Note: This essay is a work in progress, a way to think through some ideas I have about social interaction, reality testing, worldviews and what not.

Introduction

“Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.”—Edward Teller

I think about this Edward Teller quote a lot. What principle would Von Neumann have when he was talking to people? There are a couple of assumptions in this quote that should be made explicit.

If you are a once in a generation intellectual genius like Von Neumann, by definition, you are going to be surrounded by people who are less smart. But, intellect is only one type of gift. Some people are big hearted. Others are funny. Everyone has a unique blend of qualities that makes them, to some degree, unique.

Many people have the view that young children are empty vessels than need to be taught. But, perhaps the secret to treating children as equals lies in understanding that the ability to look at the world without preconceptions is an enormous gift. It obliges anyone in dialogue with that perspective to reconsider ideas that with another would go unquestioned.

So, I think the principle here is that our ideas about who is worth talking to are, generally speaking, incorrect. If two people of Von Neumann’s talent were able to talk together, would that be a better conversation than each could have with a person average intelligence or a child? What gives a conversation value?

The Value of Conversation

Not all conversation has value. It clear that some interactions simply aren’t worth having. Sometimes, one or both parties have an agenda and/or acting in bad faith. Other times, people have no common interests or interest in keeping a relationship with another person. There are people who are stupid, or they have such a narrow scope of interest – say, they enjoy complaining – that the is little of value in talking with them beyond their bad example.

But, what makes for a good conversation? There are many guides. We are told How to Disagree. Or, there are discussions on the nature of politeness. There are mental frameworks for thinking about it, such as adopting a perspective like the The Theory of Visitors, where the defining feature of all relationships is impermanence, which invites us to enjoy interactions because they are fleeting. And, yet others, that recommend that we should keep our shit to ourselves.

Fundamentally, I’ve really been struggling with the questions of the who, the what, the how, and the why of social interaction. In the end, conversation is the basis for any relationship. Not all relationships are worth having. Which are?

The Who

The first problem of our time is who should we spend time with? There are people in this world who are the walking dead. They don’t want new experiences. They don’t want to have to think. They don’t want to spend time with themselves. So, they distract themselves with a constant stream of entertainment or mindless activity. If they don’t want to spend time with themselves, why should other people spend time with them?

There are many variations on this theme. There are people in parasocial relationships with celebrities, where they believe they know them based on a character they have played, social media or a autobiography. There are people “falling in love with A.I.” A Twitter account I follow recently shared that she was talking about her emotions with an A.I. because she didn’t know anyone that cared to talk about them. On one level, this is a cry for help. On another level, this is why you need to work through your shit yourself because you shouldn’t be putting that kind of burden on other people.

People also go through arcs. Maybe someone who was once an addict has moved through that period of their life. Now, there is room for other people now that they are no longer in the grips of addiction. There’s also windows of opportunity. Maybe people just have a lot on their plate, and they don’t have room for more friends, activities or whatever.

But, how do we know that for ourselves? Maybe, because of other obligations, there isn’t room for new people. Or, maybe we are shifting in the other direction, maybe we do have more room, but how do we forge genuine connection with others?

And any talk of genuine connection needs to take into account that, broadening your social circle will invariably entail interacting with a lot of people. We know that 3-6% of people have a Cluster B personality disorder. How do you identify those people?

Moreover, just as there are people that argue in bad faith, there are people that interact in bad faith, in general. However, we must be careful to understand the percentages? Of any random selection of people, how many interact in bad faith?

I think this leads us to one principle: Know the person you are interacting with. If you don’t know that person, then you need to be very careful of how much time you spend in their company, whether literally or figuratively. There’s also a chicken-and-egg problem. How do you know someone without conversation?

Of course, this is the mystery of small talk. We talk about things that don’t matter to help reveal the character of the Other. The hope is that it can serve as a bridge, one that takes us to caring for each other and talking about things that matter to us. But, just as some people are only looking for surface entertainment so they don’t have to spend time with themselves, those same people will hide in small talk because they don’t want to spend time with themselves, or really with other people. This is far more pervasive than people with malignant mental health problems, such as those 3-6% mentioned above.

On the other end, if we think that most people don’t have anything interesting to say, a la The Barker, in The Church of Interruption story, we cut ourselves off from others. A life cut off from others is the other end of the spectrum of people that hide in entertainment and small talk. It’s a little death, where we are broadcasting to the world from our little coffins and no one is receiving your broadcast.

The What

If we know the person we are interacting with, this leads to another principle: Interacting with someone is a relationship. So, if we know the person and want to be in a relationship with them, then small talks establishes and serves as a foundation that can be extended to things we care about and build a relationship.

We need to get find out: who they are, what are they interested in, etc.? Perhaps a guiding principle is: Can this interaction lead to human flourishing, either in me, them or the both of us? Prior to writing this essay, I think the only place where I have really followed this kind of interaction is with my young nieces. I am frequently thinking about how I can model certain types of behavior, how I might challenge them in ways that will help them grow in a beneficial way, and so forth.

