Conversations As Towers In The Sky

Here's a way I think about conversations sometimes.

Imagine you and a friend are building towers into the sky. Each block is a comment or insight that you add to the conversation.

At its best, conversation lets you collectively get to go up to places you would never have reached otherwise – the other person adds a block that you wouldn't have found, which gets you to a position to discover a block that they wouldn't have found, and so on into towering heights that neither of you could have dreamed of.

There’s a few different ways that someone can be a great conversationalist:

• they can have complimentary knowledge or insights to yours, uncovering blocks you wouldn't have found,
• they can be super generative or resourceful, trying new directions that you wouldn't have thought of,
• they can have whole structures of blocks already, either in the area you're exploring or a relevant nearby area – sometimes they might be able to "reach down" from a higher spot and lay out bricks for you to join them higher up the tower

You see, conversations aren't just one tower upward into the sky – we're all clambering over these massive structures of thoughts/comments/ideas/possibilities that we've picked up through our previous thought/reading/conversations with others, and often a new conversation intersects with parts of those previous structures, and you can use those as stepping stones as you get to somewhere new.

The problem with this model is.... you're not really climbing together. (Although in the best cases it feels like it). You’re just describing blocks to each other, and scrambling up your own blocks on other sides of the impenetrable wall between human minds, with your ghostly image of where you think the other person might be to accompany you.

We're each alone with our own beetles in our own boxes; the tragedy of conversational intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul. We're describing our blocks to each other, and hearing other people describe blocks we might clamber onto, and desperately hoping that the other person is truly seeing (and climbing) the same blocks we are.

This has a few consequences.

There's a kind of meta-conversational shared context that is incredibly helpful for having good conversations. I'm honestly not sure what it consists in: is it more about having a lot of shared "basic" blocks already, so you can quickly get to high and interesting places and continue on from there? (You could imagine this as a shared cannon that everyone can safely reference, or a shared background that gives everyone the same basic concepts to work with).

Or is it about a shared language for describing new blocks? It feels like some people are able to more-easily describe new blocks to me in a way that I can then climb up to.

Or maybe it's about error-correction and disambiguating shared state. At the end of the day, there's no way to know if you're standing on the same block of not, so it's incredibly helpful if you either 1) freakishly and wordlessly understand each other as you make great leaps up the tower, or 2) be good at clarifying which blocks you're currently standing on. Otherwise you can be arguing about which blocks you should jump to or even which blocks exist, and it's actually because you were standing in different places without even realizing.