> It sounds like a contradiction that someone could learn something new by answering a question. Isn’t that just spitting out something they already know?
A while back I started participating actively on Reddit's r/explainlikeimfive, and this has been my experience — explaining things I (think I) understand in ways that are accessible to laypeople really forces me to confront the sloppier parts of my understanding. If you're a technical person, it's also a great exercise in communication with non-technical people.
> But if you’re talking to a performer, and they have a fake, glassy-eyed smile, and go through all the correct motions, while obviously being totally checked out, you’re not asking the right questions.
Or it's an indication you are asking the correct questions but that the person you're asking it from anticipated it and is evading. Anyone who has heard a politicians and CEOs take questions from the press know this.
I've seen this with both famous and regular people.
e.g. a friend of mine once met William Shatner and then ran into him again a few months later. When asked "How are you doing?" Shatner answered exactly the same way at both the first and second meeting. I imagine some of this is efficiency since famous people tend to get the same questions over and over again. Tom Wilson even has a business card that answers a lot of these questions [0]
What was more surprising was seeing this in high school. I did a summer program with kids from all over the US. A few months later, I saw one of them at a sports event and, similar to Shatner, he had a canned response. He was from a well to do family and was probably on some kind of "track" to the right college etc. Was still surprising to hear.
If you are curious to see someone busting the cache, there are video compilations of Sean Evans from hot ones asking questions of guests based on deep research and them being incredibly impressed. [1]
Charisma on Command also has a great video on how to ask better question [2]
I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).
Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.
Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.
Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them.
That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.
Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.
In my experience, breaking the script goes wrong more often than well.
First you need someone who actually appreciates you deviating from the script. Most people most times are not seeking anything "interesting" in the sense you might think it
Implies that people are always fine with having their cache busted and actually want to have a genuine conversation with you. Some aren't and will react negatively if you try.
Exactly, for a busy celebrity, having a canned answer is a polite way to acknowledge a fan and give them a little thrill. They don't have time for a genuine, heartfelt conversation with everyone they meet.
Ah, I overcame this by not using easily recognizable for the theme words but descriptions. It forces people to actually process the input.
I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice when speaking to each other but prompt.
I delight in asking novel and meaningful questions. I have a particularly weakness for meta questions; my favourite general-purpose one is, following some banal question: “How often do people ask you that?”
Followed immediately by: “And how often do people ask you that?”
This is normally already completely novel, but on the off chance it isn’t, you can recurse to higher meta!
Stuttering John used to do this back on Howard Stern by asking celebrities questions that were far out of the expected gamut at red carpet events. This was all for shock/comedy value, but "who are you and what makes you famous" type questions can really throw celebs off script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0hENpnMXk
In online communication you'll soon need to develop a skill for busting AI proxy which most people will have in front of their messaging ingestion pipeline.
I don't think anyone is born like that. Politicians are trained for it. I remember a podcast where they talked about Al Franken and how it was difficult to get him to stop answering questions. The goal: one, maybe two or three talking points at any given time and no matter what question anyone asks, it is your job as a politician to give a non answer and pivot to the point of the day.
Yes, I realize how easily language can be manipulated.
For example, when some people in high positions enjoy privileges, politicians will defend them by talking about their contributions, and the topic shifts from privileges to contributions. Similarly, when a few bad people emerge from a certain ethnic group, politicians will constantly emphasize these few bad people to negate the entire ethnic group and call for action against the group. The most crucial factors should be whether contributions and privileges are commensurate, and the degree of correlation between the ethnic group and individual events. But nobody discusses this.
It's especially frustrating watching congressional hearings. Since both "sides" are aware that the cameras are rolling and that they are there to score points/create soundbites (rather than actually learn from each other--god forbid) it's just both sides talking past each other and not doing the analytical work of a good conversation.
Even when I'm on one side of the argument, it's just as frustrating to hear my own side just move on to their next pre-written question/response instead of engaging with the underlying issues. I want substantive debate and discussion and possibly consensus, but that's sadly not the reality in most cases of import.
There is no "our side" and that's the problem. There are issues with a clear majority 80% plus voters agree on and steadily over decades and yet veto points (filibuster, committee chairs, holds) plus donor capture means a motivated minority with money can block majority-supported policy indefinitely.
You can always have arguments with philosophy or case law or whatever that for example carried interest loophole is good for America but overwhelming majority of US Americans support scraping it. Why haven't been able to do that? How many people benefit from this loophole? (Estimates are just a few thousands of people who benefit, not millions in a country of over three hundred million). Similarly, the IRS Direct File system was a modest improvement over the status quo. Why was it scrapped? How many people benefit from this?
