That's a lot easier and comes off more natural IMO.
I could observe myself and knew what I looked like, but couldn't break it. The CTO stopped me as I was speaking and said "this isn't going to work". As soon as he said that, I ended the call. I had some major imposter syndrome during that time, I think that played a huge role in my fumble. Still massively cringe when I think about that, though.
I have memories of experiences freezing up and losing the physical control required to speak as well, so I have empathy.
(Having such experiences as a child are what led to me joining the high school speech team doing extemporaneous and impromptu events to get over them. I eventually went on to be a regional champion and a state competitor, but I still sometimes have to fight the physical tension when speaking in certain situations).
I don't think it's a useful interview practice, at least in tech, below director level, but you just have to keep your composure and gently assert control. If that CTO favored it maybe their company culture was unusually aggressive.
we all have imposter syndrome when we start out. as long as you didn’t outright obviously lie or something then you probably didn’t do anything particularly wrong that’s worthy of the cringe.
(i’ve done the exact same thing in interviews, most of us probably have some story like that).
Put less kindly: there’s nothing so special about you that being yourself around a new person should cause such a panic. Even if they take an instant dislike to you, that should be something you can take in stride
Perhaps,' said Darcy, 'I should have judged better, had I sought an introduction, but I am ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers.'
'Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?' said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. 'Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?'
'I can answer your question,' said Fitzwilliam, 'without applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.'
'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,' said Darcy, 'of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.'
'My fingers,' said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault -- because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'
It seems like most people in this thread are more like Mr. Darcy, just assuming that they are destined to be bad at something that they’ve never practiced
Unless you mean you can practice socialisation at the mirror, or that you're willing to practice scales or solfege in public.
There is a diversity of physical attractiveness, innate and learned social grace, social environment, and phenotypic variability in psychosocial capacity that makes your comment sound extremely out of touch to some people.
I can do what you describe because I am fortunate that many of my social interactions are positive. For people I work with this is not the case and they are extremely socially isolated, and the tragedy is that every mistake they make compounds this. They are more sensitive interpersonally than I am and more socially aware in the moment, while less equipped to deal with social conventions and unattractive, becoming dramatically moreso in social situations due to their intrinsic reactions.
The points in the article can help all of us.
This is correct and I'm convinced there comes a point where there's no way out. The vast majority of social experiences in my life have been negative and it gets worse every time I have another, making it less likely the next will be positive.
Rather than continue to get hurt I have nearly 100% socially isolated myself, save for the internet. I work remote in a rural area and I only leave the house for essentials. There's no place for me socially and I've accepted that.
You might not like it, it might stress you out a bunch, you can cry afterwards, or have a stiff drink after, but you should be able to set those emotions aside for 30 minutes, especially for something important like a job interview.
If someone cannot do that, they should definitely go into therapy for that. No matter if it was 'done to them', it's still a problem that person carries around, and the only way around that is fixing it.
I say this with respect: the kind of attitude you're describing does more to isolate people than anything mentioned in the original post.
Bitterness or even just muted disappointment will drive people away more than any of the factors you mentioned, by a factor of 10. Have any of you gone on a date with someone who looked great on paper, but seemed unhappy to be there or resentful towards you? That's the ultimate connection killer.
You can have all sorts of setbacks, but if you're chill and have a good attitude people will want you around (barring a few assholes, but it's important not to worry about them). OTOH even if you're very good looking, no one will want to approach you if your vibes are bad or inward facing.
what if (a) I hate leading questions, (b) by default only smile when bad/tragic things happen (eg "train crash leaves 100 dead and maimed"), (c) I'm quite bad at listening bc if you don't say interesting things often/densely enough my mind adhd-s away, and (d) interrupting is second-nature to me?
...advice may be good, but for some of us it's like 99% of ourselves that we need to dial down in order to carry on a successful interaction - it works, but takes a hell lot of energy
There are lots of things people can’t just talk themselves out of.
There’s a lot of energy in this thread mixing up introversion and autism for an inability to relate to others. That’s not true you just have a different perspective and will relate in a different way. Autism might be a proximal cause for anxiety but anxiety is not a feature of autism and it can be overcome.
It is possible for someone to have a goal of changing themselves into a person who can fit in socially, and be effortlessly comfortable while doing so. After building the underlying skills, they know how to navigate social situations well enough to intuit how much honesty and revealing is appropriate for a given situation, and can roll back "fake it until you make it". They can accept surmountable social penalties for the comfort of less self-filtering and chance to have more meaningful connections.
"Be yourself" means to change yourself, and then stick the landing.
> not "acting intuitively without overthinking", since the socially anxious person's intuition is to run away.
Yes, it is exactly that, but instead of focusing on "acting intuitively", focus on that "without overthinking". Overthinking is the problem to be solved. "thinking just enough" is the optimal target.
I can’t tell you specifically what being “yourself“ means. But I can absolutely tell you that if you panic when you meet a stranger that you are not centered in your own experience. Your mind is elsewhere. You don’t know this new person, so all of the panic in the situation is panic that you brought with you from the past and is not relevant to the current scenario
For whatever reason your body believes that the stakes are very high. They might be, but even if they were, wouldn’t it be more adaptive to face the situation with the level head? Most people can do this 100% of the time and I bet that you could get there too
I had to do a hell of a lot of accepting myself before I could actually hang with people in the moment. Realistically it took six years to be “normal “in my own eyes
I can relate to this so much, my mind seems to bring up those cringe memories randomly and I hate it. If there was a way to just erase those memories I would be all for it lol.
