Talking with people

Time to time, I talk with people. It is different than talk to people; I talk with people when I am interested in.

But what looks interesting may be not and I thought about how to recognize uninteresting people. For that purpose, I imagined five categories.

Reactors

Reactors react on keywords and phrases. The polite ones let you finish the sentence. Usually, they are uninteresting. They should be ignored.

Believers

Believers understand the concept of predicates – that there are sentences for which it actually make sense to ask if the sentence is true or not.

But believers lack the understanding of the concept of credibility. They get information from the source and the source is whoever tells them or wherever they read it. Moreover, the information sure is valid, because they heard or saw it – did not they?

Sometimes, it is fun to make the believers contradict themselves, but that may be unethical and they may not understand it anyway. They are uninteresting, but they could be asked to explore the credibility due to the contradictions. Otherwise, they should be ignored.

Thinkers

Thinkers are believers that are smart enough to build theories on top of the information they got. They are the most dangerous ones, because they also, as believers, lack the understanding of the concept of credibility – imagine someone browsing the Internet who is building the own’s opinions using the Reactor’s mindset and the intellect of a PhD.

I think that it is crucial to make thinkers contradict their own findings, not themselves. They will get it and it will make them think about that for a while. However, a single contradiction changes nothing. They are used to contradictions – remember the Orwell’s 1984?

Moreover, there is a risk that they will build another (conspiration) theory on top of the contradiction. Another risk is that their intellect is greater than mine; I am still not completely sure how to approach them.

Reporters

Reporters get information from multiple credible sources and validate them. They know how to decide on the source’s credibility.

They try to put information in context, but their context is usually the present. They sure are interesting and they should be listened to.

Historians

Historians are very interesting. The most interesting, I tend to say. They build contexts.

In my opinion, they do not care much about information. They dig in multiple sources of multiple times and various credibitily to just observe. Contexts, sources, credibility, and information are high-quality byproducts.