Intellectual Loneliness
perell.com
perell.com
My experience is that when you're in my position, it's getting harder and harder (with age) to find people who are interested in talking about ideas, entertaining the curiosities in life without some agenda/getting offended by the controversial ones, talking about possibilities and concepts (rather than objects). Like having conversations on advanced mode with people who are similar.
Often times at parties, when I get bored, I think of a quote, "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events/things. Small minds discuss wine."
It's getting more and more common that I find people just wanting to talk about wine. Or the equivalent. Stuff that's completely forgettable after you leave the party. I mean that stuff is fine, and there's nothing wrong with talking about good food you've had, some articles you've read, movies seen, etc. too. And to be funny and engaging while talking about it. It just feels like... after you're done talking about that, what then?
Or if I do meet people who are intellectually interesting, how to get more connected or where to take it after a chance meeting and pleasant chat?
That said, what do I have to offer at this stage of my life either, to a stranger? I'm unmarried, so I don't have kids or the mortgage to talk about. I'm not a CEO or someone powerful. Also I'm single -- what are people supposed do with that? Don't have a lot of great reasons for anyone to want to go out of their way to spend more time with me after even an interesting 30 min conversation, without some other excuse.
We're not all living close together in shared housing to make intellectually stimulating conversations natural and prolonged. People have their lives to lead, not sit around talking about theoretical ideas. To contact the few people I've found who are interesting would be... how? "Would you like to schedule a get-together again for a conversation date?"
It's not going to get easier either. Probably in a few years I'll be the really odd guy. Eh, it's a life choice I've made, I realize that too -- to be more interested in ideas and experiences than say... people.
I figure I'd better find some interesting hobbies to make up for the lack of intellectual stimulation. But deeper, what am I working towards? For whom? So, sometimes I think of changing jobs just to see more of the world and gather experiences to be able to have more intellectually stimulating conversations. Learn about VC? Hear about more companies? Where/how?
Yeah, it's a bit of a problem sometimes to ponder.
The owner of the apartment building, an older fellow, would also come by. He'd just sit quietly in a corner, munching on chicken wings. After a few times of this, I asked him, why are you coming here hanging out with people 30 years younger? Don't you find us boring?
He said no, no. This is fascinating! Nowhere else have I encountered people who talk about the things you guys do. I just marvel at it!
Sounds pretty good - try it! The person you were talking to may feel exactly the same way.
And interesting hobbies? Definitely yes. Try getting into playing an instrument for example. If you like it, it will keep you busy the rest of your life if you want.
> But deeper, what am I working towards? For whom?
If I get to feeling like this, I like to think about my 2 cats. I love having them, they obviously love being around me, because they are within sight most of the time. But what is their purpose for existence? Do we all need a purpose for existence, or is the fact that we do exist good enough? Speaking of pets, that's another great thing to try out. Having something else living with you takes you out of your head.
We are human beings, not human doings. If you feel like doing something, great. If not, just ... be.
I think most people in this thread misunderstood the meaning behind the post (or maybe I did). This isn't about one's superiority, it's about the fact that there aren't enough people interested in talking about ideas.
People here said that someone like that would get bored if others picked the wrong topics. I don't think so. Even when I don't have a direct interest in a topic, I'm always open to learning more. But as you said, and I think this is what the article meant, many people do not have the habit of intellectual discussion. Yes, they are able to communicate, but their interests are shallow.
There was an argument here about how there's no difference between citing Plato and knowing everything about Manchester United (I think this is what MU meant). It depends. If you are only citing Plato because this is what you were taught, then there is no difference. It's a big difference if you cite Plato when you're trying to figure out why something is the way it is and you find out he had similar interests and ideas about it. The key isn't the imitation itself, but the reason why it's done. Otherwise, it's just another cargo cult.
I don't know if it's laziness of mind, cheap dopamine or something else, but it's rare to meet someone with real interests, one who's passionate about struggling with ideas, playing with them, discussing them.
But if one person starts talking about how the business of a sports franchise works, who makes money and who doesn't, the operating costs of a team, and the dynamics between owners and players, I'm all ears.
Maybe I just want to understand how the more complicated things work. It's not that interesting to talk about how he slid into home and nearly got tagged out.
But most people don’t care about the why’s or the how’s on or off the field, and mainly just want to brag about their team (or complain if their team is bad.)
I wonder how much of this is age related and how much of it is that people just have less mental room for intellectual endeavors than they used to? I was raised by what I would consider 'engaged citizens': Neither of my parents had college degrees or 'fancy' jobs (my dad's white collar semi-professional accounting gig was the top of the line for my family), and they followed ideas. We discussed news articles, stuff in science magazines and online, etc. One topic my dad (60s) and I keep returning to is that the world requires way more of his brain power than it did 30 years ago.
It's less and less feasible to maintain an interest in ideas if you aren't folded into a profession or career that lets you combine your interest with your work.
Take the difference in single versus dual income households, for example. I have lots of time for ideas because I've got someone doing the household chores. (And likewise, my sister has a lot of time for HER hobbies because I'm breadwinning for us). Now throw that on top of the pile with everybody outside of tech feeling like their employment is precarious, inflation, the pandemic, and general social instability, and I wouldn't be shocked if people just don't have the bandwidth.
I just got out of legally enforced poverty in 2019 and the difference not being in survival mode made to my ability to have intellectual interests and conversations is IMMENSE.
Uh, you're single? That's amazing! The world is your oyster! If you think you're boring now, just wait until you're a cleaning, feeding, peek-a-booing family machine.
Isn't it better to discuss wine and food and holidays and enjoy the little time we have together? Isn't that actually the most intelligent thing to do?
And sure, discussing wine can be posturing. It can also serve as a simple topic to establish social connection for people who are otherwise not entirely comfortable.
From there you can ask questions about what people care about, what they are afraid of, what they love, what they would do in a world without wine, experienced they have had or how they would act in a difficult hypothetical situation.
Ideas, experiences and people don’t have to be entirely discrete things.
Some would call it narrow mindedness, some would call it focus.
If you miss shared housing, why did you move out of it ? I've tried living alone in my early college days, that was probably a good experience (even though made me kind of waste a few years), I don't think that I would ever do that again...
To counter with a more famous quote: "in vino veritas."
A conversation's quality is the product of each participant's contributions, so perhaps there are ways you can enliven or guide the conversation to improve the experience for everyone. (Chances are you aren't the only person secretly thinking it's dull.)
> there's nothing wrong with talking about good food you've had, some articles you've read, movies seen, etc. too. And to be funny and engaging while talking about it. It just feels like... after you're done talking about that, what then?
Next you can use those shared topics to move beyond the what to the why, from facts to opinions, and from those to deep truths about ourselves and our world.
"Oh cool you liked Batman v Superman? I couldn't see past the explosions, what did you like about it that I must've missed?"
"Well the way the villain pitted the two heroes against each other reminded me of how when I was younger…"
or
"Well the scene where Superman gets nuked in orbit but then revives from the sun made me wonder about how radiation…"
Not to write off an entire profession, but I doubt venture capitalists can hold a candle to journalists when it comes to interesting experiences or conversations. I had far more interesting stories to tell when I worked in retail than when I worked in tech. Perhaps status is getting conflated with "having good conversations at parties" a little bit here.
When I started reading again my world caught on fire. A good book is vastly, unimaginably better than doom scrolling, and the wealth of ideas and history and inspiration that starts to accumulate as you read more is life changing. For example, I learned how to properly build habits, how my childhood in a cult came about and what other people who left have done to come to terms with it, and endless interesting facts about lifelong hobbies and interests. Reading is great.
"Oh my god, they're not going to do predictable thing __X__ are they? Bwahaha"
"Hahahaha, this dialog is completely unbelievable"
"Welp, that unwinds all the interesting things happening in that character's arc."
A couple things that laughter can't even redeem:
- Incessant deus ex machina. The prose can be good, the dialog believable, the world interesting, and the characters likable... but if all the problems just get waved away in some random unpredictable way, that's infuriating.
- Even worse: when a POV character has an ace up their sleeve the entire time that could have been played at any point to avoid all the conflict, and the only reason why we're in suspense is that POV character didn't share that with us.
These books give me hope I could write a book.
I’m not sure where the disconnect lies, between the people that view this as a huge problem with nonfiction and the rest. I don’t think it’s book selection, because I’ll often read a book where I felt the last half was 90% rehashing, and in the reviews no one else will mention that the author ran out of interesting things to say halfway through.
If you ask me at different times I'll give different answers, but some are just on top:
War of the Worlds, Lord of the Rings, The Mote in God's Eye, Replay, Earth Abides, 20000 Leagues Under The Sea, 2001, Nothing Like It In The World, Reach For The Sky, Winnie The Pooh, The Last of the Mohicans, The Hunt for Red October, With the Old Breed, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, Moby Dick, Shogun, Romeo and Juliet
I envy anyone reading these for the first time!
A habit I’ve picked up is to follow the deaths of famous authors (the NYT will feature one on regularly on their home page). When that happens, I like to read about their life and oeuvre and pick up one of their most famous books, which is usually both very interesting and worthwhile.
You can also just go to Barnes and Noble and wander around. Find the genre you like, poke around, and you’ll probably recognize some of the titles or authors, which is often a good sign.
If you have some favorite authors, look up their lesser known books! The fact that you liked their other work is a good sign.
Over time, you will develop a long list of books on your list so you can start getting more selective. Check the Goodreads reviews. Try to understand how this book fits into the bigger picture and whether it or the subject seem significant to you.
Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong early on. Imagine you were just being exposed to film/tv for the first time and you ask for recommendations. ‘I dunno, Breaking Bad? The Godfather? Titanic?’ Even though there’s a lot of trash out there, the best books, like the best movies, are easy to find and there are tons of rankings and compilations.
Don't just read books because they have a good reputation in general.
Business oriented: try your hand at any of the best books on x, by forbes. Google the list "forbes list of best books". Its prob circa 2010ish. They put books on leadership (annapurna, great read), entrepreneurship, product (beijing jeep), etc etc. Some really solid stuff
Pulitzer lists: Just go on wikipedia anf look at winners by year. For example, controversial but interesting : guns germs and steel.
Reco engines: I think i used tastekid a loog time ago. Type in a book, it would give you recommendations on books you might like. With advances in ML, I'm sure there are tons of engines doing the same now
This is just like the great of life - don't fear failure.
Reading a book you wind up hating is way better then spending that time trying to optimize your process to avoid bad books.
If you do want to look for more promising things, reading is still your best tool.
