Riffing a bit more on the "in a small town, you're forced to get along with others" from last week.

Even if there's someone you dislike, there's often a goldilocks topic that you both agree on, e.g. "Oh, we both like chocolate!"

That's a toe-hold of mutual understanding that you can then use as a starting point to pull yourselves up, with effort, into more broad mutual understanding.

These can be hard to find, especially in quick interactions.

Embeddings could help with this; imagine if everything public someone had written was embedded. A computer could then quickly sift through the embeddings and find toeholds of mutual understanding for any pair of people.