Memory of embarrassing thing I did 40 years ago: Loaded in SRAM cache for instant replay at any moment
- if someone is confusing or upsetting you, assume it is your fault
- interpret others' actions in the context of your fears (this one is spot on)
- assume your assumptions are wrong and that you shouldn't even bother
- pivot conversations when someone asks you about something you actually know or are good at, it might be a trick, tell them you're dumb instead
- if you must ask questions, convince yourself you must not, just figure it out instead
- dig in your heels at no point in time whatsoever and just tell people the minimum they need to hear so they leave
- do not develop narratives or it means you will have an immediate network
- do not research the acumen or credentials of anyone
- do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, they might actually be wrong and you're not a judge
- when all hope is lost in conversation, pretend to take their side to end the conversation
- do not seek to understand anyone at all
God, this one hurts. In the first couple months at my new role (which I intentionally chose to be one that would stretch and challenge me as I'm looking for some professional growth), a senior member of my team expressed the view that he'd rather someone spend three days researching than ask him a thirty-second question. When I was already insecure about my position in the team and not wanting to appear incompetent, this has ironically sent me into a spiral of being _less_ capable and productive because I'm fearfully avoiding asking for any context or guidance. I'm struggling to break that cycle, but it's hard.
3 minutes, 30 minutes, sure, I've discovered a lot of junior folks would figure things out on their own when I couldn't get back to them immediately, and tended to add some delay just to encourage trying a little harder before contacting me. I would say even 3 hours has value. Buy yourself a rubber duck and have a heart-to-heart about your problem.
3 days is going to result in lots of folks getting stuck in local minima, likely confusing themselves in the process. To be clear, sometimes a problem requires a deep dive, or there is no one who can provide useful help. Even then, some guidance just to get outside perspective is helpful.
The rubric I give to juniors is a bit more simple: if you get stuck, consider alternatives that you haven't tried out. Alternatives are of a few types including: relevant evidence/facts you can gather that you haven't yet gathered, and attempts you haven't tried yet. As long as you have alternatives keep trying them (gather evidence, make attempts). Once you run out of alternatives then seek help (avoid spinning wheels).
This way when a junior comes to me I can ask them to list the alternatives they have already tried. If they haven't tried obvious alternatives (gathered facts and reasonable attempts) I send them back. If they've tried all the alternatives I can think of then I get involved.
I'll note that this tends to work when contact between team members is relatively frequent (e.g. once a day) so I can get a sense of how long the junior has been working on a task to avoid rabbit-holing.
Today, yeah 3 days is a long time to spend researching and spinning your wheels. But it's still the best way to learn.
In fact, I'd prefer to discuss sooner than let a new dev on their own for more than a day of work. Discussion brings alignment and saves me time with micro adjustments rather than massive corrections or debates and push back when someone goes off on their own for a long time.
1. All the learning that has stuck with me was painful
2. All my most painful learning was done without help
3. Therefore, painless assistance won’t drive learning
And tbh that isn’t exactly wrong.
I have never met a senior that would dare to take such a stance; he may be willing to learn, but we will not both cover his knowledge gap and improve his own cv at the company expense. I have no idea if you are competent or not, but it doesnt really matter if you are the one deciding. Its not a democracy, and sure as hell its not amateur day. He will do as he is told, or he will find a more suitable team elsewhere. Have no tolerance for divas, they bring zero value.
Worth taking a look at the Wikipedia for Attachment styles [1]. The two types are Dismissive-Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant. Either can be superficially mistaken for anti-social, although Dismissive-avoidant tends to present a bit closer to anti-social.
I think there's quite a diversity in anti-social behaviors. He may not be describing you, but he's definitely describing others: difficult, self-centered people, probably with anger problems, isolated (because they're unpleasant to deal with) but not self-isolating.
Good:
- if someone is confusing or upsetting you, assume it is your fault (personal accountability)
- interpret others' actions in the context of your fears (at least having awareness of your fears is step one, step two is reacting healthily)
- assume your assumptions are wrong and that you shouldn't even bother (just delete the "shouldn't even bother" part)
- pivot conversations when someone asks you about something you actually know or are good at, it might be a trick, tell them you're dumb instead (playing dumb CAN be a smart thing, or at least not one-upping someone else nor making them feel small for no good reason)
- if you must ask questions, convince yourself you must not, just figure it out instead (diving into something can prevent procrastination, you can start and ask questions later)
- when all hope is lost in conversation, pretend to take their side to end the conversation ("smile and nod" can be great advice- the pro-social doctrine is "you can't win an argument and keep a relationship at the same time")
Bad:
- dig in your heels at no point in time whatsoever and just tell people the minimum they need to hear so they leave
- do not develop narratives or it means you will have an immediate network
- do not research the acumen or credentials of anyone
- do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, they might actually be wrong and you're not a judge
- do not seek to understand anyone at all
Unfortunately the parent is suffering from a complete lack of self confidence, and even telling them to go to a therapist won't help as they never will.
Seen it IRL, even if they book an appointment, they'll convince themselves there's some good reason not to go. The two people I've met with it both somehow convinced themselves that therapy didn't work without ever trying it. To the point of lecturing me, who has been to therapy and found it helped immensely, at how useless it is.
It really seems to be a nefarious affliction.
Reading that list above is like watching a car crash in slow motion. You desperately want to help them, they could have so much of a better life if they just believed in themselves even a little bit, but they won't listen to you.
One of my friends I once asked 'Do you want me to push you any morez or is it better if we just talk about other things?'. They dejectedly admitted that they found being pushed depressing and preferred if we didn't talk about it any more.
One of the funniest, insightful people I know, with a great talent, is working a warehouse job and we meet and talk and have a great time but we now talk about anything but his failure to launch.