I used to use what I called the two-minute test:
At a bookstore or library, pull a book off the shelf, read it for two minutes, then put it back.
Often you'll find you really don't want to put it back.
If so, then give it a shot.
I wish I could revert to my university learning style (late 1990s~early 2000s) which has zero internet and we had to figure out things from books even for experimental classes (e.g. back then no one had the luxury to have one's own electronics lab for introductory electronics classes, so we had to cherish the time in lan sections and read books for questions we couldn't solve in lab). It was a bit like learning programming in 60/70s -- you submit a program to mainframe and get the result next morning.
Usually by the cover.
Some did interested me, but they were rare. When I have to try 15 books to find 1 I like, it becomes frustrating and expensive.
that made me think "what a great term"
Smoothly ditching a party they don't feel stimulated by is not the worst strategy in the world. But some people I know have the skill of finding a subject of conversation with practically everyone they meet at a party. One of them has literally talked to British Royalty, yet seemed to have no difficulty holding a conversation with a man with limited education, some substance abuse issues, and assorted other difficulties in life.
It seems to me that this is a valuable skill to aspire to. And if at first glance nobody at the party seems to have anything in common with you — maybe that's all the more of an opportunity to hear about views and experiences outside one's usual circles?
I don’t think the solution is what the author does though. I mean, If you really can’t find someone interesting to engage with at any party or social event… I mean it’s a cliche to say this, but maybe it’s you?
The ability to extract valuable entertainment or information from all conversations is, though. I am no expert in this, and I have actively fled from conversations that started to center on someone's hobby horse without much escape or diversion, but I know people who can enter a conversation on anything and, even just by asking smart questions, emerge better from them.
I envy those people.
I mean, it can be fun and enjoyable, but it does not help loneliness, no more then business meeting.
It's simple actually, the techniques in winning friends and influencing people is a good place to start. Most people love talking about themselves and their interests. In reality, for anyone seeking relationships and real connections, "tricking" people to talk about what they want is empty, hallow, and disappointing. It will almost never be reciprocated.
The banality of everyday Life is soul-crushing leading to ennui. I think it is in large part due to our consumerist/distraction-filled society (itself a product of Technology) and catering to the lowest common denominator in everything.
Questions plaguing me:
- Why do i need to conform to social mores?
- Why must i accommodate myself to "popular culture"?
- Why don't people stop what they are doing, take a step back and ask themselves "Where are We and How did We get Here"?
- What have we "Gained" and What have we "Lost"?
- What exactly has "Progressed" and what "Regressed"?
- Why don't people want to face "Reality" but are willing to live in any "Fantasy" of their making/subscribing?
- Is this all there is to my Life?
- How do i cope with the utter meaninglessness of it all?
I don't think even the social mores of breaking bread or offering your guests food and water came from the same place.
My response to this is because people who conform to social mores and have at least a little accomodation to popular culture are more interesting and relatable people. People who don't are grating and can be very difficult to live with and be around.
Being able to relate to and get along with others makes life a whole lot more fulfilling.
- Why do i need to conform to social mores?
- Why must i accommodate myself to "popular culture"? Worrying about these questions is not unique, nor special. You're trying to find an escape hatch to reality. Those do not exist.
If you want to really effect change, stop focusing on the why, and start focusing on the how. We have enough armchair philosophers to last a lifetime.
As Krishnamurti said; "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
The point is not that the questions are special/unique; it is that they are fundamental, perennial and plague everybody (the "me" is just a placeholder). The tragedy of existence is that there can be no settled answer to them and each of us have to find out for himself or subscribe to somebody else's answer.
But then again as Camus said; "Beginning to Think is beginning to be undermined".
Your start with realizing something is not quite right but unable to place your finger on it, begin asking questions each of which only reveals the rest of the layers of the onion and before you know it are starting to suffer from cognitive dissonance. You then abandon looking for answers and start to focus on learning to cope with the non-answers and getting on with your Life.
Actually, there are a lot of people who do that, but they are not the majority. They are these people you probably look up to; they are these people who have said: "Ok, enough is enough. I gotta try this, I gotta face my fears, and just take the leap of faith, because it's the only viable way for me to live my life fully". Anyone who tries to do things a bit differently has to be able to stand alone, I would think, but not in isolation, but as a negation to whatever they are trying to fight against.
If you think life is banal and soul crushing, then this is a reflection on you, not on life. I suggest you get counseling.
I live like a complete stranger where I am, I spend 99.9% of my time alone. Read alone, eat alone, walk alone, sleep alone.
Most of my life is about coding, reading and walking long distances accros countries. And I am pretty happy about my life right now.
I get to have a life where I make almost no compromise, I live so cheaply that I don't really even need to work anymore.
But then you are missing out on having kids, spending time with friends, family, having stability, a dog, a hobby you can pursue, chitchat, routine, etc.
Again, nobody is forcing you to anything, it seems like you just need to take a few days just by yourself, facing your own thought and exploring what you really want to do.
The thing I find stupid in this article, is that the author goes to a party and leave early because he does not like partying.
Well, I don't either. But I have learnt that I don't a long time ago. So I don't go to parties. I don't need to make up excuses about why I am leaving.
- The Smiths
Say what you like about Morrisssey[1] but he's had some great social observations.
1. And you really should for many reasons.
An intelligent person will find any profession or hobby interesting, and thus everyone is interesting.
Saying everyone is a bore is a hallmark of a lack of intelligence. You are basically saying “I only have a very narrow set of topics I find interesting. I’m so void of intellectual curiosity, I’m not interesting in expanding my mind or knowledge into other topics.”
No, I think being interested in things is a completely different dimension from intelligence. You can be average in intelligence and extremely high in being interested. Or you can be high in intelligence and very depressed, then you don't have interest in anything.
Trust me, people who don't keen on learning won't write a blog post like this. Overthinking, overanalyzing and full of self-doubt is the sign of intelligence. :)
I know someone who has social anxiety that drives them from social events, but also makes it difficult for them to do small talk. So instead, they read. A lot. Literature, science, philosophy, gardening... That's where the next problem comes in. They find some fascinating fact and think "this is so interesting, next time I'm tongue tied, I'll remember to mention it!". That's when they realise that most people want to talk about what they ate for breakfast, who won the sports event, what their 6 year old said to teacher, whether some famous person is an asshole or not. Not a lot of people want to get down into the belly of a complex subject, debate the finer points of some issue. And that's fine, but my friend just can't do that type of conversation for more than a minute or two before going completely blank and then making some excuse for moving on.
Worse, there are people who take offence at intellectual conversation. Anything from mild annoyance ("huh? What are you talking about?") to outright insult ("Oh, somebody swallowed a dictionary" / "You think you're so smart")
As someone else pointed out, you can go online and try to find like minded people, but that can be so toxic. And not just the wider internet, but specialist groups that have a lot in common. Why, a knitting group ended up front page on the internet a while back because they tore each other apart in the middle of some purity spiral.
This is said pejoratively, but people want to talk about these things because it allows for a two-sided conversation, rather than a unasked-for lecture from someone who’s read ten Wikipedia pages on the topic.
> Not a lot of people want to get down into the belly of a complex subject
My experience is the opposite. People love to do this, when 1) they know something about the topic AND 2) you are genuinely interested in their thoughts.
The “sports event” probably has more complexity and depth than you expect. Why not (literally) meet people where they are?
- ice hockey? i don't know much about ice hockey, what are the rules / what makes team X so good - do you play sports yourself? what do you like? - what made you get into watching sports / how often / with whom?
Either you get a sports nerd that can talk at length about games and rules and training and teams and athletes, which is fascinating in a very nerdy way. Or you get someone who plays X with their kid, or has a small dad softball team, at which point you can ask what the other dads do, get a glimpse of a social network outside of your horizon. Or you can get into someone's love of sport and what situations it helped them overcome in their life.
I've had the "did you watch the game last night" conversation at airport bars and I learned so about other people from them. Knowing that people I would at first file under "loud schmuck with a basketball shirt" turns into someone who's been training every day trying to keep prison and addiction at bay is immensely intellectually enriching .
It's a bit like telling someone that likes Jazz that they should just like auto-tune pop music because it's what everyone else likes.
I'm self-aware enough to have considered that I might just be bad at communicating but still don't seem to be able to do much about it.
> My experience is the opposite.
I guess most people would like to be seen as an "everyman" that can talk to anyone but we're just not all wired that way.
There's plenty of popular culture tropes that deal with that. E.g. "Did you see that ludicrous display last night"[1]
It gets easier with age but being boring, if you want to call it that, is OK too.
It's quite another to find out later you've been ridiculed to others for trying to discuss it at all. :D
Before the internet this kind of "nerd bashing" was just the standard way of the world and you would probably grow a thicker skin without realising it.
Life became a bit more colourful and interesting when we could connect with people all over the world. It really was a seismic shift for a lot of people.
The "trick" I use to get to that point is to always steer the conversation so that I can learn something new with the next question I am asking, and let the conversation flow from there. Even with people who don't have any deep intellectual pursuits, don't read books, they have lived, come from somewhere, have family, kids, have experiences you didn't have, all of which are surely deep enough to keep your interest for 15 minutes.
It's hard to give much more input without knowing the kind of parties the author is attending in the first place. Living in a bigger US city, almost every event I've been going to (which I'm going to call "parties for nerds"), I feel like the ruffian while people discussing science, art, politics, and I can have a grand time just sitting there and not interacting at all, just taking it in.
And it might totally be the case that the author just doesn't like being around people, but framing it through the lense of intellect is missing out on the richness of people out there.
I feel there's just a low likelihood that in any single encounter, that the person is going to be interested in going where you're going. That could be conversations, dating and similar.
Putting your stuff on Twitter is going to get the engagement you're looking for because you have a higher hit rate when you have thousands of viewers. When dating, you probably won't get that specific person to talk to you, but among a large pool, you'll likely find someone who reaches "good enough" territory.
Doing parties right is just improv. Go in with a "yes, and..." style of conversation. If you're learning something, it's about doing better at the improv. Otherwise, just have fun and play.
Two things I've experienced with this. First is that there seems to be a half-life on this activity. One day one may ask themselves, what tangible benefit have I gained from all these germs of wisdom and information I've gleaned over the years? Second is that invariably, outside of "hard" disciplines, there's nearly always a counter argument or viewpoint that can be equally compelling.
So for myself, the way two decades of intellectual curiosity manifests is the conversations I have with my kids. They generally think I'm a bore, but sometimes I relate something that seems to give them a spark.
