Bradley Tjandra

What I Talk About When I Talk About What I Talk About At Parties (Part One)

Recently I went to a party when I was fairly tired. (I’d spent most of the week not sleeping very well, and most of the afternoon at some small-talk-y social event.) I had been looking forward to this party for the better part of a month, and while the party itself was great, I didn’t really have a good time. This is my post-mortem of why.

In short, the summary was:

  • I had already talked too much that day
  • I was tired
  • I hadn’t planned what I wanted to talk about at the party

I am beginning to suspect that my socialisation energy runs out at about 2.5 hours. That is, I can be social with people for about 2.5 hours before the energy required to maintain my attention on the conversation runs out, and I start disconnecting. There are other factors which hasten or delay this point, which are:

  • Talking to people I don’t know (hastens)
  • Talking about something I haven’t talked about before (hastens)
  • The feeling that I must be quick to respond (hastens)
  • Being in a large group with a single conversation, where my attention can drift off (delays, although really this is just taking breaks in the 2.5 hours extraversion lifespan)
  • Factors which make it hard to hold attention e.g. noise, being tired, multiple conversations at once (hastens)

I haven’t fully established the most efficient way to recharge. I tried a 5-minute meditation at the party, which made me feel a lot less tired and inattentive, but that also eventually wore out.

Another life hack I have for parties is to plan in advance conversational topics. I imagine this is something that people don’t need to do, but I feel like I have a problem I shall call Pointer Dereferencing Latency, which I’ll take a brief interlude to explain.

Pointer Dereferencing Latency 

I don’t know if this is a common experience, but often I feel like it takes a lot of work to explain “what I mean” to people. A few examples will help.

I’m at work, and I discover these is a problem with one of the models. Sometimes I’ll immediately stand up and go to another analyst and tell them “there is a problem with the calculation”. When asked to explain, I sometimes stumble upon the words to explain, I explain the wrong things in the wrong order, or I miss out on a key explanand. I would say I know what the problem is, it is “the calculation” (a pointer), but it takes time to go from the pointer to the full detail (how to dereference).

Another instance: I am explaining a concept, and I use a word which someone doesn’t understand (let’s say I use “Bayesian”). I understand what it means to be Bayesian. I can correctly point to examples of Bayesian models, and classify an approach as being Bayesian or not. But when asked to explain, it comes out as a series of “um, erm, you have a prior and then you get data and then you update your posterior, rather than being frequentist and…”. The problem isn’t that I don’t understand Bayesianism, it’s that it takes time to be able to explain it. And when I try to explain, I keeping using other pointers (prior, data, update, etc.), as I’m already goddamn trying to dereference one pointer, I can’t dereference all those other points too.

In general, Pointer Dereferencing Latency is when one understands the problem, but there is a huge gap of knowledge between you and the other person, and you are not good at unpacking what you mean without relying on other concepts they don’t understand, and presenting it in an easy to understand order.

This is correlated but not the same as just not understanding. I think a lot of people rely on pointers, and don’t dereference every time they think. Sometimes I’ll be explaining something, and I’ll realise that I don’t actually understand every step, or that the arguments aren’t as strong as I thought. And it’s reasons like this that teaching something can help to consolidate your own understanding.

But Pointer Dereferencing Latency is when I really do understand my argument, but it just takes me time to explain it.

And this is what I think happens when I am at parties, and I don’t have anything to talk about. Because I have a pointer called “interesting things I have been thinking about”, and it points towards a list of really interesting conversations. But in the moment of the conversation when someone asks me what I’ve been up to, it takes too much time to dereference that list into an interesting conversation topic.

Finally, the real reason I wanted to write this post was so that I could write a list of interesting conversational topics which I have been thinking about.

So here goes:

  1. What do you think of The Case Against Education?
  2. How would you create the internet if you were living in the 50s? Is there anything today which requires heavy investment from government, as it is simply too ambitious for the private sector to do it?
  3. How do you relax?
  4. Should I have more hobbies, or activities which I use to switch out of a productivity mindset?
  5. What would happen if the world were made of mini-states? How much would freedom and diversity win out of over economies of scale? Are social media websites any indication that things would stay the same?
  6. Why have we not solved face-to-face interaction? It is still worse than anything virtual.
  7. Have Millenials been trained to see anything which isn’t productive as immoral?

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