> It sounds like a contradiction that someone could learn something new by answering a question. Isn’t that just spitting out something they already know?

A while back I started participating actively on Reddit's r/explainlikeimfive, and this has been my experience — explaining things I (think I) understand in ways that are accessible to laypeople really forces me to confront the sloppier parts of my understanding. If you're a technical person, it's also a great exercise in communication with non-technical people.

> But if you’re talking to a performer, and they have a fake, glassy-eyed smile, and go through all the correct motions, while obviously being totally checked out, you’re not asking the right questions.

Or it's an indication you are asking the correct questions but that the person you're asking it from anticipated it and is evading. Anyone who has heard a politicians and CEOs take questions from the press know this.

Terminology is a bit weird.

I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).

Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.

Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.

Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them. That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.

Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.

I've seen this with both famous and regular people.

e.g. a friend of mine once met William Shatner and then ran into him again a few months later. When asked "How are you doing?" Shatner answered exactly the same way at both the first and second meeting. I imagine some of this is efficiency since famous people tend to get the same questions over and over again. Tom Wilson even has a business card that answers a lot of these questions [0]

What was more surprising was seeing this in high school. I did a summer program with kids from all over the US. A few months later, I saw one of them at a sports event and, similar to Shatner, he had a canned response. He was from a well to do family and was probably on some kind of "track" to the right college etc. Was still surprising to hear.

If you are curious to see someone busting the cache, there are video compilations of Sean Evans from hot ones asking questions of guests based on deep research and them being incredibly impressed. [1]

Charisma on Command also has a great video on how to ask better question [2]

0 - https://www.upworthy.com/back-to-the-future-actor-has-a-hila...

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Endmr-93KOY

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHyYlFCaXPM

Perhaps it's cultural, but when people do that I take it as them not wanting to have that conversation - that is fine.

Recently I had a person say a lot without really saying anything because most likely they didn't want me to have some (business related) information.

It's important to be mindful that if there is a cache, there's probably a reason for it.

Around the time I started my compsci studies, I noticed that my friends respond to certain questions in a very predictable way. I even ended up experimenting with how I present my question and what words I use, but seldom did I manage to "bust the cache". My takeaway at the time was that friendships consist of predictable actions and conversations, and I wasn't particularly fond of it. Looking back, I don't mind it as much, and enjoy the fact that I can have a predictable experience with a person I know.

> It lets the person you are talking to have novel, original thoughts, rather than repeating the thoughts they’ve had before.

But only if they're open-minded. I've met many smart people who would rather sound smart than bust their cache.

Implies that people are always fine with having their cache busted and actually want to have a genuine conversation with you. Some aren't and will react negatively if you try.

Stuttering John used to do this back on Howard Stern by asking celebrities questions that were far out of the expected gamut at red carpet events. This was all for shock/comedy value, but "who are you and what makes you famous" type questions can really throw celebs off script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0hENpnMXk

I delight in asking novel and meaningful questions. I have a particularly weakness for meta questions; my favourite general-purpose one is, following some banal question: “How often do people ask you that?”

Followed immediately by: “And how often do people ask you that?”

This is normally already completely novel, but on the off chance it isn’t, you can recurse to higher meta!

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I absolutely love the way the footnote works in this article. Best design I've ever seen for that.

Ah, I overcame this by not using easily recognizable for the theme words but descriptions. It forces people to actually process the input.

I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice when speaking to each other but prompt.

Using "cache" for this whole dynamic is annoying; not everything is a computer

Interesting take.

> you probably know what I mean by “hitting the cache”

In addition to simplifying the conversational lives of over-subscribed talkers, this convenient-answer effect also comes into play with propaganda.

People who feel dissonance on some topic are easily convinced to adopt non-answers that they can throw down like cards, to make the dissonance (and challenges) go away.

You may notice that most whataboutisms, jeering dismissals, deflecting responses, etc., are highly recognizable canned answers. Not just irrational answers.

The caching does triple duty:

1. Efficient as easy answers.

2. Efficient followup stoppers, because the person hearing them has already heard (cached) them too.

3. Effective short circuits of internal dialogue.

I find an effective response is to simply ask someone why they parroted something that doesn't make sense or actually mean anything.

And then listen politely to the subsequent pause. I have yet to meet someone with a good response for being called on their unoriginal canned non-response. Judo: obvious parroting and caching naturally undermine their own credibility when you don't play along.

Some politicians are impeccable; if you ask them thorny questions like scandals, they always throw out a new question to change the topic.

In online communication you'll soon need to develop a skill for busting AI proxy which most people will have in front of their messaging ingestion pipeline.

I have section in my notes app of things people repeat, most commonly its executives hitting the cache they're all repeating each other.