To the point about there always being a counterpoint to anything—I’ve come to use that as a justification for how nothing we do, believe, or want is objectively necessary, and what truly matters more is whether we can all get each other to agree on a certain goal to then objectively judge our actions against. It seems to me that that agreement on goal or purpose for our actions is at the core of why people disagree on pretty much any issue.
I’m not saying that existentially it counts for anything but there are usually rewards to learning deeply about any worthwhile subject.
People are different and from that difference comes knowledge. What OP is missing is the interesting different point of views he missed from leaving all of those parties early.
I’m honestly a bit surprised about how this piece got so high on here. I guess that caters to a lot of our inevitable self-entitlement as an online community
It seems to go with getting older. My two best friends for intellectual conversation passed away in 2021. Just one such friend is left. TBD how that'll go. Two people can't make for the richness of intellectual conversation that three or four can. And the ghosts of the two who are gone could cast long shadows over the remaining two of us getting together much.
Hailing frequency open. (o:
I have found that four or more participants brings verve and more perspectives to the subject. Deeply engaging discussion is far more enjoyable (to me/to some) than tiresome chatter, quips, memes, and n-depth packed nonsense spewed for the sake of content-creation.
The anti-culture of consumer fetishism and media monetisation serves a completely different purpose.
“The best parties are a wild mixture of people. Take some actresses, a bearded painter, your visiting friends from Brussels, a politician, a hairdresser, and then toss them all together. It’s especially important to have all age groups. Of course I wouldn’t want to have hippies come crawling in with unwashed feet, but all the younger people I know are bright and attractive and have something to say and they dress like human beings. Another important party secret is I always add a splash of vodka to everything. Nobody knows and everyone ends up having a wonderful time.” - Joan Crawford
Friends from my hometown. Friends in my new city. Random people I met at a meetup and bars. Some elderly neighbors
I've told him he simply needs to wait for his friends to grow up. When I was his age, it was not apparent which of my classmates was going to interested in nerd stuff either. It's a thing to wait for, and you're lucky to find one or two other people who are actually into things.
I had a lot of friends growing up, but only a small group who were into the same interests.
Here's the thing though. If your interests are intellectual, you can turn almost anything in that direction. You don't know it yet when you're a child, but just about every interesting thing in the world can be viewed with an intellectual lens.
For instance football and sports in general. The variety of data is so large that people who manage sports teams analyse numbers to decide who the put on the field and how to play them. I have a friend who uses this kind of data to make money, despite him having zero interest in those sports. Sports data talk is also something that makes your input to discussions a bit less tired than the usual tropes people put out.
Business is another one of those topics where being a bit analytical and opening your eyes creates interesting conversations.
Finally, if people just don't want to think, they want to feel. Everyone has an emotional life and often at parties that's what they want to exercise. Get used to talking about ordinary things about life. Family, work, relationships. This is just surface scratching in many ways. You kinda need someone's bio to get an idea of what they care about, so get used to giving your own spiel and listening to others.
I imagine most people who try writing on the internet don't acquire any audience at all.
From my experience I've found that to be true throughout my life. One of my best ways of learning is to be in discussion or debate with others but in practice it's just so hard to achieve in practice. Both here on HN and elsewhere I often try to engage others in debate but to little or no avail, as discussion is often over before it's hardly begun and everyone's moved on to another topic.
For whatever reason, these days very few seem to want to expend the effort to get involved in long debates or intellectual arguments and I think that this is a terrible shame as we all need to hone our thoughts and ideas by bouncing them off others - and they don't necessarily form immediately. Weeks may pass by the time we reformulate our thoughts in response to someone's idea or proposition and by then it's often impossible to respond at all let alone in any adequate way.
Nothing typifies this problem more than the comments to most websites - and posts to HN are no exception. Irrespective of the importance or relevance of a subject or topic, it's all but discussed out and dead after 24 hours, and then after a week or two site moderators inevitably kill any further discussion by stopping new posts.
To me, closing further discussion on subjects is the antithesis of what the internet should be all about. Why closing ongoing discussion on websites is such a common practice has always been a mystery to me. (You'd think those running websites would want and welcome ongoing discussion but seemingly not.)
In many ways the internet has made intellectual loneliness even more acute, whilst it's provided us with a fecundity of information and ideas upon which we may ponder it's never really been good at letting us gain full intellectual enjoyment from those ideas through ongoing participation. Whilst we may participate in superficial ways through Twitter etc. we're still lonely. For many, short term shallow participation isn't a substitute for ongoing intellectual stimulation and fulfillment.
Closing discussions after some time is just a practical matter. When posts are organized by chronology, or even by vote count, discussion cannot scale beyond a few hundred posts without becoming very hard to navigate.
Look at the incentive a new participant has when choosing whether to post in a new or an old thread. A post added deep down a reply chain, or at page 100 of a forum will have very little visibility, it'll be lost in the noise compared to a post in a fresh thread.
I think the way discussion platforms organize information is far from perfect, and noise/visibility/organization is really what puts a practical limit on ongoing discussions.
As I see it, there are several levels to dealing with the 'messy' posts issue (topics where there are large numbers of replies). In essence, these 'levels' are more different classes of problem and they require different (more specific) solutions.
First, there's the 'uncompleted reply' problem. This where one intends to reply and for various reasons the poster is unable to do so. Reasons may include the cutoff
The relevant issue here is that the time of this post there is no other post in reply to this error and thus I ought to be able to remove it without disturbing any other part of the forum per se — ah but alas it's not possible as I've already exceeded some arbitrary time limit even though it has absolutely no relevance in this instance.
My full post further amplifies my reasons.
Searching is great when you have a common question (and when the search feature is vaguely usable!), but empirically it doesn't seem to work very well for anything broader than FAQ type content. Few people use search to navigate forums, and when you do the results aren't great.
As I see it, there are several levels to dealing with the 'messy' posts issue (topics where there are large numbers of replies). In essence, these 'levels' represent different classes of problem and thus they require different (more specific) solutions.
1. First, there's the 'uncompleted reply' problem. This is where one intends to reply to an existing post and for various reasons one is unable to do so. Reasons may include the website's cut-off time for posts being exceeded or that the poster hasn't had time to reply to a post for various reasons. As I see it, this is a bigger problem than missing an initial post to a story because it can leave existing arguments in a specific thread to remain open and or be incomplete.
On more than one occasion on HN I've said I'd get back to someone on a matter and missed the timeout deadline for various reasons. This unfinished action leaves that thread incomplete in that there is no logical outcome or conclusion in respect of the earlier commentary. The problem is exacerbated if the person to whom I'm replying has made new comment that requires a definite reply. Also, the absence of any reply from me is liable to make me look like an unreliable correspondent in the eyes of that person for seemingly ignoring him when in fact matters were outside my control. This may not seem important but I believe such etiquette is actually important, especially so if the previous poster has gone to the trouble of posting information that actually needs a reply.
There are some simple solutions to this: a website can have a definite cut-off time, say 14 days, for new post to a story, but it could have a longer time for those who've already posted a comment and who later want to reply to someone who has already posted to his or her comment/post.
2. The Correcting of Errors and Typos Problem. For me, there's little worse than to revisit and reread one my posts several days after I've posted it only to find some glaringly stupid mistake that makes a nonsense of what I've written and that I can no longer correct it due to an inane website policy that stops latter editing. Mistakes such as the inclusion of wrong or inappropriate words easily happen when one misses, say, a wrong auto-correction entry. Similarly, with other minor errors such as the wrong use of 'its' and 'it's', the same goes for possessives (the correct use of which I actually do understand but it doesn't stop me from mistyping them on occasions).
As everyone in book publishing knows you cannot publish a book without an editor by virtue of the fact that we're all blind to many of our own mistakes, thus we simply cannot pick up certain errors no matter how many times we may proofread them. These days, through necessity, it's not possible to have someone sitting at our side correcting our errors whilst we type. That said, the problem of blindly missing our own mistakes hasn't gone away. In effect, even after 30-plus years, NO website has found satisfactory ways of accommodating/correcting typos after posting.
What web designers are effectively saying to us is that they are 30 years or more behind the times and they could give a damn if they never caught up. Right, there's no incentive from web designers or makers of web standards to bring web publishing standards in line and level with normal book publishing—well that's the view from their perceptive and of course we poor hapless users have never have counted for much anyway. Frankly, it's an unmitigated disgrace, it's yet another instance of the unprofessional nature of the software industry - if you want actual proof then read this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247573088_Software'... (despite this article being nearly 28 years old, almost nothing has changed to change its findings).
There are many ways around this problem and they don't involve rocket science. There's the limited editing approach as well as the ability to edit certain words on an ongoing basis, especially so those involving the apostrophe as well as words such as 'them', 'then', 'whose', 'who's' and so on.
I fully acknowledge that changing the wording or meaning of text no matter how small and insignificant the change after someone has already posted to or commented on said text is completely unacceptable and should never happen. Here too there are some easy solutions: if text is altered after a post has been made then it's dead easy to flag that post with say a dagger '†' whereupon clicking on said dagger would reveal the original text that the poster actually replied to. Moreover, many variations along these lines come to mind.
Again, the real problem is that both those who run websites and who write the code for website comments don't actually give a damn about such niceties. Nor do they actually care about the fact that their laziness and ineptitude is contributing to the ever-increasing number of errors that we see appearing across the web not to mention the increasing general sloppiness of the web per se.
Nor do they care or worry that their rotten workmanship is further contributing to increased web information entropy—or, as is more likely, they don't actually understand what increasing information entropy actually means. There are many things wrong with the web and we would be well served if those who actually ran the web set higher standards through example. Applying higher standards to accuracy and presentation is an easy point from which to begin.
3. I could not agree more with the fact that extended 'run-on' results in terrible signal/noise ratios. But again, little or nothing has been done to ameliorate this problem over the same 30-plus years. Moreover, the matter is made worse by websites allowing posters to reply to the first poster in order that their response appear high up in the posting hierarchy. This problem could be fixed in an instant if the typical tree structure that's used in most posts were modified to both better reflect the actual subject matter of the post as well reflect a more accurate relative temporal position in the posting list (both metadata from posts along with temporal data should be used to ensure that posts appear within the hierarchy in the correct and most relevant order). For this to happen it's likely that each thread in reply to any given post may have to split to accurately reflect both its metadata status as well as its temporal position relative to all other posts.
I know that's a badly worded explanation but it'll have to for the moment. Again, I also need to point out that there has been precious little development in the way forums have been displayed over the last 30-plus years. Whether it's phpBB,WordPress, MyBB or whatever, none of them do a sufficiently satisfactory job that would ensure that 'discussions and debate can meaningfully continue beyond a day or two'. The fact that none of these forum programs has either the means or wherewithal in this regard simply means that those who have programmed them have failed dismally in achieving a workable solution.
I repeat that the web is in an unholy mess: if we follow exiting example then we see that it inevitably leads upwards from the lowest common denominator and not as it ought from the highest of standards and from the moist excellent of ergonomic design downwards. I am strongly of the belief that for the web to improve significantly from its current ratbag existence then excellence should always begin at the top. Standards of excellence could start by websites actually agreeing on something as seemingly trivial as reaching an agreement on unified forum timeout procedures.
>As I see it, this is a bigger problem than missing an initial post to a story because it can leave existing arguments in a specific thread to remain open and or be incomplete.
I can see your point of view, however I'd expect the problem to naturally resolve itself if people where provided with the incentive to do so. As you've pointed out, these limitations are here almost always because of website policies. I am more interested in starting with the reason these policies exist in the first place, than starting with their removal. While I dislike these policies and the reason they exist, I would be cautious and not simply assume they're entirely inane.
What we have is a proverbial Chesterton's fence that had to be explicitly added to the software, and that has become widespread among forum/discussion platforms.
The more interesting problem to me here is finding a way of structuring online conversation so that people will find it natural to enrich an existing discussion without suffering from noise. The reason it is more important is that threads are mostly not abandoned because of cut-off time or hardcoded limits, mostly people leave when a thread falls out of view and becomes hard to find again.
The problem we really have is a problem of noise, organization, and visibility of information.
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Let's look at another adjacent domain for a minute. There exist websites serving structured, user-contributed, long-lived information that people continue building upon for years, and not hours.
When people use software like Mediawiki, contributors have no trouble finding the right page to lookup information in or to add content to. This shows that a website can scale to very large amounts of information without a big duplication problem, and without needing to limit the lifetime of user-generated content to a few days.
If we contrast this to forums, the same topics are discussed again and again, month after month, but each individual contribution to a thread is lost after a few days because of the structure of discussion forums.
Unfortunately, while traditional wikis are great for building articles, they do not make for appreciably better forum software.
I believe there must be a way to solve the problems of long-lived discussions in forum software, by taking inspiration from how other sort of platforms manage to scale to vast amounts of information without excessive noise, duplication, or time limits.
But this has to be a more fundamental change than just adjusting the limits.
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>The Correcting of Errors and Typos Problem
I'm unsure how important this is. I see typos as an annoyance, that almost always a sufficiently interested reader will be able to correct on the fly. Language is very much redundant, so that people can omit a "not" in a sentence and a reader still guess that the writer meant for a negation to be in there.
A post so compact that a typo confuses the meaning entirely occurs occasionally, but it is rare, and empirically I've rarely seen a conversations being materially impacted by a typo. Except perhaps for people who insist on reacting to the noise more than they react to the information.
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I'll also note that even when talking about more substantial errors than typos, this isn't a fundamental or universal problem.
The problem of people editing old posts to change their meaning is well-known, I think, but also rarely matters very much. The only times I've seen that done, it was being played for laughs. A deceptive person would be caught very quickly (be it by archives, screenshots, or other witnesses), and the problem solves itself.
Popular forum Reddit, for instance, happily allows me to edit a month old post. Hacker News has more stringent limits. There is a tradeoff there, and it is sometimes annoying to see a limit being more conservative than it needs to be, but I don't see a fundamentally hard problem being held back by a lack of innovation there.
>Nor do they care or worry that their rotten workmanship is further contributing to increased web information entropy
I agree that ability to edit a post feels very nice, but I think the emphasis you put on this is excessive compared to the harm it does.
To be convinced that this problem is as important as you make it out to be, I'd want to be shown that it substantially affects the quality of discussions, first.
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>I could not agree more with the fact that extended 'run-on' results in terrible signal/noise ratios. But again, little or nothing has been done to ameliorate this problem over the same 30-plus years.
Right, and this is really THE problem I think is most important. I think we've had some slow improvements, in the form of going from flat discussions (traditional forums) to increasingly threaded discussions, and sorting of comments by votes.
A Hacker News or Reddit thread can accommodate a thousand comments without becoming impossible to navigate, where a 30 year old forum may have a hundred page, resulting in no visibility for anything but the first and last posts, no ability to have multiple discussions in parallel, and all the other obvious problems that directly result from the structure of the software.
I do think we've done a small amount of progress, but it has been excruciatingly slow, and there is room for a much better system that scales to higher amounts of information, and allows people to naturally build upon previous work, without artificial limitations becoming necessary.
> This problem could be fixed in an instant if the typical tree structure that's used in most posts were modified to both better reflect the actual subject matter of the post as well reflect a more accurate relative temporal position in the posting list (both metadata from posts along with temporal data should be used to ensure that posts appear within the hierarchy in the correct and most relevant order).
Right, I agree with this sentiment completely. I think more metadata is a way of addressing this, or at least some more interesting sorting method than letting people arbitrarily gain visibility by responding in the right place. Metadata may be a solution, but the best sort of metadata doesn't require adding many annotations to each post (or people will simply not bother). It should be there structurally.
Visibility (and sorting) are very important to the quality of a discussion, because that directly determines whether relevant or low quality posts will be seen and replied to. That seems obvious, but when software is a chronology (like a traditional forum) or even a tree of threads sorted only by votes and time (like HN), I think there is room for improvement.
>I know that's a badly worded explanation but it'll have to for the moment.
It would certainly be appreciated if you have something more detailed in mind, and if you find the time to elaborate. I'm interested.
>none of them do a sufficiently satisfactory job that would ensure that 'discussions and debate can meaningfully continue beyond a day or two'.
I agree with that, despite what I've said above about some relative level of progress having been achieved. Discussion software should be able to scale in terms of amount of information, and in terms of time. These two properties are only somewhat correlated.
>The fact that none of these forum programs has either the means or wherewithal in this regard simply means that those who have programmed them have failed dismally in achieving a workable solution.
This suggests that crafting a better solution would not be challenging to you. I'm not sure I know exactly what the better solution is, but I agree that we can do better, I'd like to see more people thinking about this, and I think this goes far beyond determining the optimal value for forum timeout limits. It's the structure that needs to evolve faster than it has.
The impact of all of this is not a trivial thing. There are a few billions of eyeballs on the internet, and the quality of discourse directly affects public opinion. If we organized information better, we would create tremendous value.
In some sense, Google understood the importance of this. Wikipedia succeeded in its particular niche. Much of the rest of the world does not seems to care very much about organizing information.
It’s one thing to want to discuss all these interesting things you’ve read, it’s another to expect everyone to be interested in the same things as you and turn away from them.
Maybe i have a problem…
Man. This sounds like 14 year old me thinking I'm just so beyond everybodys mental capacity and that's why I am lonely.
I don’t think I’m beyond everyone’s mental capacity, but I’m certainly beyond most people in terms of curiosity and fascination for subjects beyond general conversation. I’ve gotten better at driving conversation to deeper places, and surrounding myself with people who enjoy doing the same. But it’s often easier at social events to drink and stop caring.
> Intellectual loneliness is a challenge that many people feel, but nobody talks about. It’s built on a paradox where you feel alive when you’re learning on the Internet but soul-crushed when you try to talk about those same ideas with friends and family.
The author doesn't say, but it would be very illuminating to know, what happens when the author meets with the authors of the books and internet works they admire so much? Do they hit it off instantly? Or does the whole thing feel disappointing in the end?
Also, I don't see the "paradox" in preferring the Internet. It's part of a pattern when you zoom out a bit.
I like people, and I like new venues and adventures. I can do quite well at socializing. I have a fairly wide social graph (in the meatspace).
But it is tiring for me, as is a lot of stimuli. Just the way my brain works. I won't go into why. It just is, and will never be fixed; only accepted.
I used to work for a Japanese company, and made many, many trips to Tokyo. I went regularly, for over 20 years.
Tokyo is "External Stimuli Central." I would always come back from these trips, utterly exhausted.
Not everyone is matched appropriately and I find it takes a lot of effort, especially emotional effort to connect with someone you don’t know for the first time, at a party where there are a lot of distractions. Have you ever noticed people who glide effortlessly from person to person, and who are able to talk to anyone? Seek those people out and study how they interact with other humans.
Having good social skills is just as important as being well read, maybe even more so. A good book can be entertaining but it only takes a chance encounter to meet a life long friend, form a beneficial relationship, or meet a romantic partner. Part of me wonders if the OP were to meet one of the authors of the books he reads at a party, would he be able to interact with them? Probably not, and that’s my point exactly.
You’re going to go to a lot of parties in life, if you give up on them you are depriving yourself of valuable life experience. It has nothing to do with books or how smart you are.
I disagree, I've only read two posts by this individual (both posted on HN) and have never heard of him prior, and both times he came off as having a superiority complex.
Both his postings have the same basic message - "I'm too smart for normal people. People who disagree are obviously too stupid to understand how smart I am".
FWIW, the smartest and highest-IQ people I have known have had no problem relating to us normal people. This individual might be one of the smartest people in the world (I've no idea what his achievements are and I don't care enough to look it up[1]), but in his writings he comes of as someone of normal intelligence who wishes to portray themselves as someone of significant intelligence.
The only question I have is, why is this person's self-written ego-massages being posted to HN? Both the blogs posted here have been mostly self-congratulatory paeans to his imagined mental and intellectual superiority.
[1] Maybe someone else can tell us all what this person is famous for.
I’ve had the misfortune of battling with depression several times in my life and one of the less discussed features of the disorder is self-pity. It can make depressed people pretty unpleasant to be around which reinforces the lonely experience of the disorder.
This article definitely resonates with me in that way. Feeling alone even in a room full of people who like you, for example.
If that’s what the author is experiencing, writing articles like this is probably a coping mechanism, however, the content being less than flattering is why therapists generally tell us to journal (private) rather than blog (public). :-)
Small-talk and chit chat aren't hard. Nor are smiling and nodding, appearing interested, asking following questions, and making the occasional joke or funny observation. None of this is rocket science.
But there's a catch: the effort is all one way.
It's like normalising conversations about sport or TV. "But I'm not interested in sport or TV" becomes an unacceptable view because "most people" are. So you should definitely pretend to find the latest reality show as interesting as the most recent ball game because otherwise you "have no social skills."
Some people are able to do this.
But it's a forced choice, and people who are not interested in sport or TV should be allowed to prefer something different.
A conversation is a two-way street. Why do people initiate smalltalk about sports or TV? Because this is a common ground where the most people can contribute. So you start there and maybe together you steer towards more specific subjects where both parties have an interest. So if people initiate a conversation about these subjects with you, that should they are making an effort.
If you don't follow sports or tv, then you contribute another starting point for smalltalk.
People who want to skip smalltalk and jump directly to the "intellectually stimulating" subjects are typically the kind of people who just want to hear themselves talk about their favorite subject and don't care about other people except as an audience. In other words, bores.
But being a bore has nothing to do with IQ.
Of course there are also bores who are only able to talk about sports or tv. But if you think most people are only interested in these two subject, you probably confusing the starting point of smalltalk with the entire conversation.
I mean, it depends. I'm considered pretty socially adept (I can be an asshole, but usually it's due to other character flaws like selfishness and impatience rather than poor social skills), and I don't like sports or most TV shows. (I watched fewer than 5 TV shows or movies in 2021).
In my experience, with small talk it's about finding a common connection. People bring up stupid things (like the weather, TV, sportsballs) in order to find a point of connection. If you don't like the things the other person likes (sports/TV), then just saying "I don't like X" without offering a follow up shuts down the conversation. Socially it signals "I do not want to connect, leave me be."
I like to follow up with "Oh, X isn't my thing, but it sounds pretty cool, especially the INSERT THING THEY MENTIONED. That's kind of like Y (thing I like); have you seen that? Are they similar?" You can affirm people's interest in things without faking an interest yourself.
That being said, most chaos apes are not consciously aware of why they're doing things.
Where it gets difficult is that it really SHOULDN'T be one way, but when the majority of your interests are things that most people don't understand, they can't ask you questions and use your interests to connect to you like they would for most people.
The rhythm of a conversation doesn't dictate that you have the same interests, but it does dictate that you ask each other questions to find common ground. If one person doesn't understand the other well enough to ask the right questions, things get lopsided, which is where I think a lot of geeks struggle, especially as the experience differential compounds over time as we have fewer proper give-and-take conversations with peers growing up.
> I disagree, I've only read two posts by this individual (both posted on HN) and have never heard of him prior, and both times he came off as having a superiority complex.
A Confederacy of Dunces is a great book, but when you meet a real-life Ignatius Reilly, they’re much less amusing than the fictional version.
> Part of me wonders if the OP were to meet one of the authors of the books he reads at a party, would he be able to interact with them? Probably not
> You’re going to go to a lot of parties in life, if you give up on them
Why do you have this incessant need to make assumptions about the author and generalize?
You're also placing tremendous importance on socializing and parties. This is not something that's of importance or even relevance for many intellectuals and introverts. Most parties consist of unrewarding, mundane chit-chat, easily forgotten. Going to parties in the hopes of finding a new "life long friend" or "beneficial relationship" is like playing the lottery.
Also, if you're going to place that much importance on parties, you need to define what kind of parties, then we can address those discretely. Company events? Parties with friends? Relatives? Conferences? Burning man?
Then something changed for me, I went to a party and actually tried to talk to people. I approached it like the challenge of learning a new skill or technology. If you appear “bored” in a conversation people pick up on it quickly — they too are likely going through the same set of emotions. The challenge is to keep a conversation going long enough and authentically enough to develop a comfort with the other person, once you do that you can talk freely and people “open up”. They will tell you things that are actually interesting and small talk will be no more. When this occurs, it’s (at least for me) the exact same feeling as getting into a good book, hours can pass without you knowing it.
When I hear someone complain about hating small talk, it’s a sign of their own naivety and the irony is that the thing they most crave —- meaningful, intelligent human interaction is possible with virtually anyone and right there in front of them the entire time. Why go home and read a book when you have a person with a life’s worth of experiences and stories right there in front of you?
The older you get the more you realize that the opportunity for social interactions like these decreases over time. There’s a finite number of them for everyone, they are not some unlimited quantity or resource and for most people the number is quite a bit smaller than the time you have (and will have) alone for intellectual pursuits.
This is pretty inspiring/challenging.
> Why go home and read a book when you have a person with a life’s worth of experiences and stories right there in front of you?
It's easier .. but then, I don't complain about being socially inept either
Out of some people, you will not get any original ideas, interesting thoughts. It is you, who needs to push them towards any interesting topic and even then they might derail it into unimportance or uninteresting ways. Yes, a person is in front of you, with a whole life experience, but there are questions to be considered, when comparing to a book:
(1) Is that person in front of you able to communicate and share any meaningful information from that whole life of experiences? Have they thought about stuff in depth before, so that they can share some quintessence in the short time, that you talk with them, before the conversation walks on to more lighthearted topics with the next person at the table?
(2) In a meaningful book, the author has firstly recognized, that there is something meaningful to write about, something to share. This might not be the case for a random person at a party. The person at the party might not even know, that anything they experienced is worth sharing or what those things are.
(3) Hopefully a good book will be written with carefully chosen words, that most precisely convey the ideas, that they author had. It is very difficult to achieve anything close to that in some small talk.
(4) Who is willing to lend you their ear and talk for prolonged duration on a party, when there are probably many other people around? That already is some precondition, which might not be fulfilled at any random party.
You can choose the parties you go to, choose the people you talk to at those parties, and in those conversations, you're an equal participant. Finding meaningful, deep conversation with strangers at parties is possible. It does require some skill and patience, and it requires you "submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known," as the quote goes.
By that I mean that you can talk about the things you care about in a conversation, and you run the risk that other people will judge you poorly for it. It takes some personal fortitude to put yourself out there.
> Going to parties in the hopes of finding a new "life long friend" or "beneficial relationship" is like playing the lottery.
Either I keep winning the lottery, or there's something at play here besides luck.
This is a skill you can learn. It's a skill with tacit knowledge requiring real-world practice in order to develop it. There are also entire books, blog posts, etc. written on it, if you care.
It's intellectually lazy to casually dismiss things... like going to parties, sports, reading fiction, watching movies... you don't have to like parties, you don't have to be good at parties, but that doesn't mean that they're sour grapes.
This assumes it is a skill one has to learn. This assumes there is value in learning this for everybody as well as an overarching value that makes this skill universally worthwhile learning.
> It's a skill with tacit knowledge requiring real-world practice in order to develop it.
I agree wholeheartedly. Like every skill one needs to practice, make mistakes, learn and become better over time. If one decides that learning this has value in/adds value to one's life.
> if you care
Again assuming that one needs to care.
This is quite condescending. This sounds like coming from an enlightened position with the need to show the truth of your ways to the lowlies.
> It's intellectually lazy to casually dismiss things
QED
Nice as hominem here. You are not arguing, you are attacking. There is no additional signal towards a shared understanding. You are fighting from an entrenched position you are trying to proof to be the truth for everybody.
> you don't have to be good at parties, but that doesn't mean that they're sour grapes.
If one doesn't find value in parties, socializing and the likes, why do others feel the need to argue that they are wrong? Why do you feel the need to attack and state universally that parties are good and OP is wrong?
I think there are people who gain value from different forms of socializing. And that is good for them. And there are people who don't. And don't need to, to be of value to themselves and society.
Why can't we not accommodate them and understand that they don't gain value from that? Why should we argue for these people to learn that skill. Can't one respect that and interact with these people on their turf? In their chosen way?
Really? You have found several life-long friends at parties? How old are you? What's your definition of 'friend' in this case? How good of a friend are we talking?
Most of your friends and acquaintances are not relationships formed at educational institutions or workplaces?
First, you have to be at least 40+ to even begin deeming a relationship "life-long", even then it's somewhat hyperbole. Very few of my friends have even struck up 1 such relationship from such events. I think it's rare. Purely anecdotal of course, looking at the people in my own life and that of my friends'.
> This is a skill you can learn. It's a skill with tacit knowledge requiring real-world practice in order to develop it. There are also entire books, blog posts, etc. written on it, if you care.
Wait, let me get this right. What exactly are you saying is a skill one can learn? Meeting life-long friends at parties? Are you talking about manipulation? Exploitation? "How to win friends and influence people?"
Bullshit like presenting not your true self, but a likable facade in order to please other people and meet social expectations?
I personally agree with the gp that "I'd rather read a book than go to a party" indicates room for improvement in social skills. So does "parties are only small talk". A skilled communicator can transition from small talk to more complex/interesting topics when talking with a stranger.
Most books are about people, right? How do you suspect the authors came up with all the interesting characters? You can find interesting characters in real life too, it just takes a different skillset from reading.
Neither I nor the GP (I think) are trying to say that poor social skills is an insult to character. Socializing is genuinely tiring for some people. That doesn't mean you can't practice and get better at it.
The underlying assumption, if used as an argument, instead of a filler phrase, is, that there is value in sozializing for everybody. But is this so?
I would challenge the underlying assumption and state (without proof, but who needs proof in a philosophical debate) that the world was made better by a lot of people and progress was created by a lot of people who were not good at socializing.
Take people like Marie Curie who actively went against the social norms when collecting her second Nobel Price in person. At this time media had made her something of a persona non grata and the Nobel Committee explicitly asked her not to come in person as to not taint the reputation of the Price with her being there.
Or take Prof. Donald E. Knuth's take on email [1]. He doesn't want to be social. He needs to be anti-social for him to do his work.
or take Luhmann who wasn't known to be very socially likeble and who stated that words like 'truth' needed to be redefined (scientifically) and was hard to follow in discussions because one needed to know how he had redifend terms one was used to.
But these redefinitions actually provided clarity and precision once understood. They were just not socially usable.
In my early 20s I forced myself to hit up clubs, raves, house parties etc and I never lost the feeling of being on edge, not knowing what to say and so on. Now since the beginning of COVID I have regressed to what I was like in my teens (socially) so that tells me that all of the practice was for nothing and against my underlying nature.
I suspect many people out there are like me, and socializing is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole for them: an unpleasant and ultimately futile experience.
Might be a framing device, yes.
> I personally agree with the gp that "I'd rather read a book than go to a party" indicates room for improvement in social skills.
I think that's reaching again. That might just be a personal preference, "I enjoy reading more than socializing." Is this not a valid opinion to have? One can also occasionally do both (not at the same time) but still prefer one over the other if given the choice.
> A skilled communicator can transition from small talk to more complex/interesting topics when talking with a stranger.
The author's problem wasn't that he couldn't engage in conversations about "complex" or interesting topics, it was particularly about the topics that were of interest to him. No matter your communication skills, you won't be able to strike up a meaningful conversation with just anyone on HAIFA constructions and their properties.
> Most books are about people, right? How do you suspect the authors came up with all the interesting characters? You can find interesting characters in real life too, it just takes a different skillset from reading.
