The Unbearable Hardness of Medium Talk
Finding a balance between the boring and the controversial
Medium talk is hard
My cousin recently got married. We live in different cities so I don’t know his friend group that well. This meant that in between photos, small talk, disappointing fish, more small talk, drinks, and cake, I had to engage in periods of medium-talk.
Medium-talk is the natural upgrade of small-talk1: Topics ranging somewhere between the vulnerable world hypothesis and the weather.
There is one problem: Medium-talk is hard.
Specifically, it is hard to avoid being boring while also avoiding controversy.
Medium talk is not hard because I’m this intense introvert. Admittedly, I do score the “I” in Myers-Briggs test. (For those groaning at Myers-Briggs due to a preference for real, certified, white-lab-coat-wearing science: I don’t score highly on the extroversion “Big Five” either2.)
The point being: crippling introversion isn't why medium-talk is hard.
I'm fairly sure it’s not because I’m autistic or anything either, contrary to the accusations of my ex-girlfriend’s mother. (Maybe I should’ve moved my priors on the validity of those accusations a little more than I did. In my defence, she [the mother] also avoids fluoride, vaccines, microwaves, and regularly tidying the house.)
The point being: Medium-talk is hard. Period.
Small talk isn’t hard (but is underrated)
It’s not that small talk is hard. I mean, I wouldn’t say I enjoy it. No one enjoys it. That’s what small talk is: Unenjoyable talk. But it’s not difficult talk. (Take that, ex-mother-in-law3.)
Due to its unpleasantness, small talk may even be underrated. There’s value in acknowledging to the stranger who's waiting for the lift with you about how god-awful the traffic is and how fine your weekend was. Important value, even. Societal value. Namely, it makes coordination easier.
To be fair, individual instances don't have societal value. The value comes from the aggregate fineness of all our weekends.
Successful small talk signals that there's no issue between you and your conversation partner. You may not be close, but you don't hate one another4.
The reason small talk works well as a signal is the same reason it’s insufferable: Small talk is safe. Everyone knows the classic areas to choose from: weather, food, travel, and entertainment5: Topics that are well-known, likely to elicit shared views, and avoid emotional reactions.
The rules of medium talk
Upgrading to medium talk is where things get difficult: The underlying signal slightly differs. Small talk signals you’re merely not an enemy. Medium talk signals you're a potential ally. It (attempts to) signal that you're interesting as well as safe.
Unfortunately, the weather only gets us so far: Some occasions require an upgrade. Small talk is for fleeting moments. Medium talk is for longer periods with familiar people who still lack closeness. Classic settings are work drinks, weddings, or anywhere that requires an icebreaker challenge.
Boring is ok for small talk. Desirable, even. Not so for medium-talk. More importantly, medium talk can’t be controversial. Hot takes can't be hot. And they certainly can’t be taboo.
Medium talk settings are not the time to discuss behavioral genetics or Aella’s polls. It’s not only self-censorship for high-decouplers: It goes both ways. Just think of the colleague who calls Chris Pratt evil at the team meeting. And gets impatient with others for not seeing how obvious this is. Chris Pratt. The Guardians of the Galaxy guy. Evil. At the morning stand-up.
Medium-talk can be nominally controversial. That’s actually a feature: Ideal medium-talk polarizes. The criterion we must follow is to avoid any consequential disagreement.
Hence we get the virality of the white and gold dress. Laurel and Yanny. Wet fish. The number of holes in a straw. And the cliches of pineappled pizza, sandwiched hotdogs, and correctly hung toilet paper.
Medium-talk can't be too intellectual either. Talking about the morally neutral discovery of the Higgs Boson is almost as unwise as traversing the culture wars.
This is partly because medium-talk should be well-known (nerdy science is niche). Partly because the second culture is not cool (nerdy science isn't sexy). And partly because we have norms against showing off (esoteric smart-person stuff is showing off - at least implicitly).
So we have a few rules we need to keep track of.
Medium talk should:
Allow the median person to form a quick opinion
Polarize
Avoid real controversy
Remain insightful
Avoid being overly intellectual or complicated
It’s a small goldilocks zone.
Yudkowsky's "no one actually likes dark chocolate" probably meets criteria. Shape rotation might even squeeze in. Delving too deeply into the weeds of the consequences of differences in shape rotation skills and how it’s related to IQ probably doesn’t.
What other topics are available?
During the Olympics I remind my chess-crazy manager at work that chess is not a sport6. And that there should only be one type of swimming stroke7.
The rest of the year I come up dry.
Being isolated
These conversation rules are a bulwark to forming real relationships with interesting people. A novel take that never offends is a tough needle to thread. We eschew topics that truly interest us to avoid being seen as weird, nerdy, evil, or, worst of all, pretentious. We waste time watching the latest bad Netflix show to join in the convo. We blindly search for interesting ideas that could potentially be broached with a new conversation partner due to a lack of common knowledge.
It’s frustrating.
The constraints of the Overton window are frustrating.
Everything being politicized is frustrating.
Caring about this so much is frustrating.
Why does it matter that we’re able to answer the work team’s one quick question in a non-trivial way? Why do we need these small status chips? By definition, these are people we can’t be ourselves with. Who cares if they find us interesting.
Choosing not to care doesn’t avoid loneliness. As the 18th century French writer Nicholas Chamfort misanthropically said: if we want to only discuss with people who aren’t conformist or boring we must be ready to live more or less on our own.
Schopenhauer echoes this sentiment when he says our one choice is between loneliness and vulgarity.
And Schopenhauer was rich! He needn’t worry about financial concerns for saying the wrong thing.
What about the rest of us?
Fortunately, the internet is a big place. We can find refuge in connecting with like-minded, intelligent, and curious people.
In the meantime, when confined to medium talk settings, maybe we need to compare pizza with and without pineapple again to ensure our view is up to date.
Some lay notions of small-talk might encompass what I’m calling medium-talk. I’m distinguishing between small talk in fleeting moments vs more prolonged conversation settings that remain constrained.
Did you know that Myers Briggs was just made up by some guy? Made up! The absolute nerve. Don’t worry. Social psychologists have since provided us with some measures with a catchy mnemonic description “OCEAN” that includes an introversion-extroversion scale that is factor-analysis-ratified so we don’t have to talk about the fake, made-up and totally-not-exactly-the-same Myers Briggs introversion-extroversion scale.
To be clear, I’m agree with Cowen’s claim that autistic thinking is simply different rather than worse.
Closeness is in fact signalled by not engaging in small talk.
In fact, one of the reasons we engage in these activities in the first place is to gain ammo for small talk. Something to think about next time you find yourself nodding in agreement about Stranger Things or how Paris sure is oh so lovely.
My argument is that physicality must be part of how one achieves success. A surrogate could play chess following my instructions and it would still be me playing. I couldn’t claim the same for basketball or tennis. (E-sports gets a little more complicated. It squeezes in under my definition, although I’d claim it’s a sport that’s not very sporty.)
Imagine having 100m races for running backwards and skipping.