What are good conversations?

We live in democracies, they work when we have good conversations. I don't think it's controversial to say that we are not having good conversations about many important topics.

This is a function of many things, and I think mediums are an overlooked contributor (more on that at a later date).

In a desire to experience better conversations and understanding, I have started an experiment with "Conversation Upgrades". The plan is to revisit existing conversations and explore how they could be upgraded so that we get more from them, and collectively understand our world better. And how WikiSim.org can support us with this. To do that, I want to briefly explore what makes a good conversation.

The ancients already did this

Yep, the Socratic method and writings like Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations (fallacies in dialogue) and Rhetoric (logos, ethos, pathos and misuse of persuasion), Plato et al.'s critique of sophistry, highlight the conflict between emotional disturbance and rational discourse. Today, our democracy faces challenges and opportunities unheard of by the ancients: filter bubbles, attention-strip-mining "economy", astroturfing, paywalls, rage-bait, link-rot, etc. and a global near instant communication network, participatory democracy, wikis, local-to-planetary scale data, computing, simulations etc.

First though let's focus on one-to-one conversations...

What is a good conversation?

While defining things by their negation might work, i.e. define a good conversation by the absence of things that would make it a bad conversation, I think in this case it's easier to define a good conversation as the attributes that it and its participants should possess:

• truthful - they're not trying to deceive anyone
• humanising - communicating in a way to help another person remain or regain an emotionally regulated balanced conscious mind.
• curious - a quality with many gifts such as encouraging exploring misunderstandings and confusion, and which also means the participant will be more open to adopting new thoughts and changing their previous perspectives.
• rational - but note this must include the rationality of accommodating irrational behaviours both in the subjects being discussed and oneself, otherwise attempting to be rational by pretending irrationality does not exist is the very act of irrationality (looking at you economic rational agents). Rationality, when applied, should ultimately lead to statements which are:
  • true - individuals make statements about the reality they experience that are true. However as we're wrong more often individually than collectively then hopefully the group can work through individual confusions, and communication misunderstanding to reach a better shared understanding of reality.
  • representative - for example if you've turned on the oven in a cold house (as I am currently), it would not be representative to point to the oven and say "the house is hot", when the house temperature is mostly "it's freezing in here!"
• relevant - sticking to the topic at hand.
• precise - defining all the concepts and terms used, and preferably at the beginnin rather than the end/never.
• referenced - providing pointers towards the specific material that part of the conversation is drawn from and relying on. And preferably using sub-citations.

Next in series → "Conversation upgrades".