Not sure how you came to the conclusion that uninteresting topics at parties equal uninteresting characters, either way, I think this is way outside the scope of the discussion. Neither OP nor the person you're replying to (me) has even hinted at this.
> Neither I nor the GP (I think) are trying to say that poor social skills is an insult to character.
I'm not so sure about that. GP practically called lack of social skills a deficiency and he wrote about hardly anything but character.
> That doesn't mean you can't practice and get better at it.
Again, outside the scope of the discussion, at least as a response to my comments and the author's article.
But, I will respond all the same, because it irks me. First, it's a truism. Second, it feels like your premise is that one should be good at it? Should everyone strive to be better at socializing?
I think no. Those who enjoy socializing should keep their skills sharp and probably work to improve them; because to them, the act of socializing is a rewarding one.
If you do not innately enjoy it, it's highly unlikely you ever will, and why should you even strive to want this? For what purpose? No, if you do not enjoy socializing, spend as little time on it as possible. Spend time on what's rewarding to you.
If staying at home reading books is it, then that's absolutely fine.
Unfortunately, there is this inane pressure in society to be sociable, appealing, and likable. To be such a person, to be liked in the office at that level, or at parties, or worse, in social media, is even equated with success.
None of my "heroes" are or were likable. They were difficult people who obsessed about their work, it took nearly all their time, in some cases the sacrifices were huge, family time, the family itself, and even procreation was sometimes sacrificed, but damn, these people laid the foundation for modern civilization and technology.
This is what all of humanity should strive for. Valuable contributions. Do you know how all those people made those contributions?
By spending inordinate amounts of time by themselves. Absorbed.
I thought that maybe it is just my way to escape socializing which I can’t really handle, sort of a replacement. I worked with my CBT doctor for a year(!) and even he came to conclusion that… it is not. You, HN, popsci and books and articles are my best intellectual friends, and that’s why I spend most of my free time in the internet and not with my friends or colleagues which I naturally have no genuine interest in. It’s hard to socialize when everything is boring and second-order af.
Edit: sometimes I think about how they feel. I really tried to find out if they maybe feel like always a little drunk or high on weed, because some people always act just like I am in these states. It would be interesting to experience some magical mind-hardware swapping to check if it’s true. Maybe I just lack natural alcohol levels in my blood or something like that, or is it a completely different experience. No chance to know for sure.
I suppose it’s antisocial, but trying to get your dose of social from groups constantly is extremely exhausting in the long run. Way too much posturing all around, and often just observing the dynamics of groups is, again, exhausting.
Just recently I saw hierarchical dynamic where everyone was sucking up to one person. Whatever, i mean, I can accommodate a few of that human bullshit from time to time, but color me antisocial for just wanting to not do that regularly. Socializing is demoralizing at times.
Some of us are really not pack animals.
The challenge with this framing is that you can be too narrow-minded about it, deciding that you can deduce what someone has to contribute based on your first impression of them. In my experience, the tendency towards curiosity exists independently of class, education level, and even intelligence (though the correlation is stronger here). But once you get past the smalltalk phase that you describe, it's a pretty easy quality to suss out.
It's a very real, very significant gap in one's social life if you are on one end of this axis and none of your friends are. I found myself incidentally in this position a few years ago, and taking steps to consciously shape my social environment and focus on seeking out more intellectually-curious friends was very worth it.
I can resonate to this article. I feel lonely and at the same time, I have been pruning my direct circle. As I grow older, my circle gets smaller, because I found most connections are not nutritious. Many of my colleagues seem to only care about two topics, 1. the (micro) housing market. 2. how to send their kids to the Ive league. There is no talking about innovation, creativity, ideas. The topics don't have to be about tech, music, finance, art are all good. My point is, I think being an interesting person, one has to be curious and has some spiritual pursue above the life itself. Unfortunately most people (in my life) seem to be the same industrial products being manufactured on a same conveying belt.
Come on. They already wrote what they had in mind. Why would you want to talk to them?
Sometimes it's not even worth reading their second book because it is about the same thing.
OP would probably wished his acquaintances were available in the book form because he could then skim the boring parts which in case of some people would be the whole thing.
And then there's this saying of specifically not meeting your heroes.
> A good book can be entertaining but it only takes a chance encounter to meet a life long friend, form a beneficial relationship, or meet a romantic partner.
That doesn't alleviate the fact that beneficial relationships and romantic partners can be intellectually unfullfilling.
The guy is going to parties. He just quits bit earlier than everyone else.
Most of us meet people really for one and only one reason. For social primate natural pleasure of physical interaction. Some people crave it more, some crave other things more. It's ok. No need to judge one way or the other.
> You’re going to go to a lot of parties in life, if you give up on them you are depriving yourself of valuable life experience.
True, but parchute jumping is also a valuable life expeirience yet it's not everybody's cup of tea. Same with interacting with people.
> It has nothing to do with books or how smart you are.
That's correct. However you have limited time in a day and people who get more kick out of the ideas than people have to make choices.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oLoNGRVeC7Y
Burgess Meredith is a bookworm and is bothered by everyone (including his wife) interrupting his reading. After a nuclear detonation, he seems to be the only one who survived because he was hiding in a basement, reading, during the explosions. After discovering the devastation and his aloneness, he is about to kill himself when he notices the ruins of the Public Library.
This is his best possible outcome: lifetimes of books to read and no one to interrupt him while doing it. He is overwhelmed with joy.
But I won’t give away the ending.
The trick is to build a social network that's compatible with who you are and not try to live up to a standard set by those socialites who are able to talk to anyone at any party. I have excellent social skills. I've done that. I can do that. It got boring fast.
It's like anything else, it requires practice and some people require more 'active' practice and mindfulness for success, while others will find it comes more naturally to them.
The author of this blog post sounds like someone with a superiority complex fueled by bad social skills that make him resent people for his inability to connect with or be interested in _them_, which is why he constructs the excuse that the people around him are simply 'not intelligent' or can't handle the big serious topics he wants to discuss all the time. I mean if he's so smart and wants to sit around discussing ideas why doesn't he just find people that have that in common? No instead the people around him are simply inadequate and he is forced to retreat into solitude. I'm sorry but that is a ridiculous outlook to have in life.
Ugh... I'm sure you mean well, but I doubt anyone can analyze someone's real-world behavior based on a few paragraphs.
This form of psychoanalysis is something the smartypants on HN do a lot, and it should be considered more offensive than it usually is. I have been called antisocial, autistic, sociopathic, you name it; while I am certainly imperfect, it is very rude to run to these conclusions based on a person's isolated opinion they were willing to make themselves vulnerable over.
Some people just don't get stimulated by conventional social settings. I consider myself a student of human behavior and have tried improving my social skills over the years (to varying levels of success), but in the end I really don't care very much about sportsball, the weather, the Netflix show of the hour, learning the names of a dozen people I will never see again, what Tina said to David, the recipe for the dish someone brought to the party. This isn't to say I don't care on any level, but I can only take so much of it because I am way more stimulated by ideas and my own imagination.
This isn't something I have much choice in, and there comes a point where I will not apologize for it. Sure, you don't want to never go to any parties, but not all parties are worth the time. If I know I'm not right for a particular party, I'll just leave and give a polite reason. No sense in me dragging it down for others. If I was at a nerd party, I wouldn't expect Chad Thunderrock to hang around for the sake of it.
I was thinking about creating a platform similar to clubhouse, but asynchronous .
So like an audio version hackernews.
why audio based? because producing audio content/conversation is easier than writing/blogging? And being asynchronous makes topic mining and content based recommendation possible.
I guess Metaverse will work too?
One of my friend groups uses Marco Polo for this. It's video, not just audio, but for us most of the time the video is not important.
I think the key feature should be content mining and a robust recommendation algorithm to find interesting people.
As for liking it... I've always preferred text over audio or video, but some members of the group are much more likely to participate this way, so it's a compromise.
Even in technical communities, it's hard to find people who are as engaged, excited and energised by those topics as I am. In 'everyday' life, people either disengage and switch off immediately, or react in a (presumably defensive) mocking and derisive manner.
It's only by spreading our net further, by reaching out to a global community of academics, scientists, engineers and founders that we can build ourselves a more sympathetic and engaged social network, and that we can fully satiate both our social and our intellectual needs.
Niccolo Machiavelli, Lettere (ed. by G. Lesca (Florence, 1929) pp. 88-90.
This famous passage was written during Machiavelli's banishment from Florence. During the day Machiavelli trapped birds, visited the local inn occasionally and gambled with the locals.
David Perell has many brothers in his self-imposed exile.
I'm pretty introvert and parties bore me. But the brightest thoughts and ideas, and the biggest intellectual challenges happen through conversations. It just takes time and effort (and less focus on ego) to go into deeper conversations with people and not feel "intellectually lonely"
Some may go to a party to "hook up." Some may go to a party to score some drugs. Some may go to a party to network. The author of the article goes to the party to have intellectual conversations. The author didn't get his intellectual conversations, but he could have wrote the same article about coming up dry in scoring some drugs.
I feel the author is missing an opportunity to practice creative adaptation in these parties. Don't go into the party with a specific frame. Instead, try on different frames as you speak with different people. Maybe create frames which you have never attempted. Or just wing it and see how it turns out.
If you make it about any one thing, you'll be disappointed, but you'll also miss an opportunity to make that moment of life interesting rather than a disappointment by going in with a more fluid presence.
Don't forget about how to play.
Notwithstanding that people have different social needs, realistically, meeting them is not the hard part, provided you aren't withdrawing from engagement. I meet most of my social needs just by having a romantic partner, and I was profoundly lonely on and off for over a decade.
There are other factors at work in my view. When we're in a bad spot it is difficult to parse and make sense of what is wrong. We view the world through the lens of our emotions and feeling depressed doesn't seem practically distinguishable than feeling lonely. This is a vulnerable state because we can get stuck in loops informed by cognitive distortions, by untruths. A matter-of-fact approach to improving wellness -- a foundation of CBT principles, healthy regimen (including sunlight and D3) and diet -- I think quells these pangs enough to allow more mental clarity in working through it. In my case, a better foundation as described did most of the work, but I subsequently resolved to kick a porn addiction (can lead to lower baseline levels of dopamine, which makes you unmotivated), and find a bit more meaning in projects and work, rather than allocating as much time to social media / consumption.
All of which to say, particularly if you are single, it's important to get out there and talk to people, but don't expect that to be a silver bullet for dealing with that sense of loneliness and lack of meaning. At the least it can offer moral support, but in those cases when other people aren't making you feel better, I expect that a lack of social contact isn't the problem to fix (or, not the only one).
