Dancing vs drilling in conversation

Related: Are You a Jerk, or a Liar?

I’m writing this for myself from a few months ago. If you’re quite like he was, you might find this useful; otherwise, you’ll find this blatantly, strikingly obvious. (It might even be enlightening for you to realize that many folks don’t find the points I make obvious.)

Also, caveat emptor.

I used to model conversations as “mining” for the truth. More effective conversation meant using more powerful drills to get closer to the truth; less effective conversation meant poorly-tuned truth-sensors and unsharpened blades. I aimed to build a toolbox of effective drills and sensors and sharpeners — double-cruxing, scout mindset, tabooing words, etc. And it worked: I sharpened my blades, and relished in my effectiveness at conversational drilling.

But in some conversations, I noticed myself getting frustrated: I’d start to engage, trying to answer questions maximally usefully, asking others about their cruxes, etc. But in response, I’d get strange and sometimes annoyed or frustrated looks, followed by confusingly ineffective truth-drilling on their part. This, in turn, frustrated me. And the mutual frustration soured conversations and whole relationships. Were they stupid? Or hiding some underlying motive? What the hell were they doing?

No, no. They weren’t being stupid; I was. I’ve now come to realize that they didn’t want to drill for truth, they wanted to dance**.** The goal they had in the conversation wasn’t external (”figure out the truth about x”) but internal to the conversation (”enjoy the conversation for conversations’ sake”). They were offering me a hand, asking me to waltz, and I was slapping it away, annoyed that they weren’t handing me a pickaxe.

Once I realized that, I started trying to figure out if someone was trying to drill, or was asking me to dance. All of a sudden I noticed that I was constantly slapping away offers to dance, without any awareness of doing it. I’ve since fixed that mistake; here’s how.

The first step is to realize you’re doing it. This part’s surprisingly simple: usually just pausing for a moment and asking myself “is this person trying to drill, or to dance” causes the answer to immediately be obvious. But sometimes, even after thinking for a moment, it wasn’t quite clear. This was especially true in the weeks following my realization, since I didn’t have enough feedback to know if my sense of noticing whether my conversation partner wanted to drill or dance was tuned. Below are some of the things that I eventually picked up — while reading them, it’ll probably be most useful for you to think of the underlying generators of these heuristics, rather than the heuristics themselves.

For noticing that someone wants to dance:

• They ask you open-ended questions, one-after another, that don’t seem to be narrowing in on something.
• They respond to your questions by riffing & yapping, rather than scouting & identifying cruxes.
• It’s unclear to you what their goals in the conversation are, and they don’t seem concerned with getting “something” out of it.
• They’re generally alright with ambiguity. If you didn’t understand them perfectly, or they didn’t understand you, they seem generally okay with it.
• It seems like they’re having the conversation just to have the conversation.

For noticing that someone wants to drill:

• They ask you pointed questions, or start with open-ended questions about high-level stuff that quickly begin narrowing as they understand the right specific questions to ask.
• They try to identify cruxes (see Crux Sensitivity), and don’t much care which side “wins” (scout mindset).
• They make their goals in the conversation clear, and they seem intent on achieving those goals.
• They notice ambiguities in language, and generally try to make sure that their meaning gets across effectively.
• It seems like they’re having the conversation to uncover some truth about the world.

Still, it can sometimes be hard to tell. In those cases, I explicitly ask them whether they want to drill or dance, but without using those words. For example, if they just asked me a question, I might respond with: “Is there something specific you’re looking for, or do you want me to just riff on that?” Riff = dance; something specific = drill. (Often, after asking something like this, people will look relieved and say “oh, please just riff!!”)

Once you’ve done this a few times with a few people while looking at their facial expressions for feedback, you can build up an iteratively better model of when someone wants to drill or to dance.

I’ll note that if someone’s asking you to dance, you don’t have to dance with them — but you still shouldn’t slap away their hand away. Politely decline; you can exit the conversation gracefully without offending their offer.

Alternatively, you can accept their offer and go dancing! Since noticing this pattern and consciously thinking of it as dancing, I’ve enjoyed these sorts of conversations a lot more — and noticed my dance partners enjoying them more, too.