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Comment by jpr | Hacker News Reader

Uh-oh, if 3/4 of people can't conversate, couldn't it just be that people aren't meant to do that?

I know I’m going against the grain here, but I’ve always been suspicious of people who claim that humans are a “social animal.” Thing is, the concept is a continuum, yet most people who say it mean it in a context like ants, bees and bonobo apes, when I happen to believe that the social behavior of lions and wolves is more apt. (Humans are best off in small family clusters, with significant periods of time in their life alone or paired off.) Humans have engaged in antisocial and asocial activities (monasteries, homesteads, and hermitage) for all of recorded history, and I resent those today who seem to delight in trying to make other gregarious like themselves.

Monasteries and homesteads have never attracted a significant proportion of the population, and they're not all that solitary, either.

Humans are a social animal, and if you're not convinced of that, study the psychological effects of feral children and solitary confinement.

Read what I wrote more closely. I didn’t say “no contacts,” I said “few.” Being social doesn’t imply packing our “monkeyspheres” to the 100 person maximum that the social butterflies seem to want to subject everybody to.

Post-neolithic age humans are easily the most social animal in existence!!! Any human that does not grow or hunt their own food is a social animal whose existence depends on a large interacting society. Even monks in remote monastaries rely on support from churches who need priests with good communication skills to put the fear of god into as many people as possible to exist.

There are countries where people are not used to having conversations. I've heard of a wedding of a cameroonian to an american, where the cameroonian guests thought the american guests were crazy because they spoke so much.

I've never been to Cameroon, but I've been to a lot of countries where they think Americans speak too much (and too loudly!). That doesn't mean that they don't have conversations, just that they don't yabber on quite so incessantly about nothing as Americans do. Americans really do talk a lot, and about nothing.

One of my first exposures to real-life Americans was riding a bus in London with a bunch of American tourists who kept saying "Ooooooooohhh, look at all those _peeeeoplee!" as if they were shocked that one of the major streets in one of the world's largest cities should have a lot of people on it.

I think he meant 3/4 of the people reading the post, which is probably not representative of the entire population.

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