Ditto for a CERN physicist that now is a part-time tutor for high schoolers living at home with his parents.
And I'm pretty sure you are describing yourself as someone with an inferiority complex and social anxiety.
Spot on, can relate to that :)
I think part of it was influenced by social media (I was a tween debatelord). Part of it was self improvement (only focus on yourself! get ahead! never blame the enviornment!). Part of it was genuinely depressing things in my life.
As an example, I was obsessed with "finding my passion" at some point. Looking back, I was looking for a way to say, "This thing I'm committed to is way more important than all the other things in my life, so I don't need to go do them". As another example, frequently I would go into epistemic spirals - I was aware of psychoanalysis, so clearly there's capability for deep self delusion. But how do I know the navel gazing isn't self delusion? How do I know framing it as "navel gazing" is not an attempt to cope? And infinite recursion ensues. Another example is constantly feeling like I needed to steelman opponents, and so I would do the utmost research and understand the "best" arguments for the opponent's side before responding.
Incidentally, I think this is why I loved computer science so much - because you often proved worst case guarantees. I had a deep disdain for heuristic solutions.
But this mentality is still bad. Let's take the steelman example. How could steelmanning your opponent possibly be a bad thing? Well, are you actually steelmanning them, or are you trying to find some sort of greater upper bound to their argument, then attacking that... for what? Efficiency? Feeling secure in yourself? Why not actually listen to them? Oh, but surely if they accept premises A, B, C, then D, E, F must follow! Do they, though? Is it possible they could not go down that route, and for valid reasons?
It's still a deep contradiction I work through, since to me personally, all of these things invoke a deep "you are not being remotely rational or moral" gut feeling when I do go down those routes. But I know that I need to sit more in grey zones and just.... live in the grey.
(I still love formal computer science and dislike heuristics. But it's much more balanced now.)
Ah, life is complicated.
- spend most of your time online
- overthink any form of social outreach and don't do it
- open reddit/HN/youtube/content_platform when you feel anything negative
- look at porn when you feel lonely
- constantly analyze other people's perception of you
You will then stifle your social skills and connections with people. You will feel extremely uncomfortable around other people most of the time. You will make niche references to things you have seen online and nobody will get you. Interacting with real people will be terrifying. Mission accomplished.
That isn't necessarily an excuse. I strongly believe that after a certain point it's really on you to get over your hangups, especially if you're an adult. It may not be easy but it's necessary
Anyways, I've never found that just telling lonely people "it is your fault you're alone" has ever been helpful
So if you have any interest in finding the good people who you think are worthwhile, you still have a pretty good incentive to talk to people. And if the good, worthwhile people are that rare then you need to talk to and get to know as many people as you can
However, a study of Philosophy may convince one that "it is better to be sane alone than be mad with the crowd".
What does Albert Camus mean by "Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined" in Myth of Sisyphus? - https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/c1ohej/what_...
It wasn't my intention to advocate for 'compromising on values' rather, I think the best way to do any discussion is being honest, and that starts with being honest about your values.
I think the whole point of my method is to identify who is the person that's compromising their values, i.e. someone who agrees with "it's good to help people" but then disagree with social healthcare shows that somewhere on the imaginary line between helping people and social healthcare that person flips their opinion, which is incredibly helpful information in debating.
Then step one is to cast the other fellow as the enemy, and then you create a case against him, leading the conversation in the appropriate direction.
It's a popular way to do it. See all of social media for examples.
That's something the OP could add to his guide: approach every interaction as a contest you must win.
"""
through some upsetting turn of events, someone put this on hackernews and started a piranha feeding frenzy of speculation about what / who im referring to here. so just to be clear:
i wrote this bulleted list in a couple minutes as a way to rant about the lack of charity i was noticing in 2 places
- my family, where 2 members aren't speaking to each other for petty reasons, looking for the other to capitulate and admit they're the aggressor
- on bluesky, where users are blaming every outage on "vibe coding"
if you took extra meaning from it, i'm sorry or congrats!
"""
Your options when dealing with truly obstinate family memebers in real life? Stop. Give yourself permission to disengage. There isn't another option. (https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing...)
The worst situations usually were if someone with this kind of self-sabotaging coping mechanism for some kind of trauma (because that's what it usually seems to be in my experience) ended up in some kind of moderator position in some on-line community, which they tended to seek out to get more control to cope with their fears.
You mean the fine folks over at Bluesky, the social media network built around isolation, intolerance, and refusing to listen to other’s POV, exhibit these same character flaws?!
Who’d’ve thunk? :)
> do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, especially those that you have never met or otherwise spoken to
> do not seek to understand those you do not already understand
Are these not reflected in your comment?
For unrelated reasons (looking up the author of a quote in the bsd fortune file) I was looking at François de La Rochefoucauld's wikipedia page and learned that he wrote this in the intro for his book of maxims on human behavior:
"... the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit."
The basis for its existence is to supply a platform for people who want to isolate from ideas and narratives they find uncomfortable, so they self-select into echo chambers that cater to their preexisting ideologies. That's their whole business model!
Many of these biases are common in humans, and humans can exchange ideas.
It can be enlightening to test your biases against real human being to see which ones are valid and which ones are things you've picked up along the way and might not be fruitful to you now.
Because you only see life through your own eyes, you definitionally can't examine yourself in isolation, and you can't know how you are affected by yourself.
I've found exchanging with others fruitful, even when I don't want to and find it repellant.
Have a good one
Agreed. It's almost like taking bitter medicine for me- I loathe the idea of going to outings and meeting new people, but however tired I am afterwards from masking, some part of me comes away better off for it (assuming I'm not being forced to do it all the time).
In general, I am skeptical when anybody says, "I am a ______." We vastly overstate what aspects of our condition are innate and which are merely habitual. I have seen many people with misanthropic tendencies find balance, and many others sink into the mire.
By all means, continue learning how to enjoy yourself alone, and stop feeling like you "should" be more like everyone else. That's actually healthy.
At the same time, though, consider the possibility that there may be more for you outside your house, and you just haven't found it yet. You don't have to force yourself to be social, but try different things that sound like they might be appealing to you.
It doesn't have to be either/or. Keep enjoying your solitude, but budget a small amount of your energy to exploring in case it unexpectedly pays off.
I don't think reclusiveness is a moral failing. I don't think we owe society participation. But I do think that hermithood forgoes unbounded unforeseen possibilities for a known, bounded experience. I'd call this "the safe bet is not necessarily the best bet" argument against isolationism and towards social/collaborative open-mindedness.
Which is the same reason everyone else seeks relationships with other people. That is the value social interaction brings. Now that you've cracked the code, so to speak, do you find this behaviour grating because you don't normally like to have your thoughts and ideas challenged/enlightened?
What you really want to hate is time, because that's the true limiting factor. Given enough time, anything is possible, but you {insert any modal here} run out of it. Hence, why projecting things onto descendants is a thing. Writing and other methods of symbolic information reproduction have been great inventions to facilitate this.
It's not good to be alone, I was in a car crash one time and my buddies pulled up on the scene and gave me a ride home.
God, it's such a breath of fresh air. I can be silly and goofy and have fun again.
I know it's not for everyone but the point is it may help to find your scene. If you actually enjoy being there, people will enjoy being with you.
my problem with women is I only interact with them when I'm physically interested in them otherwise I leave them alone so yeah I'm on edge like "I gotta land her" kind of thing, which I'm not saying is good, as proof of this I haven't been in a relationship with a girl for 12 years, not that I haven't had the opportunity but I'm also picky which, I need to be impressive myself to match it but yeah
With girls, be up front, direct, don't shy away. Honestly a lot of the old PUA strategies work really well if you look at it like a skill you're building.
EDIT: wait, I am going to go out on a limb and say that you meant "I was in a car crash of a conversation one time and my buddies pulled up on the scene and gave me a ride home."
Some people have ultimate confidence in their social judgements and the true sign of empathy is a kind of meta-empathy that allows you to consider truly alternative understandings of the world i.e. empathy for empathy.
One explanation I have for this is that precisely because empathy is a more rare experience for them, it becomes a more remarkable one, perhaps even overwhelming at times. This leads them to believe that they experience it more than or more intensely than others, when on the contrary the rest of the world is simply more habituated to it and integrate it more gracefully in their ordinary experience.
The other interpretation is that it requires certain level of narcissism or egotism to describe oneself in such flattering terms.
Or ultimately, as the Spanish proverb says: dime de que presumes y te diré de que careces.
Probably some degree of all of this is true in most cases.
An introspective, empathetic, thoughtful person might still accidentally say something that an external observer might perceive as having been said without thought or consideration to the feelings of others.
The above is not meant to be contradictory to your point, just a consideration to the general faults all humans hold.
Sorry, sticking to this one.
Call me anti-social if you want, but facing overwhelming dissent may indicate you're the lone free-thinker in an echo chamber. Being that one guy who's always prodding the hivemind with a pokey stick has value in my opinion (though you will end up getting stung on occasion).
Maybe you do actually know better than everyone else, but why do you have to prove it to others? You can just quietly make your argument and shut up. It's their loss, and people may remember that you were right.
Maybe it's about an important decision at work, but if your correctness pisses everyone off, no one is going to listen to you again. You've won the battle but lost the war.
People shouldn't be that way, but they are.
I'm not trying to be the "lone free thinker". But if I see a hivemind, I occasionally insert my opinion with the intention of having a different perspective be recognized.
It's important to feel heard, but an issue in an argument is that no one is being heard and you're yelling past each other. You don't feel heard by more strenuously arguing your point; you make a calm, genuine effort to hear them, and then hopefully they'll reciprocate the favor. At the very least, you break out of the doom loop and walk away.
This is generally the right approach, unless you're on the hook for the consequences of whatever the group decides. Continuing to argue a point that you've already made isn't likely to change any minds that weren't open to it the first time you said it. I think that's even in the HN guidelines.
If you're the one responsible for a decision, listen to what others have to say but if you still feel strongly that your contrary view is correct then go with that and live with the responsibility.
You just better be right. If you're wrong then no one will ask for your input ever again.
> Being that one guy who's always prodding the hivemind with a pokey stick has value in my opinion (though you will end up getting stung on occasion).
When done deliberately, it's called the "tenth man rule": when 9 people agree, the 10th man is obligated to figure out a way to disagree. I learned about it from this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777175 (pretty great comment, IMHO).
Asocial = avoids people, quiet, misses social cues. i.e. doesn’t attract people
Antisocial = cruel, obnoxious, remorseless. i.e. actively repels people
Psychopaths, I would say, are "quite good" at attracting people, by knowing exactly what to say. Sociopaths may sometimes attract people unintentionally, just by virtue of their impulsive personalities sometimes causing them to be "fun" to be around.
In both cases though, people who know them well tend to be repelled by their lack of regard for the needs and feelings of others.
This speaks to me quite a bit, particularly around unfalsifiable topics I'll have with friends/family, such as theology. If we define hope as the idea they'll change their mind and agree with me, seems not much one can do but retreat into themself, right? I suppose I can sympathize with their sentiment before I retreat into myself, but taking this bullet point at face value I'm unsure how to make this a pro-social experience :/
In my experience the only way to really connect across those divides is to first have a long history, months or years, of productive and positive social interaction. But you don’t get control how others think and feel, even if by some theoretical measure, your position is “right”. So even under the best of circumstances you just have to accept and resist that others think differently.
edit: also the article is sarcastic. You shouldn't retreat into yourself just because you cannot agree on something. Talk about something else.
See the (very rare, statistically) experiencers of spontaneous remissions the Catholic Church declares miraculous healings, such as Dafne Gutierrez:
https://catholic-miracles.com/miracle/charbel-makhlouf-dafne...
I'm not personally sure that's a supernatural event, but if I'd had my eyes deteriorating for years, undergone multiple failed surgeries to stave off blindness, become fully blind, had doctors tell me I was irrepairably blind, and lived without eyesight for years, then had it come back within two days of praying to a Catholic saint for healing...
Well, I doubt I'd still be agnostic after that.
To me that doesn't follow logically. What if instead of praying to some saint, they found their lucky underwear that they lost when they were a child, and wore that for the first time again? Would that proof that the lucky underwear was somehow instrumental in fixing their eyes?
Apparently the body was able to heal her own eyes, and it would have happened if she prayed to the saint or not.
I bet if you observe your own mind for long enough, you'll find some part of your life which requires you to have faith too. Use that to understand your friends and family better. The next time you find yourself in a conversation with them about religion, ask them about their faith (not their religion). You will gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how they navigate the world.
If you can have that conversation, go ahead and ask them about their religious beliefs, withholding judgement unless/until they say something morally objectionable. You can think of their religion like any other mythology, and you get to play sociologist for a while. There's a fascinating variety of responses people give to even fundamental questions - e.g. "what is god?".
This open approach is not only much easier for everyone, it's also more useful in the long term. My neighbor has an interesting mashup of beliefs that includes a decent chunk of Christianity. She sometimes has bad anxiety, and unfortunately she can't afford treatment for it. I've helped her out of panic attacks using two methods: 1 - I've given her a clonazepam tablet and 2 - I've quoted scripture to her (e.g. "behold the lilies of the field"). Both methods work, and the latter tends to work faster.
It's different if the person is using their religion as a cover for engaging in or supporting something morally evil. That's a trickier conversation and often one not really worth having, depending on your relationship and how comfortable/willing you are to attempt to correct them.
Calling theology "unfalsiable" is ignorant. Like saying math is unfalsiable, because there are multiple geometries and nobody understands it anyway.
nothing personnel, kid
(a) I felt speed was far more important than readability (reasonable for rapid-fire short messages or constrained typing ability such as a flip phone, also a common way to imply "fuck you, my time is more important than yours" in longer forms such as email), or
(b) i'm 14 and e e cummings is so deep (blogs)
if i want people to read my stuff, then what kind of manipulation would writing all lower case accomplish? seems counterproductive. and if it is counterproductive then it can't really be manipulative in my favor. so why do it then? this is even more significant in german where all nouns are capitalized. there writing nouns in lowercase is not only an aesthetic difference, but a grammar violation. (and yet i do it anyways)
which status would i be seeking? (i am actually asking myself this question. depending on the answer i find, it might even get me to change my behavior).
writing all lower case has become a habit for me, that i stopped thinking about it. it's time to revisit that. interestingly at some point i decided to use capitals in blog posts. technically everything else is actually messaging, including email and HN.
lastly, the article is a list. it is not clear to me that lists have to start with capitals, since list items are not always complete sentences. they don't end with a period either. so even when capitalizing properly, i am unsure whether they should be capitalized.
The article is a bullet point, yes, but some items have multiple sentences with no caps
so if you feel that my lowercase writing is like i am not greeting you then that's the feeling i probably induce in others frequently. welcome to my world :-)
(multiple sentences appear only twice, btw, it's proof that the writer intended to write all lower case, but not strongly noticeable (to me at least))
You just answered your own question there. Being perceived as different, as beyond social conventions, as too cool for silly language rules. Or as they put in your parent comment - nonchalant
that has been the mantra for my whole life. (that doesn't mean i don't learn or wouldn't listen to reason, but it means that the changing something had to have a good reason. (and in the context of writing, for example, readability is a good reason, being perceived as different is not))
social conventions is something i have always struggled with. they often make no sense to me. why do i have to shake hands, for example? yes, there is a social and historical explanation, but the rituals are often so detailed, and so variable that i never know what is the right form in which situation.
so yeah, i am cool, even if i don't want to, and nonchalant describes to to a T.
i don't really want to change my behavior (i don't mean writing specifically) for the sake of becoming more accepted, because it also works as a filter. someone who can accept me despite my quirkiness is likely to be more open minded. it's a form of protection.
1. your comment is in lowercase 2. see bullet 2 of my post
nothing personal kid
antisocial /ăn″tē-sō′shəl, ăn″tī-/
adjective
1. Shunning the society of others; not sociable.
2. Hostile to or disruptive of the established social order; marked by or engaging in behavior that violates accepted mores.
3. Antagonistic toward or disrespectful of others; rude.
Nerds hate him!
It’s easy to use a diagnosis as an excuse not to connect. But it’s a lame excuse. It is much more interesting to understand what tools we need to gain to connect with the world. Sometimes I need to be an anthropologist. Sometimes I need to be a crime scene investigator. Usually I just need to listen better.
When I was in a wheelchair I had to use ramps instead of the stairs. But that didn’t stop me from going to the movies
I can't talk most of the time, that does stop me from having a conversation yes.
Processing Sensory information takes priority over social circuits in my brain, physically.
So I am unapologetically autistic and no I don't have to break my brain to try to fit in.
If people find my disabilities upsetting thats stereotype ableism and yes it happens often
maybe learning to be better at it would help, because the biggest pain and discomfort for me is that i don't know what to say and that anything i can think of feels meaningless.
i "solved" the problem by moving to a country with a different native language and culture. this raises the barrier to communicate and it seems to have an effect of curbing smalltalk.
while in a wheelchair, how comfortable were you asking for help? that would be the biggest challenge for me.
I wasn’t bad at small talk. I was bad at sharing my thoughts and feelings because it didn’t feel safe. As a result the only things that felt like safe small talk topics were the weather and sports.
Overtime I’ve become better at sharing my feelings, even if they are “embarrassing“. I ended up talking for three hours on a plane ride last weekend with an absolute stranger. We talked about the differences in our family dynamics, what cities we find it easier and harder to make friends in, the current state of our relationships and what we wanted out of them. All of that was “small talk” because we were just passing the time with someone we will never meet again. But the subjects were not small.
A side effect of feeling comfortable talking about things that matter to you is that it gives you a lot more motivation to be curious and interested in things that matter to other people as well. Even better, if you share with people more deeply about how you are feeling, they will be able to help you in ways that you didn’t even realize were possible
It's an interesting list, and yeah, I'd say most are common sense and well put. But I'm still a bit very of those "negative lists".
(I actually just found a webcomic which tries a similar approach - gives their characters intentionally the worst possible ways of interaction, with the "quest" of the story essentially being if they manage to grow and learn the right ones.)
But in both, its easy to employ "persuasive game" strategies and have the reader "discover truths" that are really colored by the author's perception.
Essentially, I'd like to know the context in which this was developed, so the whole list isn't just an instance of item #7 of it. Basically it reads as if someone could have written it in rage after some particularly bad conversation that didn't go their way.
i wrote this bulleted list in a couple minutes as a way to rant about the lack of charity i was noticing in 2 places
- my family, where 2 members aren't speaking to each other for petty reasons, looking for the other to capitulate and admit they're the aggressor
- on bluesky, where users are blaming every outage on "vibe coding"
For what it's worth, though, the people I know to need emotional literacy the most, would probably find the art style extremely off-putting. I don't agree with them, but it's an interesting correlation to ponder.
Could it be that people who react strongly aversively to such warm fuzziness identify it precisely with the things that have been done to their minds during development so that they would become incapable of certain fundamental cognitions?
Just take their strongest point:
> dig in your heels when confronted with overwhelming dissent
A few months ago I watched a college-age people-pleaser assertively turn down three peers pressuring her to hang out after work somewhere she didn't want to go. Three! She stuck to her guns, then looked up and nodded to me. I subtly nodded back. Real cowboy shit.
People are different and follow different paths of growth.
I get a bunch of the others, but this one kind of confuses me. What's the opposite (better?) move? Logorrhea? Forcing a confrontation? Reciting bad poetry?
I suppose there's debate to be had about whether leaving a dead conversation is a retreat, but leaving the situation and pulling back a bit to think about the circumstances, one's mood, the people involved, etc seems like a good thing on balance.
However, I would suggest considering if the ‘making fun’ is in casual conversation or truly adversary.
In casual conversation of someone making jest about your lack of speaking, just smile and say you are having a good time listening and hanging out.
If they are actually making fun of you, never associate with those people again, they suck
It's not all puppies and rainbows of course, because some people can't hold a conversation without being led through it by the hand, which is exhausting. And others think everyone else is always so fascinated with what they have to say that they never stop for you to get a word in edgewise.
But, active listening accounts for the majority of my social skills, for better or worse.
Sigh
And I'm probably less autistic than the average HNer.
But people mostly don't have it all worked out.
There are specific demographics who do.
Some are naturally gifted at social interactions and/or grew up in environments which taught them how to socialise effectively.
Others are charming narcissists - likeable, high status, attractive on the outside, monsters on the inside. They can appear effortless because they don't care about anything except presenting an image, so they get get very skilled at it.
Most everyone else has some social anxiety or frustration and makes more or less obvious social mistakes at least occasionally.
Conversation sucks sometimes, solitude is beautiful.
Me: I'm da king of da highway
For younger introverts, none of this behavior is necessarily anti-social if the group all shares these same traits. The moment a member of that group has any higher self-esteem than the rest, they will either see that individual as "cool" or as a threat (or both).
To be truly anti-social is to either completely isolate yourself, or be unrelentingly and unreasonably hostile in all interactions. This list is neither. It's just passive aggressive and a lot of ego.
I don’t really understand this, what would an example look like?
What do you think of the regional transit funding measure? Seems like it'd be a real disaster if BART stops running at 9PM.
In that way you're signaling your support and they'll probably just continue the conversation in the same direction.
Sorry, networks, in this context, are too social for me, as they involve other people.
It seems that the models that dominate are ones which sort people into categories that emphasize positive traits and explain away negative ones as, "Society demands X but I just need Y." This is an important corrective to the medicalized model, but sometimes I feel it obscures the degree to which people are malleable. A lot of our behavior is habitual, and if you change your habits, you can change your "personality" without rewriting your own temperaments.
The other problem is one of causation. A group of people could all describe themselves as asocial, but what drives them to that label is entirely different. One legitimately needs less social interaction, one is riddled with social anxiety and has developed a deeply avoidant response, and one just hates people. They may be unified in feeling out of place in some social interactions, but what they need (or even don't need) is entirely different.
I don't know. I couldn't sleep last night and this is all I could think about. What does that make me?
It’s curious how many people do this. Especially if you try to address their deeply-held beliefs, they’ll just start talking about something else.
I am picking up what this author is putting down.
