Personal essays
The physics of chatting with someone
The browser
There’s a scene in my new book where the detective decides that his sidekick needs to organize his work with a physical planner. Much of this book takes place in a department store and so it should be easy to find one.
The pair are loosely based on Poirot and Hastings. In mine, in a nod to Jonny Ive, the detective is Chamfered Edges and the sidekick is Captain Swiftly.
I know it’s silly. But it makes me smile and the book is really a technical book on dataflow in SwiftUI and serves as a counterpoint and metaphor to the lessons being taught.
Anyway, they’re in a department store. In my mind the story takes place in Paris though I never say so. I used to visit this time of year for the dot Swift conference. This department store is like a scaled down version of the Galeries Lafayette.
I couldn’t, for the life of me, think of the name of the department in the store where you’d find the planner. But I’d heard about perplexity.ai at last week’s meeting of NSDrinking and so I thought I’d check it out.
At the prompt I typed, “What section of a department store are planners kept in?”
After a long delay, I saw the response that began, “Planners are typically kept in the retail store’s back-of-the-house area, which is not accessible to customers. Store planning involves determining the ideal store size, layout, fixture placement,…”
Clearly they were talking about a different sort of planner and it was a little disturbing that they were kept somewhere.
At the end of the lengthy answer I was prompted to ask a follow-up.
I wrote, “I mean calendars.”
This time the answer began, “Calendars are typically found in the stationery or office supplies section of a department store.”
Real life
Forget that the initial answer was wrong and the machine misunderstood what I was asking - people do that too - the physics of the interaction felt wrong to me.
By now I probably have as many conversations over text as I do speaking. With some exceptions, most exchanges, whether typed or spoken, are short phrases or sentences with a fairly quick response or follow-up.
So the exchange with the machine, in real life might have been…
“What section of a department store are planners kept in?”
“Oh, they’re kept in the back.”
“Back?”
“Yeah, store planners work on…”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear. I mean planners like calendars with extra pages for to do lists.”
“Oh, the stationery section. Third floor near the escalator.”
There’s a back and forth. By physics I mean for action (thing spoken) there’s an equal and opposite reaction (response by the other person).
Back and forth.
There’s interrupting.
Suppose I was going to ask, “what section are planners kept in? You know the calendar things?” But I was interrupted before I got to the clarifying question.
That’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to conversation. We can’t know both what we’re talking about and where the conversation is heading at the same time.
At the moment I was interrupted, an answer was provided based on what had been said and the listener’s idea of where we were going.
Momentum
I got to thinking about the physics of conversation last week when talking to a friend.
He made a comment and I thought he was referring to a conversation we had had a year before.
I said something back because I didn’t think we had finished that discussion and he said he didn’t want to revisit the conversation.
I said ok, made a further comment about it, and then stopped.
Why the further comment? It certainly made things worse. I’ve told people, “I don’t want to talk about that right now” and been annoyed when they continued.
The answer is physics. It’s conversational momentum.
It’s that moment when the waitress says, “enjoy your meal” and you can’t stop from saying, “you too.”
Some people can stop quickly and some are like a train where it takes a mile to come to a complete stop.
Sometimes it’s not the person it’s the topic like the difference between coming to a stop on concrete or loose gravel.
The trick is to not speak while you’re coming to a halt.
It’s one of my favorite Ron White quotes, “I had the right to remain silent. I just didn’t have the ability.”
You have to not speak in such a way that the other person doesn’t think you’re sulking or angry. You’re just staying in your silence until the thoughts in your head have come to a complete halt.
Heisenberg, Newton’s third, and momentum.
And later when you go to unpack the conversation, you need to be aware that items may have shifted during the flight of time in between.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 202. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe