# Collecting Shibboleths


> Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers. -- Voltaire

I am an introvert by nature, but I come alive for a good conversation. I was
reflecting on this after a recent international flight, where I was sitting next
to a friendly man who turned out to be a late-career civil engineer. I have a
close friend who is a civil engineer, and so as this conversation unfolded I was
able to inject pieces of information I’d learned from her -- the differences
between various civil CAD tools, stormwater management challenges, and so on.

In a conversation that’s going _well_ there are ample opportunities to ask
perceptive questions where you can learn interesting pieces of information. That
information can then sit in your back pocket, to be carefully deployed the next
time you run into a similar conversational vein. This can be absolutely
delightful when it works.

I’ve loosely been referring to this as **“Collecting Shibboleths”** in my inner
dialect. “Shibboleth” here is used loosely. It typically denotes language that
separates an in-group from an out-group. However, I’m using it more in the sense
of language that indicates a certain level of knowledge about a topic, used as a
bid for establishing rapport. It’s a “hey, I’ve walked some of these mental
paths before, not as deeply as you, but I’m curious to learn more”. And it’s
“_Collecting_ Shibboleths” out of recognition that each conversation you have
contains an opportunity to learn something interesting or useful. You are
building a lifelong repertoire, and you do so by asking engaging questions.

There is a huge difference between “Oh, you do low temperature physics, that’s
cool” and getting to “Oh, your lab synthesizes Bose-Einstein Condensates? That’s
fascinating -- evaporative cooling, right? How long are you able to stabilize it
for?”. Usually it doesn’t take _much_ knowledge to bootstrap this. A little
knowledge and a lot of curiosity goes a long way.

Using a shibboleth is distinct from pretending to know more about something than
I actually do. You aren’t trying to “impress”. Rather, the goal is to add more
conversational hooks for the other person to respond to. More interesting paths
for the conversation to wander down.
[More doorknobs that are asking to be turned.](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs)
You’re looking for a spark of recognition in the other person -- the interplay
of “Hey! Here’s an opening” and “Yes! I’ll run with it”.

Better questions lead to better answers. Better answers enrich your mental
models. And better mental models, in turn, sharpen the questions you ask next
time. This leads to a wondrously virtuous cycle in that becoming a better
conversationalist is self-reinforcing.