The Most Human Human (25 page)

Better might be throwing your interlocutor a loaded question, like the famous “Do you still beat your wife?” A question like this, asked, say, of a nonviolent unmarried heterosexual woman, is off at so many levels that it’s basically unanswerable, requiring a huge backpedal and clarification of presumptions. Some languages actually have a term for answering questions like this, with the most iconic being the Japanese word
mu
that appears in certain Zen parables. “Does a dog have Buddha-nature, or does it not?” asks a student, and the master replies, “Mu”—meaning something like “All answers to this question are false.” Or: “Your question is, itself, false.” You can think of
mu
as a kind of “meta-no,” an “unasking” of the question, or even as a kind of
“runtime exception.”
¹
Lacking such a one-syllable recourse, though, a respondent is in the tight spot of needing to completely unpack and dismantle the question, rather than “responding” or “answering” as such. This is enough to fluster most humans, and flummox many,
²
and it’s a good bet that a machine parser wouldn’t have nearly the savvy to react appropriately.

In looking at the way chess programs work, we discussed the “minimax” and “maximin” algorithm, two terms that we treated as synonymous. In “zero-sum” games, like chess, for one player to win necessitates that the other must tose—no “win-win” outcomes are possible—and so minimizing your opponent’s outcome and maximizing your own constitute, mathematically anyway, the same strategy. (In the history of chess world champions, “prophylactic” players like Tigran Petrosian and Anatoly Karpov, playing for safety and to minimize their opponents’ chances, stand alongside wild attackers like Mikhail Tal and Garry Kasparov, playing for chaos and to maximize their own chances.)

Here’s one critical difference, perhaps the single biggest difference, philosophically, between conversation and chess. Asked by
Time
whether he sees chess “as a game of combat or a game of art,” Magnus Carlsen, the current world number one, replies, “Combat. I am trying to beat the guy sitting across from me and trying to choose
the moves that are most unpleasant for him and his style. Of course some really beautiful games feel like they are art, but that’s not my goal.” Meaning, if there are collaborative elements, they are accidental by-products of the clash.

Capitalism presents an interesting gray space, where societal prosperity is more than the occasional by-product of fierce competition: it’s the
point
of all that competition, from the society’s point of view. Yet this non-zero-sum societal benefit is not something that any of the companies involved are
themselves
necessarily interested in, and it is not something that is, per se, guaranteed. (Ironically, we have antitrust laws that exist partially to
limit
the amount of collaboration between companies, as working
together
sometimes comes—e.g., price-fixing—at the consumer’s detriment.) Whether you consider business zero-sum or non-zero-sum depends heavily on the context, and on your disposition.

But conversation, in the Turing test’s sense of a “display of humanity,” seems clearly and unambiguously non-zero-sum. Wit and repartee, for example, are chess’s opposite: art that occasionally produces moments of what looks like sparring.

Seduction, interview, negotiation: you can read any number of books that portray these interactions in an adversarial light. E.g., interviewer Lawrence Grobel: “My job was to nail my opponent.” In some cases—criminal trial being a good example—the adversarial mode may be unavoidable. But on the whole I think it’s a mistake to consider conversations as zero-sum situations. Conversation at its best is less like minimax or maximin and more like “maximax.” You put each other in a position to say great things. You play for the rally, not the score. You take pleasure in the alley-oop, the assist.

Of course the way the game is played depends in part on the way the game is scored: for instance, sports that celebrate, and tabulate, assists (ice hockey, for example, which gives credit to the last
two
players to touch the puck before the scorer) always seem to me to have more cohesion and team spirit among their players.

It breaks my heart, then, that so many of the communication “games” available to middle and high schoolers—namely, debate—feature conversation in its
adversarial
, zero-sum mode, where to weaken someone else’s argument is as good as to strengthen your own. Additionally, the metaphors we use to describe dialectics, debate, and disagreement in our culture are almost exclusively
military: defending
a statement,
attacking
a position,
falling back
to a weaker version of a thesis,
countering
one accusation with another. But conversation is just as frequently a collaboration, an improvisation, a tangoing toward truth—not so much
duel
as
duet
. It’d be worth thinking about how to offer opportunities for our children to learn this, by reconsidering both our figurative speech and the extracurricular activities available to them.

Our legal system is adversarial, founded, like capitalism, on the idea that a bunch of people trying to tear each other apart, plus certain laws and procedures preventing things from getting too out of hand, will yield, in one, justice, and in the other, prosperity, for all. Sometimes this does happen; other times, it doesn’t. At any rate, it’s a terrible metaphor for the rest of life: I suppose we need Lincoln-Douglas debates and parliamentary debates and things like that in our high schools to train the lawyers of tomorrow, but how will we train the spouses and committee members and colleagues and teammates of tomorrow? We get to see how well presidential candidates can hack down, rebut, and debunk their rivals: How will we get to see how well they argue
constructively
, how they barter, coax, mollify, appease—which is what they will
actually
spend their term in office doing?

I propose the following: the Anti-Lincoln-Douglas, Anti-parliamentary debate. Two sides are given a set of distinct and not obviously compatible objectives: one team, for instance, might be striving to maximize individual liberty, and the other might be striving to maximize individual safety. They are then asked to collaborate,
within strict time limits, on a piece of legislation: say, a five-point gun-control bill. After the exact language of the bill is drafted, each team will independently argue to a judging panel why the legislation supports their side’s goal (liberty on the one, safety on the other), and the judges will award a score based on how convincingly they make that case.

The tournament judges then give both sides the
same
score, which would be the
sum
of those two scores.

It’s that simple. You pair up with each team in the tournament, round-robin-style, and the team with the most points at the end wins. No individual
match
has a victor, yet the tournament as a
whole
does, and they became so by working
with
each team they were paired with. The point structure encourages both groups to find mutually agreeable language for the bill—or else they will have nothing to present the judges at all—and, even beyond that, to help each other “sell” the bill to their respective constituencies.

Imagine the national Lincoln-Douglas champion and the national Anti-Lincoln-Douglas champion: Which one would you rather attend a diplomatic summit? Which one would you rather be married to?

Put practically and more generally, a collaborative, “maximax” style of conversation means that you speak with a mindfulness toward what the other person might be able to say next. As far as answers to “How are you?” go, “Good” is probably down there with the worst. “Good, you?” or “Good, what’s up?” don’t give much of an answer, but transfer the momentum back to the asker without much friction. “Ugh …”
and to a lesser extent “Amazing!” invite inquiry, and this effect is increased by alluding, however vaguely, to recent events: “Yesterday sucked; today was awesome” or “Not so good
today
 …” or “Better!” or even the subtle “Good, actually,” whose “actually” hints at some reason to expect otherwise. It’s terse, but intriguing enough to work.

Think of these elements, these invitations to reply or inquiry or anecdote, topic switch, exposition, you name it, as akin to an indoor rock-climbing gym’s “holds”—those bright jewel-tone rubber blobs that speckle the fake rock walls. Each is both an aid to the climber and an invitation onto a certain path or route along the ascent.

This notion of holds explains and synthesizes all sorts of advice about conversation. For instance, business networking experts and dating/seduction gurus alike recommend wearing one at least slightly unusual item of clothing or accessory. In
How to Talk to Anyone
, Leil Lowndes calls these items “Whatzits,” and in
The Game
, Mystery and Neil Strauss dub the practice “peacocking.” The principle’s the same: you give other people an easy first hold—a simple and obvious way to initiate a conversation with you, if they want. The other day I ran into a friend of a friend at an art gallery opening, and wanted to strike up a conversation but wasn’t sure how. All of a sudden I noticed he was wearing a vest—a rarity—and so my first remark became obvious—“Hey, nice vest!”—and once the conversation was in motion, it was easy to keep it going from there. It’s interesting to consider: dressing generically might actually be a kind of
defense
, presenting a rock face with no holds, making yourself harder to chat up. All clothing can be armor.

The Mystery/Strauss camp find themselves
opposed
to the conventional wisdom of folks like Lowndes, Larry King, and Dale Carnegie in one particular, however: they don’t advise the asking of questions. Instead of asking whether someone has any siblings, they counsel us to say, “You seem like an only child to me.” There are a couple reasons for this approach: some bogus, some legitimate.

The bogus reason is that it comes off as less interested in the person than asking them directly. The Mystery/Strauss camp are obsessed
with
status
in conversation—which is a game that Larry King, for example, or Charlie Rose doesn’t have to play: the interviewer’s
job
is to be interested in the other person. Cool people, Mystery and Strauss seem to be saying, are more interested in holding forth than in learning about other people. To be fair, let’s consider the context: these guys are talking about picking up supermodels and celebrities in L.A.—so maybe games of status matter more in those circles. (I’ve heard, for instance, that one of the
best
openers for normal folks is in fact just about the worst and most insulting thing you can say to a Hollywood actor: “So, what have you been up to lately?”) As for me, I celebrate the sexiness of enthusiasm. And I submit that the
truly
cool people don’t
care
that they seem interested.
³
The only thing sexier than curiosity is confidence, and the person with both will simply ask away.

Besides, the kind of guardedness that comes from developing an entire “method” to the way you talk to people suggests a kind of minimax approach to wooing—by avoiding umpteen pitfalls, you can indeed minimize rejections, but that’s playing not to lose, to maximize the
minimum
outcome.
⁴
Whereas authenticity and genuineness, which maximize the
maximum
outcome, succeed perhaps less often but more spectacularly.

A legitimate reason to prefer, if you do, statements to questions is that the statement (e.g., “You seem like an only child”) simultaneously asks the question and hazards a guess. The guess is intriguing—we
love
to know what other people think of us, let’s be honest—and so now we have at least two distinct holds as far as our reply: to answer the question and to investigate the reason for the guess.

The disadvantage to questions is that you leave too few holds for
the person to learn about
you
—but statements don’t really go too far in this direction either. A tiny anecdote that springs a question works, I think, best. The other person can either ask
you
about your anecdote or answer the question. Whatever they want.

Another manifestation of the climbing hold is the hyperlink. The reason people can lose themselves in Wikipedia for hours is the same reason they can lose themselves in conversation for hours: one segue leads to the next and the next. I sometimes get a kind of manic, overwhelmed sensation from conversation when there seem to be almost
too
many threads leading out of the page.
⁵
These are the “Aah, where do I even begin!” moments. It’s not necessarily a pleasant feeling, but it’s much more pleasant than the opposite, the cul-de-sac, sink vertex, sheer cliff, the “Now what?,” the “So …”

This feeling is frustrating, stultifying, stymieing, but also kind of
eerie
—eerie in the way that a choose-your-own-adventure page with no choices at the bottom is eerie. You get to the end of the paragraph: What the hell? What next?

I went on a date in college with the assistant stage manager of a play I was sound designing—we’d hit it off talking about Schopenhauer, I think it was, one day after rehearsal. So when I met her at her building on a Sunday afternoon and we walked over to catch the matinee of the other play running that weekend on campus, I started from the two holds I had: “So, what kinds of stuff do you like to do when you’re not, you know, running light boards or thinking about German philosophers?” Inexplicably, she testily reproached me: “I don’t
know
!” And I waited for the rest of her answer—because people often do that, say “I don’t
know
 …” and then say something—but that was it, that was the whole answer.