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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

Something that goes unquestioned in this article is that you want to live with people who are like you down to the same taste in video games. I find this not to be true for me, and that I find it easiest to live with people that are different enough that you end up needing to use kindness to relate to each other.

After having felt isolated in my previous living situations, I'm now in a complex where we all hang out in the parking lot most afternoons. I'm a software engineer, my neighbors include bus drivers, clerks, landscapers, those who have no visible means of support, etc. It's a nice relaxed environment, which I don't experience when people who are too similar are around.

This is a problem with a lot of matching systems, sometimes similarity isn't desirable.

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Sometimes? How about almost always!

The whole "loneliness epidemic" is a result of people stuck in bubbles with other people like them.

Being compatible and being alike are not synonymous. What people will admit they like and what they truly like are not always the same thing either.

Think about it,why would someone like your own self make for good companionship? You already have your lonely self,why would more of what is like you be less lonely?

I have a very strong opinion on this matter: Symmetrically different people make for a compatible companion. As in the old "opposites attract",but with a requirent that the opposite attributes are symmetic which means they complement and complete the other.

Can you think of a significant stretch of time, before the advent of the loneliness epidemic, when people were any less stuck in their bubbles? Unless we've only just discovered loneliness, there can't be much of a correlation between loneliness and bubbliness.

I think your argument about symmetrically different people being compatible is probably accurate, but this points to happiness in the bubble. A bubble is really a collection of people who perceive the world with the same basis, more so than share all the same opinions. Since the bubble shares a basis, there is more likely to be people in that bubble that are truly symmetric to you on the substituent axes of the bubble's basis, than say a person in any other bubble.

There is an underlying assumption to my argument, that opinions within the bubble are somewhat uniformly distributed along each axis, but this has been the majority case in any bubble I've been in.

I mean certainly a bubble in some form is always present and it always causes societal issues. It just happens to be more precise and effective at isolating you thanks to modern tech.

Before the internet, you exhaust the pool of available people pretty fast due to difficilty of communication. If you want to talk to someone you had to know their phone numbet and you may not know much about them outside of hear-say. Your bubble maybe the area you live in and the activities you enage in but discovering new people meant having to spend a significant amount of time in person interacting with someone. You may know they live somewhat within your bubble you don't get to message them for a while and checkout their various social media profiles.

I think of "Sienfeld",even thou they exaggerate a bit on that show,all the people they meet,date,work with are all within the same social bubble. But they still had to go on dates or interact with people in person before getting to write them off. If that was today, George Costanza would hardly get a tinder match and even then he'd write off those women after a message or two. Or he may use a more bubbled app.

I am just saying communication has gotten a lot easier which allowed us to build better bubbles. Loneliness isn't new but the effectiveness of our bubbles are much better than in the past.

I don't think the article is saying that everyone must match to that level of specifiety, or that your preferences must match your own characteristics. I'm sure some people would try to find people just like them, but you could just list your "must haves", or even exclude people like you.

A good example is OKC (the dating site), which asks you a bunch of questions, and then lets you choose one or more "acceptable" answers, and how strongly you feel about that. You can choose to accept all answers for most questions, or to say the other person must answer exactly one way, it's up to the user.

You don't know what you don't know. Those questions merely isolate you in a bubble. They prevent you from discovering the uncomfortable different which might actually be exactly what you need.

It cuts both ways though. You only have so much time you’ll spend socializing. In a lifetime you’ll meet maybe 0.001% of the people you possibly could have. If you aren’t discerning with who you give your time to, you’ll miss out on more and more of what could have been better relationships.

It’s easiest demonstrated at large events or parties: there might be 200 people you could meet, and you have 3 hours there. If you weren’t discerning, you’ll spend 80% of your time just with whoever happened to be loudest and you’ll not meet lots of the more compatible people there. In reality, you can make snap decisions about whether a relationship is worth pursuing with > 50% chance. “This person is whining about how awful their spouse is”: probably not someone you’ll be able to mutually respect. “This person refuses to make eye contact with me”: probably not someone you’ll have any real intimacy with. And so on. These might be wrong 20% of the time you apply them, but even so you’ve boosted your chance of meeting someone compatible at this 3 hour party. These aren’t questions like “I like to play Super Mario Bros”, these are trying to gauge real deep-seated, fundamental personality traits like “I’m driven by a curiosity of the world around me”, or “I tend to the people in my life”. These are things that really do matter in relationships. I know I want my friends or spouse to tend to the people in their life. I know that without curious people around me I lose my motivation. Take that 0.001% of the world you’ll ever meet and be more discerning about which 0.001% that is. There’s nothing wrong with being selective about who you let into your life.

To explore any vast search space, you have to apply some randomness though.

