Created: January 24, 2021
Modified: February 25, 2022
Modified: February 25, 2022
generative questions
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Small talk can be mindnumbing and pointless. I like the idea of 'big talk, not small talk'. But realistically small talk serves a social purpose. You can't really go deep with someone until you know who they are and what they're interested in. You're not going to walk up to someone at a party and open by asking them about their views on rule vs act utilitarianism (at least at the vast majority of parties).
- It's natural to ask people factual questions. "Where do you work?" "What kind of stuff do you do?" "What is that useful for?" "Where are you from?" And so on.
- There's a place for these, but they're usually not all that interesting to be asked or to answer.
- You have a better conversation and get to know a person better by asking people to describe who they want to be. Questions that generate ideas, plans, thoughts about the future.
- Examples:
- What can't you stop thinking about?
- What's something exciting you'd like to work on?
- What books do you want to read?
- or "What books have you read recently" also gets at their aspirational selves and is easier to discuss since they can describe the book.
- These are a special case of the insight that the goal of talking to anyone is to help them think. communication is processing.
- Another example is to ask people to speculate:
- Who will win the game tonight?
- Who will run in the 2024 election?
- Which companies in (some market) will grow and which companies will shrink?
- Which of these is appropriate depends on the person and the context. But when used appropriately, asking for speculation is giving someone the gift of letting them engage in prediction as a model-building exercise.