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1. Is passively listening to someone ramble the best way to understand their thoughts?
Almost certainly not. I think Bob said it well:
I think we just agree to sit down, relax, have a couple of beers, and chat. There ought to be some interactivity and dialogue about it. Rambling can easily become babbling and leave too much to a Rorschachian interpretation. And we need a mute button, just in case.
I can’t think of a case where passive listening is better than active listening when you are trying to understand someone’s POV. Understanding someone’s thoughts, which is at best asymptotically approachable – even for our own thoughts – requires testing your interpretations by, for example, asking for clarification, or summarizing or re-stating what they said and seeing how they respond.
You might be wondering, if Justin believes that, then what’s with this theory about rambling being the best way to get “inside someone’s mind”? Actually if you go back and read the post you’ll notice that I deliberately omitted the word “understand” and any synonyms thereof. Originally, I actually began with the question “if you were trying to understand someone’s thoughts...” but then as I wrote about my rambling theory I realized it wasn’t right, and so I pulled the trick move of re-wording the question to “if you were trying to gain access to someone’s thoughts...”
The best way to understand someone’s thoughts, that I know, is active listening in a relaxed setting, like Bob said. But if you just want to get their thoughts raw, listening to them ramble is the best approach I know.
There is a quote from my masculine booklet that says something to the effect of “thought is deeper than all speech, and feeling is deeper than all thought.” I interpret that to mean that speech is at best a decent approximation of thought, and thought is at best a decent approximation of feeling. So listening to someone ramble is certainly an imperfect way to get at someone’s thoughts (and especially feelings), but until we invent a machine that accurately reads and interprets neurons, then I think it might be our best option.
As a small aside, I think speech rambling beats written rambling (i.e. free-writing) simply because nearly everyone speaks faster than they write, so writing allows relatively more time to do the mental changes of direction internally, where we can’t observe them. So probably the best way to get at someone’s thoughts is to tell them to speak FAST.
2. Is listening to someone ramble interesting? Or is it insightful?
To the first part, the only answer that can fairly be given is “to each his own,” or some variation thereof. Xan did a really cool thing and sent me a couple of audio recordings of him rambling, one in direct response to the post. Did I find them interesting? Yes, definitely. In one of the recordings, Xan suggested that the reason we might find rambling interesting is simply because it’s novel—it’s something we rarely have access to. Like Harriet said, we don’t even get to see first drafts, so seeing the raw thoughts that led to the first drafts is even rarer. For me, hearing Xan’s recordings was interesting if only because I had never heard his voice before. But I suspect that even if I was familiar with the way Xan speaks it still would have been interesting, just to hear kind of the “structure” of his “thoughts” (or more accurately, speech), and the things he found salient, and his transitions between them.
Xan, though, happens to be a supremely interesting fellow, and a total smarty pants. He was included in my list of people I would pay to hear ramble. On the other hand, I tried my own little experiment and rambled to my webcam, and I found it terrifically boring. I would hate for anyone to have to listen to it. I’ll admit that talking through some ideas led me to some places I didn’t anticipate, but it was mostly blather about “hmm, what should I talk about next” or repeating the same point in a different and equally as bad way—things writing solves. My point is, as Bob said, we need a mute button for certain kinds of people.
Xan also made a good point that rambling should not be considered a substitute to polished, edited communication (e.g., writing), but that it could be a good complement to it. Maybe it would be interesting if writers included with their writings videos of them talking through their ideas for the first time, before they had written anything. That could potentially add a lot of insight into understanding the raw thought process that ultimately led to their polished conclusions.
3. Is there anything to this idea of assembling a video collection of interesting people rambling?
At the end of the last post I said that I wished there were some TED-like site that collected videos (or audio recordings) of interesting people rambling at length. Randy agreed that it would be interesting, but suggested it might be hard to do because, after all, people want to present their best selves. True rambling would be too uncomfortable for most people, especially people in the public eye who worry a lot about their reputation (with a couple of exceptions like Sarah Silverman, who seems willing to say whatever comes to her mind).
I have no doubt he’s right that it would be uncomfortable for people, but I don’t think that would prevent a lot of people from doing it. Celebrities are artists who are pros at working through, rather than fighting, discomfort. You don’t get a celebrity to do something by saying “this will be really comfortable” ; rather, you get a celebrity to do something by saying “a lot of people will watch this.”
So, would a lot of people watch this? It’s hard to say. I think for certain, more enigmatic figures like Steve Jobs, people would eat up a video of him rambling. But it’s hard to know what kind of market there would be for more ordinary, but still interesting, ramblers.
I think the important thing would be the rules. The No Storytelling rule is important, but I don’t think it’s enough. I think there would also need to be rules about how long they can stay on the same topic, and maybe there needs to be a rule that they have to drink a couple of beers before commencing rambleage—something to drop their guard a bit.
