We all have different roles in different circles, and present different aspects of ourselves to different parts of the world. For simplicity, I think of behavior as belonging to two selves, one public and one private. The public self is the personality that you affect when you are dealing with strangers - you are polite, non-confrontational but will punish the occasional queue jumper, get excited about certain technical subjects, enjoy talking with people who disagree, etc. The personal self is the one that has ridiculously strong beliefs about sci fi morality, what constitutes a beautiful object, and the nature of happiness, etc.

Every time I move to a new place, I find that there are three stages that happen:

1. Public self is established by adaptation to local culture - this happens pretty quickly
2. Private self is established by meeting people who share a large proportion of interest - this just requires you to meet the right people
3. Bridging of public and private roles by meeting a series of people who are of intermediate familiarity

I've found the third stage to be the most interesting. Both public and private selves get along too well with other people, and generate no discomfort through which personal growth can be pushed. The best setting for personal growth is that of encountering a person who is getting to know you better, and having to decide who you want to be.

Being able to meaningfully disagree is something I treasure in friends. I've found this discussion about the correct way to disagree to be informative: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13435

Everything matters

Communication is a holistic phenomena. When you listen to speech, you consider the motives, interests, and abilities of the speaker in pursuing the resulting goals. You ask yourself why someone is saying something the way that they are saying it.

Are you saying I'm stupid?

This is one of those things that trips me up every so often, especially in one-to-one conversations. When we are in a group, it's easy to understand that disagreement can be seen as an affront; conversely, it can be difficult to remember that people take badly to disagreement in private conversation as well.

Is it interesting to you too?

Topics inevitably drift over the course of a conversation, and picking up cues and allowing the topic to change in the right direction is also important, lest what one considers a profound line of thought is taken by the other to be irrelevant inanity. I imagine religious aphorisms to be a stark example of this - I believe there are people out there for whom the ability to conclude a conversation to a biblical quotation or some other aphorism is profound, whereas such is somewhat inane to me.

Classic prose

Addressing all these facets can be done by adopting the style of classic prose. Classic prose is a simplifying construct which manages to compartmentalize conversational causes and to clarify what would otherwise be an even more impressionistic exercise. It's a construct that prioritizes simplicity and clarity over all else.

http://classicprose.com/csx.html:

The role is severely limited because classic prose is pure, fearless, cool, and relentless. It asks no quarter and gives no quarter to anyone, including the writer. While the role can be necessary, true, and useful, as well as wonderfully thrilling, it can hardly be permanent. For better or worse, human beings are not pure, fearless, cool, or relentless, even if we may find it convenient for certain purposes to pretend that we are. The human condition does not, in general, allow the degree of autonomy and certainty that the classic writer pretends to have. It does not sustain the classic writer's claim to disinterested expression of unconditional truth. It does not allow the writer indefinitely to maintain the posture required by classic style. But classic style simply does not acknowledge the human condition. The insouciance required to ignore what everyone knows and to carry the reader along in this style cannot be maintained very long, and the masters of the style always know its limits. The classic distance is a sprint.