211–220 of 260 posts
Not sure I agree that "agreement on important issues" should be on the "things that don't matter" section. I know that stuff in particular matters big time to me, even just for friends. My closest friends tend to see the world very similarly to me than people I am much less close with. In fact, more often than not I end up pruning out the people that think drastically differently than I do. Most of the time this just…
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No. I just have had very strong, close relationships throughout my life. Talking to someone for a mere 45 minutes is not a big flipping deal. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732892
> Talking to someone for a mere 45 minutes is not a big flipping deal. It's a big flipping deal to a lot of people; don't presume everyone is you.
I think all of that is uncalled for, overly personal and essentially an ad hominem.
It takes more than a one time 45 minute conversation to create and maintain a close relationship. There is lots of research about that.
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> You don't know who someone is until you see them go through poverty. The inverse is also true: you don't know who someone is until a) they get rich and/or powerful (and change), b) you go to poverty (and e.g. they prove to be only "fair weather friends"). And I would just more harshly someone who reveals themselves to do bad things or be a bad friend when they get rich or when you get poor, than someone doing bad s…
I think we vastly underestimate how much of an affect our environment-the circumstances we find ourselves in—has on us. Different aspects of our personality are revealed, or developed(?), in different settings. Temperature, time of day, how tense our muscles / tendons feel, how well we sleep, I think we underestimate how much all of these contribute to what we call 'personality'.
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You fear people will imagine you are close? Or you fear people won't feel close to you when you feel close?
Being unable to tell the difference between someone that likes you versus someone who is just being polite, and if you consider them a "friend" and act "accordingly" they would consider you a socially incompetent weirdo.
I have had genuine friendships and other close relationships with introverts. I know how that plays out and that can work. Problems arise when people get weird ideas like because they talk to me once in a while, they have some special claim on me and I am not supposed to have other friends.
Keep in mind that it takes two to tango, even platonically, and if you like dancing with this person but they like dancing a lot more than you do, it is not reasonable to expect them to sit on the sidelines waiting for you. Let them dance with other people in peace at times when you don't want to dance anyway. It isn't taking anything away from you if they are consistent about being available for you when you need a friend.
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No. I just have had very strong, close relationships throughout my life. Talking to someone for a mere 45 minutes is not a big flipping deal. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732892
And I think this is exactly the problem. People who are already socially confident don't think about these processes because they just happen naturally for them. You meet someone, chat with them, and then sometimes you become friends. So when someone comes along and outlines the process, it seems clinical and detached, and thus kinda creepy. Certainly it was my reaction when I first started seeing things like this. "…
But it takes 15 to 20 hours a week to establish and maintain a genuinely close relationship. Forty five minutes is barely a down payment on that.
I have known "players" and how they operate. They are good at creating an illusion of closeness, often based on outright lies. Their goal is sex, and her welfare be damned.
Forty five minutes is also not enough time to verify if what they are telling you is something genuine. It can take weeks to learn that what he shared day one to make you feel all squishy is all made up BS.
So 45 minutes may be enough to create certain feelings, but if you think that is genuinely a close friend that you can trust, you have a lot to learn about how relationships work.
After a two year period of watching my boss interact with people, I can confirm that this method works extremely well. He is a "natural", in the sense that he can form close bonds with people incredibly quickly. At first I thought he was using some sort of secret strategy, but after a while I noticed that he was simply sharing personal details about himself (which the article refers to as "self-disclosure") without b…
Bob's statement seems troubling if you take it as meaningful rather than sales patter. There's an inherent conflict between the implications in "What day works best for you?" and "I definitely could not miss that. They meant the world to me." From the client's perspective, if he reflects on that conversation at all, the question naturally arises: "What if I had said Wednesday?" Would Bob have skipped spending time wi…
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Don't want to question the value of your experience but I couldn't help noticing that your example and enraged_camel's examples all take place in the context of (mild) danger and risk. Employer-employee; employee-client; travel abroad. Could it be that shared adversity is the key to bonding? Personal revealings would then follow gradually as a natural consequence. In this view the best way to make friends would be to…
There is definitely evidence for shared adversity being helpful for bonding, but I think it's a stretch to somehow say employment is adversity. By that logic, pretty much every interaction we have is through shared adversity. (It's true that I've had some amount of shared adversity with all my close friends though.)
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No. I just have had very strong, close relationships throughout my life. Talking to someone for a mere 45 minutes is not a big flipping deal. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732892
Maybe not to you. That might be the longest some people have had a conversation all year..
Things like this are why people laugh at Silicon Valley, this is a very aspie/robotic approach to this topic.
What's interesting to note is that no matter how you dress it up, human beings are indeed biological machines and respond in surprisingly predictable ways. The companies which specialize in data gathering and analysis are increasingly able to corroborate this observation with concrete examples and algorithms. It's of course a tautology, but "normal" social interactions are just that: a set of arbitrary norms. Normal…
Is that why people that use a process to try and explain what people will do are nearly always wrong? Economics, politics, etc. People do respond to basic triggers of biology, but we have very little understanding of these trigger and where they originate from.