For all my adoration of Rorty, and how the philosophy of science took a “practice turn”, I completely suck at conversation. So much for thinking about the human element.
Part of it is probably a base intelligence. Sometimes in the conversation, I simply cannot keep up, and sometimes I cannot express myself fully. Given the nature of my job and the jobs I aspire to get to, this will happen.
I honestly feel like I’m getting better at the raw social aspect. I’m not annoyed to ask people (not just friends - complete strangers, interviewers, etc.) to repeat what they said, often because I have an ill-formed qualm, and a decent amount of time, I’m able to articulate said qualm and we’re able to arrive at a conclusion. It’s not completely second nature, but I’m surprised at how developed that skill is.
Granted, sometimes it isn’t a social aspect - if you’re unable to come up with interesting thoughts, well, too bad, you can’t turn shit to gold. That happens to me often as well - and in certain situations, you aren’t allowed to just disengage and ruminate.
But I don’t think it’s so binary. I think for me, the issue is that I don’t have much experience trying to understand someone else live, in conversation, funnily enough. A lot of the time:
- we exchange pointers, to then look up offline
- we brush by it
- we just understand it
It’s funny because I criticize things such as Solomonoff induction for allowing arbitrarily expressive models, yet when I’m a lone duck and forced to confront the beast, I have no real protocol. My mind goes blank. I don’t try and sit back and have any kind of protocol for mapping out the space.
And it’s not like I need this one good rule for doing anything. It’s just that I get stuck a bit, far too often.
When alone, I have remedies. One is private writing. Rumination counts too, I guess (but not really).
I don’t know. Thinking is hard, I suppose.