changes to pages, their ownership is opaque, and they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow).
This is how archive.is describes itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i277vt/psa_ar...:
> Yes, the word “archive” in the title is misleading. The main purpose is to hold up ephemeral web pages for latecomers. Shots taken more than a few days ago have almost no visits.
There is one documented case of this and it was in response to harassment. My usage of archival doesn't involve me harassing the person who is graciously offering that service to me so it is outside of my threat model. This is actually a case of letting perfect be the enemy of good. I frequently archive posts where the owner may want them to be removed so what archive.org allows is against my threat model against the archive. They are not the same.
>they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow
I already gave you an example of how they made the archive of 4chan disappear out of the blue with no warning. Archive.org is no better in this respect of archives going away with no warning.
Ultimately everything is temporary so if you really care about backing something up you should do it yourself. I believe both these sites do give you a download option to save the pages locally.
> For example you can't even see 4chan's homepage.
That's likely the same thing, the 4chan admins asking IA to omit them.
> I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it.
Being able to preserve material depends on their surviving.
> Going to post it here in case someone several years from now comes to this thread and wants to read the original blog post.
I wouldn't count on short-links living long. The point of link-shortening is that they're temporary.
If the point of not getting to the point is to build trust, then there has to be a relationship in which that trust is invested. Otherwise, not getting to the point is just more invitation for someone to take issue or dismiss what you're saying, to divert the discussion, or to completely miss the actual points you want to discuss.
The trick though is to gravitate towards places where there is a community and where you end up talking to a few of the same people. HN's probably not going to be it, an IRC channel, Discord, forum, etc, where you keep talking to the same dozen regulars is much better.
Any advice for finding the smaller communities? I've been trying to join larger more public communities to make the initial connections with people but mostly I find that they are either ghost towns with thousands of people but no one is active, or they are so active it's just noise that no one is really keeping up with
Contemporary rhetoric nearly always prefers passive-aggressive positions. People don't want to be pinned down to a position. They refuse to disagree, even over uncontroversial positions.
"I don't understand why you want to paint the shed blue" . Look, I explained it with 3 paragraphs. It's totally acceptable for you to want red, but it's frustrating to hear you say you don't understand why I'm proposing blue.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
I mean Ryan gosling face has 0 bits of information in blade runner and yet we know he's pretty sad and emo.
-- David Foster Wallace
As a younger man I was more of the "Just say what you mean, get straight to the point" kind of guy. I think what changed for me is that I learned that people are often much more interesting than their opinions. Going to someone wanting one-word answers to everything (outside of a work context) can become very impersonal and extractive. Its reductionist. It's assuming you're the only one with deep thoughts, conflicted feelings on certain topics, and interesting opinions.
All those "ice breaking" exercises you do at work? It's started by like people like the author. They don't have a clue exactly how it should come about. (at least the author understands the concept but still dangerous to implement it at offices as they don't really dig it yet. but it's been 11 years for him so should be better by now)
The author comes as one of those awkward people who gets to the points without any "softening". You seens those people. The author is exactly that kinda person. Annoying but at least don't waste your time. But not great as a close friend but OK as an acquitence.
> There are many, many more people who are clueless about how to behave in online conversations than there are people who are clueless about how to behave in offline ones. How I came to be the flipside of that, I don’t know.
I tried to use "logical" sense here for comments as but acts like the author because I am semi-anonymous here. IRL, I am as cordial and courteous as possible. and try not to shove "logic" into someon's face.
Anyways, glad to see someone understanding the point of ice-breaking late in life (better late than never, thus kudos).
When you speak with someone, you likely are not aware of everything that is going on with their current emotional state. If they're having a good day or bad, if they even have had the time to build insight on it, what's nagging at them, etc. You may also not know where their ideologies, ethics, morality, etc are since these are only really shared with the ones close to them. And even then these shift and ebb especially if someone is at a formative time of their life (eg a college student).
So every initial conversation is a little back-and-forth of mapping this out, warming up, and saving the deeper stuff for later. It's a trust-building exercise where you suss out if someone will be receptive, if they'll validate your experience of the world or if they're more likely to be closed off and dismissive. Because the latter hurts and that hurt can last longer than you expect.
I personally don't find small talk rejuvenating and used to get bored of it quickly. I think the thing that irked me was that I always saw myself as open-minded and receptive and it felt like a waste of time, just get to the point, etc. But these days I'm keenly aware that we're not all at the same place internally and someone may have had some less-than-ideal experiences they're still holding onto. I can be sympathetic to that even if it means I'm bored for a few minutes of my day - it's really the least that I can do.
But smalltalk is for me nothing useful and ranks along, maybe better off time as tv shows or scrolling. But I don’t think there is inherent value after checking out compability.
This is just _my_ unfiltered view.
I can find many things interesting, the world is fun to explore.
This scene: John Adams meets the Dutch...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1cgBI5rdI
This is an asking to ask situation. You can just talk via text messages.
>Eventually, the conversation turned, and we finally got to talking about the thing she wanted to talk about. But that probably at least half an hour into the conversation.
This sounds like a waste of time. Why waste over half an hour on a conversation that can be finished probably within a single minute.
How can you be so stingy with your own daughter? Haven't you ever loved someone enough to give them a half hour of simply sharing their mind without growing impatient?
In the military we call this Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). You start with the goal and step back into the details only as requested or if in conflict with the goal of the response.
I wonder how the author would feel about our internet today?
What is wrong with our society that this man remained oblivious—while growing up, forming romantic relationships, starting a family, raising a child to adulthood—of the necessity to cultivate trust and comfort in others before, and throughout, difficult conversations?
People are not vending machines!
> necessity to cultivate trust and comfort in others before,
Con artists are very adept at building up such conversations. So the trust and comfort it builds is superficial.
Yeah, and there's chlorine in "mustard gas", so what? That doesn't implicate salt.
> as long as they are not evil
Look I'm not advocating for the guy to be hanged, but I think his "conversational style" is evil, or is the innocuous tip of an evil iceberg. We live in an increasingly atomized society— One in which both casual and intimate relationships are mediated—when not wholly replaced—by machinery controlled by absentee landlords.
OP's "introversion" is a capitulation to slavery.
I've worked for a boss like this once - he was the worst boss I ever worked for. There was absolutely no room for nuance in the conversations, no attempt to build rapport or a sense of shared understanding. It was his way or the highway.
Human beings are emotional, not rational actors. The "idle chit-chat" gets the foundations of emotional solidarity in place that make anything else possible. When you try to avoid it, you get an organization slinging daggers at each other because someone had the nerve - the audacity - to tell people what to do over an email without any room for them to respond and feel heard, never mind that, rationally, that's exactly what they were hired to do.
There is, of course, value in getting to the point - but only after you consistently build and assure and rebuild and reassure confidence that everyone is in the same boat together.
and
> being an introvert made conversation awkward and laborious for me.
and
> And this, too, was a bit of a revelation to me, that someone would not want to get straight to the point, that someone would need a nice long conversational warmup before they’d feel comfortable enough to be ready to talk about something more uncomfortable.
and
> I never fully understood this before. I feel like everyone else understands it, though, because they act as if they do. But if they do, it must be an intuitive understanding, a grokking, not an explicit fact that people state out loud.
...are all common experiences of people with forms of Autism.