Remember SVB? Remember how everyone who opposed TARP suddenly supported bailing out SVB depositors just because now these were companies in which they had invested?
The point is there can't be a real debate when the outcome of the debate determines your paycheck.
Often they will just talk around a question too. They will be asked if they will give everyone free ice cream if elected, and they will just talk about how great ice cream is, how important ice cream is, etc, but never actually answer the question.
This is a basic survival skill in politics, and not just for scandals.
Let's take Bernie Sanders, because he's well-known in Vermont for being happy to go off-script and actually talk to people. During my only personal conversation with him, he was delighted to discover that a small, local event actually served excellent chicken. (Apparently politicians eat a lot of rubbery chicken.)
But at that same event, Bernie was approached by a woman asking some conspiracy-tinged question. And he very gracefully deflected and changed the topic. I think that just about anyone who interacts with the public is likely to pick up some version of this skill eventually.
> It sounds like a contradiction that someone could learn something new by answering a question. Isn’t that just spitting out something they already know?
A while back I started participating actively on Reddit's r/explainlikeimfive, and this has been my experience — explaining things I (think I) understand in ways that are accessible to laypeople really forces me to confront the sloppier parts of my understanding. If you're a technical person, it's also a great exercise in communication with non-technical people.
I do technical training and also give talks. There is no better way to learn things than to have to teach others.
> But if you’re talking to a performer, and they have a fake, glassy-eyed smile, and go through all the correct motions, while obviously being totally checked out, you’re not asking the right questions.
Or it's an indication you are asking the correct questions but that the person you're asking it from anticipated it and is evading. Anyone who has heard a politicians and CEOs take questions from the press know this.
I've seen this with both famous and regular people.
e.g. a friend of mine once met William Shatner and then ran into him again a few months later. When asked "How are you doing?" Shatner answered exactly the same way at both the first and second meeting. I imagine some of this is efficiency since famous people tend to get the same questions over and over again. Tom Wilson even has a business card that answers a lot of these questions [0]
What was more surprising was seeing this in high school. I did a summer program with kids from all over the US. A few months later, I saw one of them at a sports event and, similar to Shatner, he had a canned response. He was from a well to do family and was probably on some kind of "track" to the right college etc. Was still surprising to hear.
If you are curious to see someone busting the cache, there are video compilations of Sean Evans from hot ones asking questions of guests based on deep research and them being incredibly impressed. [1]
Charisma on Command also has a great video on how to ask better question [2]
0 - https://www.upworthy.com/back-to-the-future-actor-has-a-hila...
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Endmr-93KOY
2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHyYlFCaXPM
I don't think people actually care about a sincere answer to "how are you doing", so replying with the prebaked line makes sense
There's a long story about Boris Johnson (dickhead chancer who was prime minister in the UK) doing the same routine in 2 different occasions: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/c1korj/jeremy_v...
... and people loving it.
Terminology is a bit weird.
I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).
Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.
Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.
Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them. That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.
Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.
In my experience, breaking the script goes wrong more often than well.
First you need someone who actually appreciates you deviating from the script. Most people most times are not seeking anything "interesting" in the sense you might think it
Would you enjoy talking to someone who does not like to have their curiosity peeked? (imho: probably not)
Also, if you'd notice that happening: a good sign you're wasting your time talking to that person.
In a good conversation both (or more) participants get something useful/interesting/funny out of it.
It's piqued, like a pike is sharp, piquant, pique(d).
Perhaps it's cultural, but when people do that I take it as them not wanting to have that conversation - that is fine.
Recently I had a person say a lot without really saying anything because most likely they didn't want me to have some (business related) information.
It's important to be mindful that if there is a cache, there's probably a reason for it.
I absolutely love the way the footnote works in this article. Best design I've ever seen for that.
It’s https://littlefoot.js.org
Except that they are invisible and inaccessible in Reader mode.
Implies that people are always fine with having their cache busted and actually want to have a genuine conversation with you. Some aren't and will react negatively if you try.
Indeed. Canned responses are a defense mechanism for being in awkward social situations. Making it more awkward is maybe not a great move.
While this is true, it also means they're not someone I want to converse with so it makes it easy to move on to someone more interesting.
I was more thinking about celebrities, influencers or con exhibitors, where a fan-celebrity relationship may exist, but not a real relationship.
Same goes for politicians, though there it becomes much more problematic.
