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Comment by parpfish | Hacker News Reader

As an introvert that’s been consciously working to make new friends, I’ve noticed a couple phenomena:

- I’d love to be friends with other introverts to enjoy quiet times together. but… int-to-int pairs will rarely form in nature, however extroverts are great for mediating the connections. Make friends with the talkative outgoing types, because through them you can meet the other quiet people they’ve befriended but you’d never meet in the wild.

- however, there seem to be some common pitfalls to introvert-extrovert friendships. From my (introvert) side, you can often find yourself getting insecure or jealous of all the other social connections that your extrovert friends have. There’s an asymmetry there that can feed lots of insecurities. I’m sure that there’s something equivalent from the other direction, but I dont know what it is

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I used to feel insecure or jealous of the number of friends these people have, but years ago I realized that I would find their lives exhausting and terrible. And vice versa, they'd hate the amount of time I spend on my own doing stuff.

For me it’s not that I want to have a ton of friends like they do, it’s more that I worry about how we each perceive the relative importance of the relationship. E.g., they are one of five friends to me; I’m one of 50 friends to them.

The deep Schadenfreude when you see your extroverted friend rage about their phone ringing for the 8th time this hour.

"What a fool I am," he said. "Here I am wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes that are not worth gaping for."

You implied: Having your phone ring several times per hour is something desirable.

[strawman situation] is extremely difficult, I agree

> ...getting insecure or jealous of all the other social connections that your extrovert friends have. There’s an asymmetry there that can feed lots of insecurities.

I wouldn't sweat this too much. Mathematically, most people have fewer friends than their friends have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

I don’t fully understand how this is a paradox. I guess it’s based on the fact that there are „super nodes“ in human social networks, where one person has many friends, while most others don’t? Or is there anything more to it?

It's the more expansive definition of paradox, meaning something like "counterintuitive result". In expectancy, a randomly chosen person has an average number of friends. You might therefore think that a random person and their friends, all of whom seem randomly chosen, would have the same expected number of friends. But you'd be wrong, because the friends weren't random after all: they had at least one friend. Not a logical paradox, but a surprising fact.

I wouldn’t have expected that everyone has as many friends as themselves, hence my confusion. Thanks for taking the time to respond though.

Found the EE!

The counter-intuitiveness is partially to averaging. Averages often deceive our intuitions.

There is a fun but rare kind of humanist that doesn't think they are special but are curious about others, see the value in randos they meet and thinks that _others_ are special and they really _listen_, you know?

Pretty sure its just that they all have superior statistical intuition.

>I’m sure that there’s something equivalent from the other direction, but I dont know what it is

There's a risk of becoming a people pleaser or letting people down. People expect you to manage the party or the outing or whatever.

There's fear that the many relationships you have are shallow. Even in this post your suggestion is to simply use the extrovert to get to a real friend you actually want.

Direct insecurity of what people "actually" think of you is still there, I'm sure.

That said, people are usually thinking about their own problems and what people think of them a lot more than what they think of you so just relax a bit.

Find some nerdy social hobby, become part of a community. Board games, killer queen arcade, and indoor rock climbing have all been a bridge to some close friendships for me.

Int-to-int pairs are more likely to form in nature at specific watering holes.

For example, EA/rationalist is not quite my kind of community (altough I think highly of many of their writings), but an ACX meetup looks like a good place for introverts of a particular kind to come together.

I guess the trick is to find the right kind of place first.

For those who are out of the loop:

EA: Effective Altruism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism )

ACX: Astral Codex Ten; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACX https://www.astralcodexten.com/

LW (used at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43663979 ): Less Wrong

If you like reading HN then you’d probably enjoy an LW meetup!

Ughh, LessWrong is a bit more of a rationalist cult than anything - and I say that as somebody who is in the AIS & EA space. It's a huge problem that fields like AI Safety happen on that forum, as "normies" really get scared off by the stuff that's on there.

These days they are more of racialist scientism meet & greet

Who'd want to miss out on joining the next Zizians!

There's nothing equivalent from the other direction.

- extrovert

(/s ;))

Ah, you b--tard stealing my hard-earned friends! ;))

But seriously, is this how some insecure introverts also bond around those charismatic sociopaths and then help'em ruin the world while quietly working for the XYZ agencies? /s

I think that’s just insecure people in general, unless extroverts have an ability I don’t know about that makes them immune to charming sociopaths

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