A dozen problems all around

A dozen problems all around

• Sriraj Chandra

The day you start your undergraduate life is extremely eventful. Of course, college life begins, but the number of different people that you meet and interact with just goes off the charts. This is a unique feature of the institute. It is hard to find like-minded people, but that makes you appreciate the fact that similarities go deeper than maybe having the same cultural roots or upbringing. The more you talk to different people, the more you understand that every person here has a unique trait. As a math guy myself, this fascinates me quite a bit. Although human nature is extremely unpredictable, every collection of individuals tends to have a well-defined structure to it. However, classification of such structures cannot be absolute, for relativity hinders such possibilities here as well. How does one classify people using principles? The fact is that we do so all the time, without realizing it. For example, the way we greet people can be modelled as a function! There are people we never greet at all, and there are people whom we hail the most courteously. We do this without the need to think twice, and certainly do not need to think of this behaviour as a function (greeting) acting on an input (person). The information in such responses, if gathered accurately, can reveal a lot about a person!

Looks like we’re diverting from the premise of the first paragraph. We are indeed, but we will return pretty soon. For people who have read “A Study in Scarlet”, or any Sherlock Holmes novel for that matter (or who have seen the BBC TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch), such analysis would seem pretty commonplace. The first introduction to the world’s most popular character’s exalted profession is an excerpt of a similar kind, though an outrageous one at that. Maybe this makes you feel exactly what Watson felt in that moment, but to a much lesser degree. “What is this guy trying to imply?!”

If this was getting too predictable, let us bring up another author - William Sydney Porter, eminently known as O. Henry. Unpredictability reigns supreme in his stories! One can never seem to predict the twist at the end of his tales, although everybody knows that it is just around the corner. Thus, everything does not fit into the same concept. There exist conversations where one can be misled if following Holmesian analysis, but these generally need to be crafted.

Any average conversation fits quite nicely into the scheme of analysis. A useful skill in such analysis is to simulate conversations, given your knowledge of the person you’re conversing with, and to analyze any differences/deviations whatsoever. This not only enhances your knowledge of the person but also allows you to easily converse with people on a day-to-day basis. Seems too hard/boring? Try it out for yourself. It should not be too hard. You do this all the time subconsciously.

By this point, it must have become clear that the focus of this article or whatever this is, is a conversation. We do not think much of casual conversations, but these provide a foolproof way to probe into the characteristics of a person. But why should one care for said characterization? How does it help with anything?

To be fair, most conversations we have in a day are only of momentary significance and just serve as fillers during common recreations. Once you are able to characterize people using their conversational parameters, you basically have full control of the conversation. You can have a heart-to-heart conversation if you want, and you can also shut them up. (in a polite way, of course. That is the whole point of this.) This can be used in other ways as well. For example, if a person is distressed about something, a correct conversational approach might help them open up as opposed to a wrong one. But isn’t this just equivalent to knowing a person deeply? What does this have to do with conversations? Well, this gives a concrete and sufficient meaning to “knowing a person deeply”. Conversations can thus serve as information packets about people, even without analysis of body language or anything else. So, we have finally established a rather simple point with quite a lot of trouble, but this has allowed us to discuss the various aspects of a normal conversation that can be useful in Holmesian analysis. We now come back to our initial premise.

When you meet and talk to different people, you tend to subconsciously gather data about them, even if you do not care about them at all. The other part of this analysis is to classify people by their conversational parameters. Some people can be pretty easily and consistently classified due to the fact that they are outright boring, or pretty single-minded, in other words. They talk to almost all people in a similar conversational style, and thus can be thought of as single-levelled.

Then there are people who converse distinctly in groups as compared to in solitude. Their conversational style varies depending on their level of comfort with the person they are speaking to. Still, their conversational parameters stay constant for quite a range of conditions.

Then there are people like me, who like to make up conversations as they go along without any restrictions whatsoever. Most, if not all, people can be clas- sified into these three categories. But this is not yet the interesting part. The correlations between conversational parameters tend to be directly proportional to the correlations between the persons in most cases! By correlations between the persons, multiple things are being referenced, from their cultural intersectionality to their day-to-day correlation in activities. So, inferences regarding individual correlations can be made quite easily using correlations in conversational parameters. This helps quite a lot when you already have a characterised person with respect to whom you can characterise other people. The most natural example of this is you yourself. We act as self-references in conversations when we subconsciously diagnose people. For example, this whole thing is written in the form of a conversation where I imagine you, the audience, asking the questions, as I answer them. Thus, it happens in the form of a supposed mock conversation.

Conversations are inherently easy to build, as compared to stories or poems.

It feels easier to talk to a person than to tell him/her a story or poem. At IISc, most conversations tend to be academic, which are almost devoid of any characteristic conversational parameter. So, modelling of conversational parameters tends to be extensively done only for close friends. However, as we have discussed before, by transitivity, the model can be extended to quite a number of people.

However, such an analysis, though quite good at predictions, is not assured to exist. As we have discussed earlier, unpredictability of conversations is always a problem.

What is the point of all this, finally?

Just fun, I guess. That and the fact that you get to emulate Sherlock Holmes (or your favourite detective). Life tends to get mundane sometimes, amidst quizzes and assignments, reports and exams. Especially if one leads an effectively solitary life, this can give you respite from boredom. Just make up conversations, and see if you can infer something significant from the most subtle of comments. One might also find conversations with oneself, not DID or some Banner-Hulk syndrome. instructive in such cases. In following this, one also tends to infer a lot about people from very limited information. If you do follow this rigorously, you can sometimes even realistically intrude on a person’s train of thought. I do not need to tell you that it would be extremely cool to do so (a classic Sherlock Holmes thing). You can also have “conversations” with people without needing to talk to them, just based on their conversational parameters, i.e. conversation simulation. Do I sound like a lunatic? I guess so. An extended period of solitude makes you think about these things in a more important light. They actually make more sense than most casual conversations. The best thing about this is that this mechanism is automated in us to the point that we do not even realize it sometimes. Well, have fun using this method. However, please use it consciously. Finally, have “real” conversations with people. Nothing beats the fun in those. I hope this was one such conversation.

Adieu….