I generally don’t look at interactions with adults in this way. Probably because I, personally, focus on autonomy and agency as values, and I think trying to influence people in particular directions undermines their autonomy and agency. The flip side of these values is that I also don’t want to be part of how people are using their agency. Ballot box political issues? Community or celebrity gossip? Sports? The latest hit show, movie or entertainment? I’m, largely, not interested. These are varieties of getting lost in small talk.

On a personal level, I have an internal dialogue that is withering. It’s absolutely brutal. I’m used to it. I think it is, in the main, useful in making me the kind of person I wish to be. But, I tolerate this kind of abuse because I see its value. Being that way to other people, however, is rude, particularly if you respect their autonomy.

Even if you don’t care about autonomy, I’ve found, over the years, that you cannot tell people anything. People get comfortable, like I’ve gotten comfortable with a rude internal dialogue I wouldn’t normally subject people I care about to. You cannot really predict how people will respond to anything you do. You certainly cannot predict whether it will end in human flourishing, however defined. So, what is left? What are we doing when we are talking to one another?

Are you interacting to pass the time? For amusement? Because we are maintaining relationships that are a product of luck and circumstance? There is a lot of talk about a loneliness epidemic, particularly among men. At base, are relationships about not being alone? What should they do for us, in shaping our character? Why spend time with other people? What makes our current relationships worth having?

The Why

The main question is: to what end? Why interact with anyone else?

If you are a genius like Von Neumann, you aren’t interacting with people because you’re likely to learn something you didn’t already know, particularly in your area of expertise. And, hidden in the quote above, I think that may also be a hidden assumption. That social interaction is about information seeking or refining our mental models of the world.

But, clearly, this is not how most interactions work. We aren’t looking for information. We are looking for validation. I remember hearing a quote that marriage is to bear witness to the life of another. I think there is some truth to that, and there is somewhat true of all our relationships. We get to see people on their best and worse days, and our response to those moments. In the crucible, gold is tested. All theory, any idea about how the world works, needs reality testing. There is nothing more real than the people around us.

This is not a view I’ve seen before. It’s a useful way of thinking about our social milieu. If our social interactions are primarily on the level of small talk, it is doing the opposite of reality testing. It’s hiding reality, and it is doing the same thing as immersing ourselves in entertainment.

The How

Looked at in this way, we now have a heuristic for thinking about our relationships with others. Does this person help me to hide from reality or test it?

Which brings us back to Von Neumann, children are all natural reality testers. They engage in make-believe. The imagine worlds that don’t exist. They make up rules and new games. They spend the majority of their time testing reality. Adults do not. Adults think they already know. But, even adults have constructed fantasy worlds, they just tend to believe they are real and are only doing limited testing.

But, we are all playing the child’s game. We all have ideas about how the world works. We all have a reality we have created in our minds. But, how many of us think we are testing it, seeing where the flaws are, where it is wrong? Most of us aren’t.

Further, maybe we have incompatible visions, even if we meet another person that is actively trying to refine their ideas about the world. They may have ideas and values that are incompatible with our worldview. So, most interaction is talking past one another.

So, you have to choose. You have to chose who to interact with, after you know who they are. You have to be interested in knowing the contours of your and their worldview and have an interest in testing it. You have to think about your relationship, and how you can serve to help yourself and others to test your ideas.. But, we have limited capacity to do this kind of work. So, maybe the key here is selection.

If it is person you only know through social media, do you really know who they are? Are you sure you are not dealing with a fiction? For example, how would you determine whether you are dealing with an LMM, someone attempting to catfish / scam you? The answer is you largely you can’t. As time goes on, it will become harder.

So, you need to filter. Social media is good to get an acquaintance with what I think of as the over-id (a portmanteau of Emerson’s Oversoul with Freud’s id). It will expose you to fragments of memes, myths and other elements of humanity’s cultural legacy. But, at the same time, it is exposing yourself to a kind of mental illness of a powerful collective. There is room to use this for our development, but there also seems to be a lot of ways that it could go wrong, and drive us into ways of thinking that are destructive, or at least maladaptive. Certainly, away from any sort of reality testing.

There’s probably a continuum, where on one end is the over-id and on the other is an affinity group, a group of individuals with whom we can have flourishing relationships with. Chances are, our affinity group will be a small one.

So, perhaps the first task of someone like myself would be get the inner dialogue more in line with how I would like to speak with the group. As is common in Buddhist loving-kindness practice, we probably need to start with ourselves before we can show grow more skill at showing loving kindness to others. Then, we need to broaden our area of concern to those closest. And then, look at our friends, acquaintances and lastly, even the social media environment and look for people that we think they (and we) might be able to bring closer, and in a way that benefits everyone in the relationship.

I don’t know how Von Neumanm was able to interact with everyone as well as he did, given how talented he was. But, I imagine there was a process like this one that he used to be able to interact with a larger set of people and do it in a way that treated everyone as equals. Everyone has something to bring to the table. The question is whether yours is the right table, or not.