If you got this with people that are actually close, there would be a problem.
Exactly, for a busy celebrity, having a canned answer is a polite way to acknowledge a fan and give them a little thrill. They don't have time for a genuine, heartfelt conversation with everyone they meet.
> It lets the person you are talking to have novel, original thoughts, rather than repeating the thoughts they’ve had before.
But only if they're open-minded. I've met many smart people who would rather sound smart than bust their cache.
Ah, I overcame this by not using easily recognizable for the theme words but descriptions. It forces people to actually process the input.
I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice when speaking to each other but prompt.
I delight in asking novel and meaningful questions. I have a particularly weakness for meta questions; my favourite general-purpose one is, following some banal question: “How often do people ask you that?”
Followed immediately by: “And how often do people ask you that?”
This is normally already completely novel, but on the off chance it isn’t, you can recurse to higher meta!
But you are also reading from your cache of questions
Stuttering John used to do this back on Howard Stern by asking celebrities questions that were far out of the expected gamut at red carpet events. This was all for shock/comedy value, but "who are you and what makes you famous" type questions can really throw celebs off script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0hENpnMXk
I was expecting legit questions. These are just rude
Using "cache" for this whole dynamic is annoying; not everything is a computer
In online communication you'll soon need to develop a skill for busting AI proxy which most people will have in front of their messaging ingestion pipeline.
Some politicians are impeccable; if you ask them thorny questions like scandals, they always throw out a new question to change the topic.
I don't think anyone is born like that. Politicians are trained for it. I remember a podcast where they talked about Al Franken and how it was difficult to get him to stop answering questions. The goal: one, maybe two or three talking points at any given time and no matter what question anyone asks, it is your job as a politician to give a non answer and pivot to the point of the day.
Yes, I realize how easily language can be manipulated.
For example, when some people in high positions enjoy privileges, politicians will defend them by talking about their contributions, and the topic shifts from privileges to contributions. Similarly, when a few bad people emerge from a certain ethnic group, politicians will constantly emphasize these few bad people to negate the entire ethnic group and call for action against the group. The most crucial factors should be whether contributions and privileges are commensurate, and the degree of correlation between the ethnic group and individual events. But nobody discusses this.
It's especially frustrating watching congressional hearings. Since both "sides" are aware that the cameras are rolling and that they are there to score points/create soundbites (rather than actually learn from each other--god forbid) it's just both sides talking past each other and not doing the analytical work of a good conversation.
Even when I'm on one side of the argument, it's just as frustrating to hear my own side just move on to their next pre-written question/response instead of engaging with the underlying issues. I want substantive debate and discussion and possibly consensus, but that's sadly not the reality in most cases of import.
There is no "our side" and that's the problem. There are issues with a clear majority 80% plus voters agree on and steadily over decades and yet veto points (filibuster, committee chairs, holds) plus donor capture means a motivated minority with money can block majority-supported policy indefinitely. You can always have arguments with philosophy or case law or whatever that for example carried interest loophole is good for America but overwhelming majority of US Americans support scraping it. Why haven't been able to do that? How many people benefit from this loophole? (Estimates are just a few thousands of people who benefit, not millions in a country of over three hundred million). Similarly, the IRS Direct File system was a modest improvement over the status quo. Why was it scrapped? How many people benefit from this? Remember SVB? Remember how everyone who opposed TARP suddenly supported bailing out SVB depositors just because now these were companies in which they had invested? The point is there can't be a real debate when the outcome of the debate determines your paycheck.
This interviewer didn't let it go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyqnu6ywhR4
Often they will just talk around a question too. They will be asked if they will give everyone free ice cream if elected, and they will just talk about how great ice cream is, how important ice cream is, etc, but never actually answer the question.
I'm surprised there isn't a term for doing that.
It's not slick, but I've always labeled this as; answering the question they want to answer (rather than answer the question that was asked).
Isn’t that just dodging the question?
This is a basic survival skill in politics, and not just for scandals.
Let's take Bernie Sanders, because he's well-known in Vermont for being happy to go off-script and actually talk to people. During my only personal conversation with him, he was delighted to discover that a small, local event actually served excellent chicken. (Apparently politicians eat a lot of rubbery chicken.)
But at that same event, Bernie was approached by a woman asking some conspiracy-tinged question. And he very gracefully deflected and changed the topic. I think that just about anyone who interacts with the public is likely to pick up some version of this skill eventually.
I have section in my notes app of things people repeat, most commonly its executives hitting the cache they're all repeating each other.