A lot of the comments on this thread talks about "social skills", "learning from people", etc. But reading books itself is a way of communicating with people over space and time. If you focus on the efficiency and ROI, reading classic books will probably inspire you more than talking to a random person at a party.
The OP's complaint about "mindless conversations about the news" seems justified in my opinion. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a good book on the topic. Don't Look Up is also a good movie on the topic.
Maybe I just need to build a social media following (probably on Twitter)?
He has a course that outside SV is hard to afford (the time-unlimited writing one is over 10% of the annual take-home pay of a senior software engineer in the UK), a massive twitter and mailing list following - and what else that makes his output so popular?
- Dancing a lot means I am working out
- It allows me to play a bit with my identity to people (you know jump up and down out of excitement instead of a normal handshake)
- In fact, it allows for play (I sometimes bring a scarve to parties and play rope jump with it or limbo dancing)
- I get to study/observe drunk people and drunk group dynamics from a distance or as a part of it (by being drunk myself)
- I get to meet people and hear their perspective. Emotionally that means I feel like I am walking a few steps in their shoes
- In rare cases, I can have a deep intellectual conversation with people but there are better venues for meeting people in order to have intellectual conversations
Partying and network events and the like is simply not for everyone and that’s okay. I hope the author has a few friends where he can have amazing conversations with
They'll be telling me about some algorithm they used in a weekend project and I'll just be thinking "Doesn't Excel already do that" or "I'm not a systems programmer, nobody writes their own sorting algorithm in JS"
And then they never do much other than code, so conversation topics are usually depressing politics, code, or more code, but the code doesn't feel like code, it feels like philosophy in machine readable form.
Sometimes I think I'd enjoy a real dedicated web dev job, just to be on a full team of people who focused on UIs and features and best practices, instead of toy apps and computer science I don't understand, and an endless quest to simplify down to the stone age.
Yes, a lot of people simply vegetate in front of media. Sure, avoid them.
However, when you find someone who does something be interested in what they do. Even if you think it's boring as hell, if they find it interesting, engage them on it. First, you will be surprised how often you find out that it isn't as boring or straightforward as you thought. Second, the topic will eventually turn to something else that you will probably find far more interesting.
Finally, you will get a reputation as someone interesting to engage with. And that opens the doors to even more interesting people because they people standing around thinking "man the people at this party are boring" will want to engage with you.
There's a book about learning how to draw "with the right brain". The main idea is that you learn how to see. It quotes one of pupils who said that once he learned that he realized that there were no people who were not beautiful.
It is both possible to be a great intellectual AND have an ability to appreciate the company of others.
The world isn't full of just interesting ideas but also events and people too. It sounds like he's unable to expand beyond "intellectualism" as the only worthwhile thing to do. That's fine if that's his choice...but there's a certain smugness he carries with that attitude.
Source: Most of the parties I go to are full of my own weird passionate curious kind of people and that 3am rabbit hole is where most of those end up. Good at going to bed early, we are not.
There’s a saying that small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas. It’s very true.
It sounds a bit cliche, in Mexico we call it "mamador". By other side, the point that he mentions about feeling more connected with an internet audience is one of the main advantages of internet... Infinite leverage and the possibility to find or even create an audience. But, social skills are important too so is a skill that we have to develop.
Getting there did take work, a friendship has to be cultivated and nourrished, but it is worth it.
Sounds like this person needs better friends with whom they can have good conversations? This is not that deep...
George Carlin.
(Goes home and eats a bucket of ice cream while perusing Tik Tok)
like I think its great that people like OP have enjoyment and passion for "intellectual pursuits", but most other people don't. you have an interest, and like most other interests, people aren't going to share your interest because they have their own, different interests. so don't be surprised when you try to pivot the conversation, people don't want to talk about
like it sucks you can't share your interest with those close to you, that's a problem most everyone has, but when it's on the topic of "intellectual pursuits" or whatever - articles like this it always read as "I'm smart, everyone else is dumb, woe is me"
that may not be what people like OP are intending - but the problem is others just have different passions and priorities than you and are turned off when you want to discuss only what interests you. I'm certain most could have such a conversation with someone like OP, but why would they when their tone smells like "smarter than tho" because they want to talk about esoteric philosophy or abstract ideas at a college party
if one want to get rid of this "loneliness" you either need to find a community of like-minded others (see the internet) or introduce conversation topics in a more mutually interesting manner instead of wishing for others to meet you where you are
I write this as someone who has been on both sides of the conversation
That was hard to swallow. I think the next hard to swallow realization was that I’m not a very good person. I’m not mean to anyone, but I invest very little in actually doing good. I know I should, I have the resources to do it, but I’m still so self absorbed. I buy things I don’t need knowing the same money could literally save lives. I worry about my own security even though I could find a new job within a month.
I used to think I was a pretty nice guy until I realized how terrible I am at changing my behaviour to help other people. In all practicality I’m kind of an asshole. I’ll do better.
- My intellect is isolating me, but it's not my fault and it also is not the fault of people around me. Not any more than it is either my fault or the average person's fault that I need a stepstool in my kitchen since it's not designed for me. (I'm quite short). Being very intelligent is like being very tall in that it's falling to one side of the distribution curve and human society/life is going to be designed for the average person. As shitty a measure as IQ is, having a 140 IQ is kind of like being 7 and a half feet tall: Nothing is wrong with you, but good luck.
Basically, that my intellect is isolating not because I am superior to the other apes, but because any personal characteristic that puts me on one end of the bell curve when it comes to experiences is going to be isolating. I also feel very isolated due to my homosexuality and my MS, and in some similar ways: They all involve experiences that influence me in foundational ways that most people cannot understand and never will.
By the way, some of the most valuable people in our societies are borderline horrible arrogant narcissists. I don't see people not using the knowledge that Isaac Newton shared with us, because he was a horrible person... I honestly think that if he saw a shrink and worked on "his issues" (by today's standards) he would have lobotomized himself.
Nietzsche had a good intuition about people that optimize for full manifestation of the self in reality, but was kind of naive what qualities these people would exhibit. It is the entire package, not only the "good parts" (by today's standards)
> I buy things I don’t need knowing the same money could literally save lives. I worry about my own security even though I could find a new job within a month.
These things are normal, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
But you are right that going through life thinking you are some lonely, tortured genius is not healthy and is a recipe for being a true asshole.
I know I should
This is a great opening to self-analysis. Whence do you know it? What’s the goal? What if you did something “good” whatever it means to you, what then? Imagine it, what’s different? Walking this graph of questioning every term may discover the true source of your unease, which may be completely unrelated to “being good”.
Everyone is self-absorbed to some extent; it's an evolutionary trait that helps with our survival. Some will be self-absorbed in a narcissistic sense, others, as you've mentioned, with their security and position. Then there are those who are so completely self-absorbed with their ideas and interests—interests that have become so integral to and inseparable from their thinking that the way they think has shaped their identities. In essence, ideas have shaped and remolded their personalities in ways that let them think and dream of little else other than their principal interests.
I would suggest that if we examined the behaviors and inner personalities of many if not most of history's great illustrious thinkers such as famous scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and many others who we now revere and respect—then there's little doubt that we'd find many of them would easily be classified as self-absorbed assholes. Moreover, the term self-absorbed asshole would automatically apply to many by virtue of their very nature—and it would still apply irrespective of whether their interests are noteworthy or important and or whether their work actually possesses any real value or utility or not. Simply, one can be a self-absorbed asshole no matter what the intrinsic value of one's work is.
For instance, take Isaac Newton, who from various accounts was a rather nasty man and that's likely putting it mildly. Then there are true self-absorbed bastards like Fritz Haber the German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the Haber–Bosch process to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen that led to the large-scale production of fertilizers, this process has benefited many millions of people worldwide over the past century. Despite Haber's important discovery he nevertheless remains a self-absorbed asshole with his stripes as rotten as ever—just by virtue of the fact that he's also the Father of chemical warfare having overseen the 'weaponisation' of chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. Haber's virtuous discovery doesn't mitigate him in any way as from various accounts he was a truly nasty person.
Then there's Einstein. Can you imagine Einstein arriving at the patent office in Berne fresh off the very tram that he'd already envisioned as central to his thought experiment in relativity—only to confront his co-workers with those very ideas? I've no idea whether Einstein did so or not [he likely had more sense not to] but it's easy to imagine that he did and that his co-workers quickly offered excuses then exited his presence in great haste.
The fact is, one has to be self-absorbed in one's thoughts if one is to achieve anything worthwhile. Whilst there are notable exceptions, I'd respectfully suggest that for most people that it's not possible to integrate thought into concepts and cohesive ideas without being obsessively involved with them.
How one presents or hides this self-obsession to others in the outside world that is perhaps the main or most important issue. Being adept at handling one's obsessions in the presence of others and in social settings is a worthwhile trait, that's if you possess what it takes to do so. Unfortunately, not everyone does and the ones who don't are likely to end up with the 'asshole' moniker.
(For my own part, when I'm self-absorbed with a problem it's best others not be around me as they'll likely be ignored. At least nowadays I've some cognizance of my problem: for the women in my life have repeatedly pointed out that being male means I've only the limited capacity to think about one matter at a time. I now understand this.)
There are of course a few in the genius class who can be both totally self-absorbed in whatever interests them and who simultaneously seemingly run normal lives without any additional effort, it's as if they've two independent brains running in parallel. Names that spring immediately to mind are the likes of Mozart and Leonard Euler but there are many more. There are stories of Euler—likely the most prodigious and prolific mathematician in history—being totally absorbed and doing mathematics whilst his rowdy kids surrounded him, it seems that nothing ever distracted him). If I recall correctly, all up Euler had 13 kids. How he also managed to have ever had sufficient time for doing great mathematics remains one of the great imponderables.
Finally, we need to mention and separate out how great minds interact with one another when on matters of common interest. Such individuals often have obsessive interests that are so heightened that their psyches exclude them from considering almost everything else. It's not only a specific common interest that binds them but also it's the minutiae of detail within that interest, it's key—it's the very 'spice' of such interest. One can imagine being a fly on the wall in the heady day of the early 1900s listening to conversations between the likes of Einstein, Hilbert, Lorentz, Poincaré, Minkowski and others. That said, the fact that pockets self-absorbed assholes — assholes of such high and outstanding caliber occur with such rarity that they can be ignored for all practical purposes.
We fetishize intelligence too much as a society and too many don't understand what it really is and how it can differ. It's nice to imagine a world where we valued empathy as much as intelligence.