Precisely because you can never explore more than a tiny bit, you can't know your snap judgements are not systematically blinding you to important stuff without just trying things at random sometimes.

Optimization problems are for robots, not human beings.

Be a good human. And you will attract good humans.

>I'm now in a complex where we all hang out in the parking lot most afternoons.

Sounds like you have something rare and valuable.

Anyway, you make good points. From the point of view of society's health, it's good to create connections between people of different points of view, and this project could end up being harmful if it cloisters likeminded folks together. I would guess that many of the properties listed (such as being a musician or enjoying hiking) cut across fairly wide swaths of society, however.

i want to live in such a complex too.

I live in a mexican neighborhood and I see them talking to each other on the street but my spanish is bad to follow the conversation at their speed.

Just keep at it! When I first moved to Japan, I couldn't have a good conversation with anyone. I eventually met a young woman with Downes syndrome and she kindly chatted with me every time she met me. It was such a huge help! There was an older woman who would see me gardening in containers and come over to give me advice. I couldn't follow what she was saying at all, but she kept coming over and chatting anyway. I kept going in to corner stores and chatting with the staff -- nothing too long. Just a few sentences each time. I went every single day (even now, I know all the staff of every convenience store in town!) Eventually your language gets better and better and better. There is always someone who is lonely, or kind who you can chat to :-) Just keep smiling. Keep making contact. Say hello to everyone you meet. Every day try to have a short conversation with someone. You'll eventually find people who will be happy to chat with you in Spanish.

Personality, while much harder to measure than interests, is a much better way to determine if people can be friends. And “interests”, unless you take them very seriously like being an amateur golfer or musician or something, are quite ephemeral; I tend to share interests with friends because we became friends first and then both got into new hobbies together, not vice versa.

Most people choose friends who are similar to themselves, even at a genetic level: https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/friends_are_the_famil.... Social homophily is well-studied and I would assume that you are an outlier.

> people that are different enough that you end up needing to use kindness to relate to each other

I've never heard it put quite this way before, and it's so true. Thanks for this.

This is a crucial point,

Indeed, the situation you describe illustrates a lot of things this post misses. That friends and acquaintances are the cure for loneliness, not roommates (back in the forgotten days when people had friends and could easily rent apartments, "never choose friends for roommates" was a common saying - you spend too much time around roommates and have too many petty disagreements with them). That extra time and seemingly random spaces are best places to "hang out", meet people, and enjoy their presence. That different and contrasting interests can sometimes bring people together.

The problem is that the rich complex of relationships involved in friendship tempts the entrepreneurial minded to exploit that richness and destroy those relationships through monetization. And indeed, the last fifty or hundred and fifty years of history is that. So there's really nothing left (at least for the monetizers) and the opportunities for roommate monetization are absurd fantasies of trying to light ashes on fire again ... and so-forth.

>"never choose friends for roommates" was a common saying - you spend too much time around roommates and have too many petty disagreements with them

In my experience, great conversations more than make up for petty disagreements. In any case, if you move into a house with people you aren't currently friends with, you aren't increasing your risk of losing any of your current friends. And if you make friends with your new roommates, that will help you navigate petty disagreements more easily. (Also, roommate matching software could try to identify and prevent the most common causes of petty disagreements.)

>The problem is that the rich complex of relationships involved in friendship tempts the entrepreneurial minded to exploit that richness and destroy those relationships through monetization. And indeed, the last fifty or hundred and fifty years of history is that. So there's really nothing left (at least for the monetizers) and the opportunities for roommate monetization are absurd fantasies of trying to light ashes on fire again ... and so-forth.

I think the interaction between business and friendship is much too complex and heterogenous to be easily summarized as "businesses hurt friendship" or "businesses help friendship". Some businesses harm friendship (multi-level marketing schemes). Others build friendship (bars, sports leagues, adventure travel). You have to look at a particular business to determine whether it hurts or helps. You're making a very strong generalization without any supporting evidence.

Agreed, 100%. People close to you are usually your opposites.

It feels like you are making sweeping generalizations. “Software engineer” applies to a massive variety of people, all across gender & sexual identity spectrums, socioeconomic backgrounds, races, ancestries, religious beliefs, favorite sports teams, food preferences, political opinions, etc.

What you’ve written up sounds like a sanctimonious appeal to make yourself sound more “blue collar” especially by choosing to describe diversity in your apartment building based essentially solely on occupation status and implicitly contrasting engineers with “needing to use kindness to relate to each other” (something all my engineer coworkers seem to be exceptionally good at, for instance).

I’d be willing to wager highly that if you are having trouble socializing with engineering peers, you are probably the reason for the trouble. If you can’t find exceptionally wide diversity in a very generic field like software engineering, it suggests you’re not trying very hard.

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