Then after a sports incident, I got a concussion. For a while I could not handle light, screens, noise, people, work, or normal social pressure. So I deliberately isolated myself until I could figure out how to get better.
Here's my checklist:
- Know why you're doing this and share with a close person; Someone else grounding you in your asocial trip can make a difference;
- Read books, Jung helped me stay sane while in isolation;
- Learn a new skill. I picked math and system programming as I realized it's easier for me to solve math problems and debug computers, rather than humans;
- Assume your state of mind is temporary and you're doing it with a purpose;
You're on your own, ignore the environment, find happiness inside your mind, don't seek too much external validation. Then your body will tell you if it's time to socialize or keep on deliberately introverting. Happy meditation.
1. Not every social interaction can (or should) be an objective weighing of ideas. It's not the other person's responsibility to enter into a formal debate with you at your local dive bar or whatever.
2. For their opinions to be valid, the other person doesn't need to conform to your idea of an acceptable conversation style (see 1). Also, in my experience, "anti-social" responses are detected more readily in the other person than in yourself, you're not as cool and collected as you think you are.
3. Feelings aren't forbidden. You may be a bit repressed yourself, meaning you feel shame or disgust when confronted with other people's feelings. Guess what... that's also a feeling!
4. If you repeatedly encounter these "anti-social" people in your life (which I guess OP does since he wrote a post about it) there's one common denominator: you. Can you honestly measure up to your own rules, OP? It takes two to tango.
5. There's a good chance you're sandbagging your conversation, meaning you're talking about some topic that you've thought about a lot, to a completely unprepared party. In my experience with people making complaints like OP, this is often combined with a controversial opinion about said topic. Instead of truly testing your idea against someone, you provoke an emotional reaction and celebrate your superiority because you staid calm and the other person exploded. Charlie Kirk was good at this unless he encountered actual experts.
6. Related to the above: come on, it's perfectly normal to get defensive and upset when you find you're losing an argument, don't act like you don't do it.
With respect to all; there is an incredible amount of subtle communications that go into standard conversations
E.g. “ when ambiguous, assume intent is malicious, ignorant, or amoral”
Most immoral actors cloak deliberately cloak themselves in ambiguity.
IDK if I agree with that. If you could dissuade a nazi by biting your tongue and keeping the conversation going, wouldn't that be the morally right thing to do?
> Most immoral actors cloak deliberately cloak themselves in ambiguity.
Yes, but that still doesn't mean you should assume everybody to be one of those 'immoral' actors. Assume that somebody is normal, if they do something that proofs they're an 'immoral actor', only then assume that they're being dishonest.
i wrote this bulleted list in a couple minutes as a way to rant about the lack of charity i was noticing in 2 places
- my family, where 2 members aren't speaking to each other for petty reasons, looking for the other to capitulate and admit they're the aggressor - on bluesky, where users are blaming every outage on ai
if you took extra meaning from it, i'm sorry or congrats!
That said, if I may be so hypocritical to add to the list, the heavy reliance on pointing out fallacies is a pretty big one. A lot of the times it simply degenerates conversations into logical golf, with no semblance of trying to actually understand the other person remaining. Though in those cases, that intent was usually never really present to begin with.
If you're in a toxic environment, this is what it's like. It's a culture problem, not an individual problem.
Here are some examples, going to get anecdotal here:
- People stealing credit for my work
- Needing to kick them off of projects I'm on to protect myself
- Getting into political standoffs with people trying to pressure and threaten me into arrangements that fuck me over
- Had people I work with turn on me all of a sudden and try to throw me under the bus
- A manager forcing someone to work with shitty consultants (who were, of course, a personal connection), then using it to throw them under the bus
- People trying to gatekeep higher ROI work for favorites
- Management lying to people and misrepresenting opportunities to get them to join, then rug pulling once they've signed on the dotted line
The "antisocial" behaviors in the post are just the sort of rational emotional detachment which happens when you figure out that you're dealing with shitty people.
Maybe I'll get genuinely antisocial here: a lot of people in general are shitty people. Or at least, if you've attracted shitty people into your life in the past, it'll keep happening in the future and you're better off growing the emotional scar tissue (i.e. "avoidant attachment") instead of this victim blaming. There's something about you that makes them target you and you're better off having the artillery ready
I think you nailed it. People's behaviors are always adaptive to their environment.
So, is the question legit? If so, why can it not be answered?
This reminds me a bit of StackOverflow. "Question already solved" elsewhere. Well, before StackOverflow, people often asked a question, and were told "read the manual". So, were these people pro-social? Does the ORIGINAL position hold any merit when it comes to a question? HOW is it even inferred that a question was asked "suggestively"?
These bulletin points are no good. They make too many assumptions. What does "anti-social" mean? When reddit moderators ban people and censor statements, is this pro-social behaviour?
> when all hope is lost in conversation, retreat into your self
What horrible recommendations. Hopefully AI wrote those, because I can not believe a human wrote that, not even as sarcasm. I don't even see any sarcasm there. How do you detect sarcasm in written text accurately? Is my text sarcasm? Everyone agree or disagree with that? People are different. All that attempt to group into social or anti-social, is rubbish nonsense from A to Z.
So I find this post incredibly condescending, and it seems clearly directed at a few specific people this author had some sort of moral or political disagreement with. Which means the author is committing the exact sins he's inveighing against!
I will be a little more specific:
assume they have no sane reason for doing or saying what they are doing or saying
assume intent is malicious, ignorant, or amoral.
interpret others' actions in the context of your fears
exploit your immediate network; when the obvious merits of your narrative are exhausted, present like-minded people with tastefully curated details of your interactions with detractors, to provide a more appropriate account that your supporters can rally around to crush any lingering threats to your narrative
do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, especially those that you have never met or otherwise spoken to
do not seek to understand those you do not already understand
They always find a way to get what they seek.
