Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Small Talk is Good, Actually, published by Gordon Seidoh Worley on February 4, 2023 on LessWrong.

You all liked the last two, so I'm going to keep it going so long as I have ideas and time. This is another casual post in the spirit of what I wish someone had told me when I was younger.

Some people really hate small talk. I never really did. Mostly small talk just confused me or I barely registered the difference between small talk and big talk. So I never really cared about it one way or another.

Then I moved to the Bay Area and lived with a bunch of rationalists and found out some people really hate small talk.

I remember one time carpooling to a party. The party was in Palo Alto and we were driving down from Berkeley. As we started to cross the Dumbarton bridge we got on the topic salt flats. After a couple minutes one of my fellow passengers cried out:

enough of this small talk! i could have this conversation with anyone! we're all thoughtful, interesting people! surely we can talk about something more interesting!

And then sat in silence for a couple minutes trying to come up with a good enough topic of conversation.

The standard arguments against small talk go like this:

Small talk is too shallow. Only deeper conversations are worth having.

Small talk is boring. It doesn't convey new information.

Small talk is fake and full of bullshitting and hyperbole as people try to make themselves look good.

Small talk asks people to casually share too much about their personal lives.

Small talk demands people be constantly ready to say mildly interesting things.

People value different things, and I'm sure some people legit don't value small talk and there's no convincing them. But our values are also informed by our skills. Sometimes what we think is a deeply held value is actually just a defense mechanism because we aren't good at a skill. So in this case, opposing small talk is sometimes the result of:

being introverted and overloaded and not wanting to talk at all,

being socially nervous or shy,

having had bad experiences making small talk as a kid and getting excluded from groups because of it,

having said something embarrassing or awkward or rude during small talk and fearing making the same mistake again,

and so on.

There's plenty of reason to find small talk hard. That's different from claiming it to be bad except in the narrower sense of being a bad experience for you. But that's rarely how "small talk is bad" is proclaimed. Usually it's someone who wants to get out of small talk and then makes a bigger claim that small talk is a bad norm.

But there's actually lots of reason to think that small talk is good. Lots of people engage in small talk, and they do it for good reason.

The main purpose of small talk is building social bonds. It's the verbal equivalent of primates grooming each other. We can use those increased bonds for various purposes. Sometimes that's getting to know more about someone so you can ask them more interesting questions. Sometimes it's building a network of friends you can call on for things. And sometimes it's setting up the trust needed to engage in deeper conversations.

Small talk is often a necessary prelude to deeper conversation. Most people can't engage in deep conversations without first establishing a level of trust with the people they're talking with. They don't feel comfortable sharing until they know how others will react.

So even if you don't like small talk, it's good to get good at small talk because many people like small talk and even need it to have the bigger conversations you may want to have. You might try to avoid people who like small talk, but that only kind of works. Eventually you need to interact with the wider majority of society that wants to engage in small talk, so learning how to talk small is a useful life ski...