This isn't true. If you have a very popular website and take the most common threads people might read on it, then you will likely have at least a few hundred thousand people viewing it. If 1% of the smartest 2% comments you would have a maybe a hundred comments from people who would qualify for mensa if the viewers were random people, basically flooding the comment section.
The reason this works is that people will flock to threads that is about something relating to them. People who do well on IQ tests will flock to threads about intelligence etc.
:)
On the flip side, I have found a startling amount of people genuinely don't have many passions / interests. Skills and talents, sure. But passions - no.
Or I guess if eating foods like cereal and McDoland's counts as a food passion, or watching TV, or working a job you don't actually enjoy - if these count as passions - then I suppose everyone does have interests.
I'm just not inclined to think people are really that passionate about these things - and instead, it's just what they do. Sure - anybody who spends 10 hours a day laying bricks - they're obviously infinitely more skilled in that and related things than someone who doesn't. But a lot of people simply exchange their time for money, and don't particularly love what they do. Most of us HN-ers do, and we forget how rare that is.
I think some of us on here forget how close we have it to a life of leisure compared to the average person (ESPECIALLY globally). I know a lot of people that pretty much have no time for anything besides work and family.
And I hope that all people like this LOVE at least their work or their family. But in reality, I know A LOT of people trapped in a life where they genuinely dislike both. And that's pretty much their whole life.
That'd describe Perell well. He doesn't have many passions/interest. He's bowing out of one interest to flee back into his singular comfort zone of unchallenged isolation, where no one "tests" his chops and he can fly on the wings of his self perception to whatever height he desires.
He shuns every passion/interest that does not align with his narrow view of which passions and interests make a person "intellectual". He's the kind of guy who will use his superior training as "guy who writes things on the Internet" to start arguing medicine with me, and then leave the party because few people share his interests and he just can't contribute to theirs. Because we're not as intellectual than him.
... in his narrowly defined niche of what makes a person intellectual.
Hint: being able to cite Plato does not make you in any way, shape, or form, more "intellectual" than the guy at the end of the bar who knows every Man U soccer game score, who scored, against whom, in which game, at what game time, using which strategy.
Having consumed a 500 page book does not make you more intellectual than having consumed 500 episodes of Coronation Street. Consumption, in general, is a low hanging fruit, intellectually. Your love for Doctor Who doesn't make you smarter than someone's fanning over Rihanna.
Intellectuals are rarely lonely. Because true intellectuals see value in information, no matter the sender or matter. Restrictive topic selection is pretty much the definition of anti-intellectualism, in my opinion.
Every single time I dig deep to search for someone's passion, I find at least one, and often multiple. In general, I find way more than I initially expected when I was a teenager.
I have also found many people don't think it's socially acceptable to talk about their passion in many situations. This makes it hard to discover these passions when you have only casual interaction with people.
I think we need to be careful about setting unrealistic expectations for what is normal/desirable (you use the term "elitist" as if having a passion for something is only reserved for the social/economic elite). This echos back to job adverts looking for engineers with "passion" etc.
I would argue that a singular "passion" might actually be a negative trait as it can have a negative impact on other parts of your life (as illustrated by TFA). I'd certainly not want to work with or hang around with person from TFA as they sound like a prick (not much to judge them on I agree, but there you go)
It is 100% ok to just live your life. Interested by something different every few days/weeks/months/years? That is totally ok. Maybe you just like to live your life and enjoy leisure activities? That is totally ok too. Too busy for anything apart from work and family? Totally fine.
Another problem being that most people cannot handle disagreement. If you want to discuss an idea that often leads to disagreement. True intellectuals relish an opposing viewpoint, whereas the vast majority of people wonder why you're being an asshole. The fact that most people cannot handle respectful disagreement in search of a deeper understanding is a problem they have, but a burden placed on others.
And of course most people who would call themselves "intellectual" are actually in the latter category.
The distinction between the author and others is not the intellectual pursuit, but the dislike of parties. My bias is to think they’re attending parties with the wrong people, or of bad design (yes, design/engineering is something that social gatherings benefit from).
I like a good party plenty, but I’ve slipped away to read books, and I don’t consider myself to be a voracious reader of books.
Parties are also a little over-hyped, even a social construct, I would say (writing it down it actually sounds tautological).
On my country's local sub-reddit someone was asking people older than him how did they spend New Year's Eve parties in the past, which reminded me of the New Year's Days I used to spend with my grandparents in the countryside, in a village close to the Carpathians. There were no New Year's Eve parties in that village, or in the villages surrounding it, for that matter, young, unmarried, people would usually congregate on Saturday's evenings for a "village party" so that the boys would find girls to marry and that was pretty much it, once you were married and especially once you had kids of course that parties were not a thing anymore for you (why would have gone there? you were already married).
A little on the conspiracy-oriented side I would say that modern parties have been presented to us as the way we now know them ("you have to be there! you have to be seen as a likeable person! you have to talk and make conversation! you have to small almost at all times!") out of consumerist reasons, I would even that most of this whole "modern socialising thing" is backed-up by consumerist reasons.
But to bring a different lens to the topic: to me, articles like this are about protesting the way social interactions are designed and blindly followed by many people, not signaling superiority.
So I don't read OP as "I'm better than anybody else", but as "There must be a better way of interacting with others and sharing interests. I dislike the current way".
The article resonated with me because I think the concept of "parties" is overhyped. I've done a lot in my life and yes, there's a good side to them. But there's also plenty of BS going on: power dynamics, shallow conversations, etc.
The problem is, parties are a sort of a sacred dogma to the vast majority of people. Friends and aquitances will often tease/insult you you for not going to them, or for going and not staying late enough.
I don't understand why the hype. Why are parties the "ultimate and only" way to have fun and interact socially for some people? There are dozens of other ways to interact with people.
For example, I rather have one to one catch-ups with friends because when you get small talk out of the way you can deep-dive into topics. Because of that, I'm an anti-social outcast for many people. "The weird guy that doesn't go to parties". I think that's what the article is on about: societal pressure to individuals so they interact in a certain way and bend to stablished norms, when such norms are not enjoyable for such individuals.
The thing is some people have trouble finding people close to their niche. The solution is search better and/or widen your niche.
There has got to be a better way of doing this... Too much "king of the hill" and "payola" mentality on communities that call themselves "fair and credible" these days, and the time/creator investment loss is huge if you consider time invested to achieve any level of credibility and/or voice on social sites.
I have found that my own (personal and business) web sites are usually the best place to post content, my opinions, and maintain user accounts I don't want to lose, and where I can build a far better/more reliable audience than I could ever do on social media and other community sites for over the past 5 years really.
I hope that type of individual web site culture and related indexing comes back. An app or web site that enables seamless integration of personally owned web sites into it in a socially integrated manner would be a much better long-term solution/idea for all social communities in my opinion. I'd develop something like that myself, but would need tons more funding and human resources beyond what I'm working with currently (of course).
Just as a computer that doesn't support HTTPS is functional yet un-networkable, so too can a person choose not to support the small talk protocol (or to offer only obsolete versions) thereby forcing the other participants to degrade or refuse the connection.
Everyone has things they're deeply interested in. If you want deep conversation you just have to muster curiosity about what they're into (and not fail the social capabilities portion of the protocol). Rarely you'll get really lucky and the person will share one of your niche interests, but it's an unreasonable expectation so don't make it your goal.
I'll explicitly highlight "appropriateness" as part of those social capabilities: participants balk at philosophizing in dance clubs or slasher flicks at funerals or topics that exclude or are obviously uninteresting to others in a multiparty conversation (since 3+ participants is common at parties).
Practicing the protocol makes it less draining (assuming that's what's actually draining you).
I have things I’m passionate about as well, and I enjoy a good book as much as the next guy, but I go to parties to relax, and talk shite to people.
"always"? On one side Reddit is known for its armchair experts to the point of being a cliche'.
Yet anti-intellectualism is widespread in many environments. The idea that people should only engage in gossip and idle conversations in a college party is a good example.
I sort of miss it, but I’m also happy with the conversations I have now, so meh?
TL;Dr - some people like to read books, some people like to do other things.
And yes, watching certain professors (not YouTubers) makes one's heart run faster.
I remember prof. Brian Harvey 2008 course (Scheme based) of old MIT courser by Eric Grimsin. Or Systematic approach by Gregor Kiczales, or Dan Grossman's "Programming languages" course.
And then you stumble upon another node_modules shit...
Andrew Ng was also very cool.
Care to name the song?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)
P.S. it seems there are multiple bands inspired by Hesse, not just Steppenwolf.
I realized I might be guessing wrong about the reference but was willing to look foolish in the interest of brevity. Appreciate the reply.
You can't talk to a single person at the party who has an interesting world-view, experience, or education? Isn't that the heart of creating characters? Empathy and experience?
It's fine to not enjoy socializing but acting like it is because you are too creative and smart for everyone else is delusional.
When I go to parties I talk to people about ethics and philosophy and creating music and creativity and cooking, and I trade stories from my past and make jokes.
Acting like watching a lecture on YouTube or reading your thousandths book is somehow superior to talking to living breathing humans because "ideas" is bizarre.
You can do both. Read a lot of books and also socialize.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten more used to the opposite idea:
Relative to other people (which is implicitly the metric we are using here), you are really smart.
Why do I think that? Because of the data.
The data is pretty solid that, whenever you survey the population, the level of intellectual sophistication is extremely low.
So low that many of the words I'm using in this comment would not be understandable to a significant chunk of the population. So low that, while knowing how to do a wordy math problem is table stakes on HN, knowing how to solve (x+5)*3=21 places you in the 'elite' of the general population.
It's got nothing to do with how we feel about it. It's just a fact that, when we look at the problems that 50% of the population cannot solve, the bar is shockingly low.
So based on that, yeah: the people who are reading this, who know how to write a 'for' loop on a computer, who read way above a 6th grade level, who could say 'yes I know what an imaginary number is', are really smart.
Some of the best post-age-forty conversations I’ve had came out of me asking someone, “what do you find hard in that job?”
The more hands on the better. And these things - these kinds of discussions - aren’t generally available on YouTube lectures or whatever. In person you can get people to drop the facade or the spin and just talk.
The OP is ONLY interested in a subset of topics he feels is interesting. This is the opposite of intelligent. A hallmark of intelligent people is to find fascination with everything. I recently went to a party where I met a guy who worked in a chicken processing plant. I know nothing about processing chicken. I literally spent an hour talking to him about his job. (By the way, he works way harder and takes way more garbage than us white collar guys).