Well, at a minimum, I do agree that the author seems to have intended this post for people like you.
Do every thing on this list under the hood while presenting the exact opposite as a facade for public consumption.
Of course, the majority is always right and we should yield to it right away /s
It COULD be that you are correct and the world is crazy, but its far more likely that you are the one who is missing something. It's always worth stopping to double check when this happens.
Perhaps more importantly, if you do happen to be right when everyone else is wrong its important to determine your goals.
Is it more important to be right, or to be happy? If the answer is the latter then its sometimes best to just let people continue being wrong for the sake of being social. Nobody likes to be told they're wrong, so is "correctness" worth more than that person's feelings? Very oten it is not.
this is only the case in a 'wisdom of the crowd' world where people hold uncorrelated, authentic, self-formed opinions. If you're in a world of mass opinion and mania where ideas spread virally it ceases to be an indicator. In that environment its not truth that determined popularity of a belief, but how transmittable they are. In a world where gigantic companies produce sociality being anti-social in the most literal sense is a very real survival and truth-finding strategy.
And of course it's more important to be right than happy. Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism. If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
As Cormac McCarthy said in his last book: “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it's a bad bargain.”
Not really. It continues to be an indicator, just a less reliable one. As I said, it's one heuristic. It increases your probability of being right more than it decreases it, but it isn't an absolute rule.
Fundamentally, science itself relies on this heuristic to some extent. The idea that an experiment be reproducible is essentially the idea that the majority of testers should agree on observed reality. You just have to be careful not to conflate opinion with observed fact, or to treat it as more than a heuristic evaluator.
> Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism.
Not at all.
You do not need to be correct to be happy, and there is no correlation at all between your ability to correctly understand the world and your capacity (or worthiness) to experience joy or to help others experience it. You are allowed to be wrong and happy, or apathetic and happy, or ignorant and happy, or even nihilistic and happy.
> If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
There's more than one type of happiness. The kind you describe is hedonic. The other type is referred to as Eudamonic, and it comes from connection, service, and a sense of purpose.
You'll never get to experience the second type if other people don't want to be around you because you've decided that your own narrow perspective is the One True Perspective (TM).
Don't get me wrong, I reject post-modernity and the horrifying idea that there is no objective truth. I just also reject the idea that any of us are valid arbiters of that truth, or that we must know the truth before being allowed to experience happiness.
I like to be told I'm wrong. While it is true that I am a nobody it means I'm about to learn something.
I believe you, but in my own experience I've met more people who say this than who mean this.
Usually it's situational. People might genuinely like to be wrong when the novelty is fun or useful, for example in lab work or in low stakes classwork. However, they despise it with politics, their job, or anything else that might have actual consequences in their lives.
There's almost no time when it's better to try to convince somebody they're wrong. It won't help you, and it won't work anyway, so it won't help them either.
Sure if you're somebody's doctor, and even then you have to pick your battles.
Also, when a population group is large enough (e.g. entire world), it's quite likely a crazily-held belief is shared by other people, or people who would at least nod in agreement.
so your suggested response is the right approach, but it doesn't end there. you can try find a common belief and build up your argument from there. peoples opinions can be changed if you take the time to learn how their opinions are formed and present them with the opportunity to consider alternative ideas. ideally in such a way that they discover the truth on their own.
a key component is that unity enables change. it is better to be wrong but united, than right and divided. if we are united (and thus stay friends) then we can learn from being wrong and change direction. if we are divided then changing direction is difficult.
What most people do is just whine and repeat themselves because they don't understand all the ways they're being misunderstood. They lack self-awareness because they lack sufficient experience hearing and digesting the arguments from the other sides. This is a missed opportunity.
What people should do instead is leverage their self-awareness once they have the spotlight and "magically know" which concerns to address when they are given that brief window of rebuttal. It's hard to get attention, so they must strike when the iron is hot. It takes a lot of experience, and most never get to that level. Repetition signals to everyone else they don't really know what they're talking about.
The majority of the audience may actually be on your side agreeing with you, but they won't stick their neck out for the truth if they know they're less informed and less experienced than you, yet even you still failed. They have no chance to do any better, so they just shut the fuck up. Everyone languishes. Your point is noted, but not winning. All you did was paint a target on your back for the next time you say anything. People would rather be winning than right. Agreeing with you once doesn't mean they side with you.
Im going out on a limb here, but I'd say intelligent people will tell you - without a doubt - being right. Because being happy is a perception and always a transitive state. There's nothing holding you from being both right and happy.
> Nobody likes to be told they're wrong
Thats actually a southern european way of looking at things; Its a cultural trace that varies a lot by region. Pointing flaws in plans is actually something I saw as worthy of an appraisal in Germany.
Also, I always tell people when I think they are wrong. I no longer insist or argue, just point out what lead me to the conclusion; you don't want to be in the blast radius of a deaf manager, an incompetent colleague or a delusional partner. Win-win.
Take a thousand subjects. I’m going to be wrong about 990 of them. Because I know just enough about it to think I might have a clue.
You could probably read up on something for five hours and have a better opinion on it than most people that you meet.
How many things are just passively received opinion? And what kind of signal is that? Oh no, all the Jacks and Jones disagree with me.
On the other hand there are some cases where you can go down some dark rabbit hole and gain false knowledge and education. Maybe studying political science or something.
Also this document is basically just how I act, or how I would still act if I was less self-aware; some combination of the two.
I suspect the author may have written this partly as a self-critique.