
Ask HN: Best tips for holding great conversations with liberal arts alumni? - Emore
I'm attending a university alumnus dinner, being the only CS-student there.
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Jun8
After my PhD in EE, when I started my graduate work in Linguistics I had quite
a shock to see how different they thought and argued (and then I took a course
in the philosophy of department, _that's_ a different story altogether).

My advice would be: Try to get the most out of meeting with them. It's easy to
look down on the "soft sciences", but you'll be surprised at the insights you
may learn. You should not use jargon, even if it sounds mundane to you, they
won't understand it and think you're doing it deliberately to look clever.

~~~
Emore
Thank you for the advice!

Also, I should mention that I am indeed fascinated by the multitude of topics
that other have studied, but that I don't know anything of. That's the
problem, I believe: I want to get past the mundane "So what is that?" sort of
questions.

~~~
atgm
Try to keep it going; all you can do is hold your half of the conversation. If
you don't know what something is, try to relate it to something you do know --
if the other person is holding up their end, they'll work with you and you'll
have a decent conversation.

Edit: It's really the same as holding a conversation with, say, someone who's
in a technical profession you don't know about, or a family member you haven't
met for a long time. We liberal arts majors aren't aliens!

~~~
Jun8
I disagree, not with liberals arts majors not being aliens part, but this
being the same as talking to someone from any technical profession you don't
know about. In my experience, the thinking process thought and praised in
liberals arts fields is in some respects quite different from that in any
technical field, as to sometimes be a real impediment in communication.

One example from a topic I worked on: author attribution using stylometry. To
a CS (or EE or whatever) the thought that you can take a corpus composed of
writings from various authors and train classifiers to differentiate the
unique styles of each would be mundane. To some English majors, such a strong
structuralist approach would border on sacrilegious (remember Prof. Keating's
reaction to such an approach to judge poetry in _Dead Port's Society_ ). Each
approach has something to be said for it but it has to be done delicately,
otherwise polite discussion becomes impossible.

------
eof
If/when you need to disagree/contradict them frame it in a way that is not
like you are the authority.

Generally, it's probably better (more polite) to say "I am pretty sure it's
actually..." or, "I always thought it was .." even when you know 100%.

Wikileaks is probably a good topic of conversation (politics and technology).

~~~
vizvizviz
This. Conversation is a give-and-take. Simply declaring that the other person
is wrong and that you are right makes people less open to continue talking to
you, as it makes you seem combative.

------
deafcheese
Just approach it like you would any other conversation. Ask questions about
their lives - everyone likes to talk about themselves. Make jokes. Try not to
be nervous. Be yourself. There is no need to act differently just because
you're talking to liberal arts alumni.

------
brudgers
Assume you are below average: <http://sivers.org/below-average>

