You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

Post by chugger » Mon, Oct 31, 2011, 5:12 AM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #12

georgieporgie wrote: post #8

What? What was with the Eventbrite 'brogrammer' paragraph? You seem to say that 'marrying' social life and technology is a bad thing, but it's the segue into her (apparent) use of user groups and networking to further her career. Also: Bottom line: If the main topic of conversation you have with your friends is not how you can better yourself, you need to get new friends. Uh. No. If you drop universal statements like…

What is a brogrammer , anyway? I am imagining something like the Cheezburger "Bro" site, but sitting at a computer??

Post by eric-hu » Mon, Oct 31, 2011, 5:46 AM UTC

kellishaver wrote: post #57

"If the main topic of conversation you have with your friends is not how you can better yourself, you need to get new friends." Friends serve a number of purposes. Some make us better people, some accept and support us for who we are. The best ones manage to do both at the same time. But I think looking at a friendship from the angle of how it can benefit you and make you a better person is a somewhat selfish metric…

Post by HSO » Mon, Oct 31, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

buf wrote: post #38

georgieporgie wrote: post #8

What? What was with the Eventbrite 'brogrammer' paragraph? You seem to say that 'marrying' social life and technology is a bad thing, but it's the segue into her (apparent) use of user groups and networking to further her career. Also: Bottom line: If the main topic of conversation you have with your friends is not how you can better yourself, you need to get new friends. Uh. No. If you drop universal statements like…

The 'brogrammer' line was my vain attempt to drop some humor into the article. I'm an engineer, not a writer, and I'm learning through comments like the ones you made to better my writing for the future, and to find out what is appropriate and what is not. Thanks for the feedback.

Post by pingswept » Mon, Oct 31, 2011, 6:17 AM UTC

Post by pingswept » Mon, Oct 31, 2011, 6:51 AM UTC

eipipuz wrote: post #78

pingswept wrote: post #77

I know this is barely relevant, but anyway: if we're all the average of our 5 closest friends, it means we're all identical, unless the population is split into disjoint subgroups that have no friendships between them. If that's not the case, how could the highest-quality person have 5 friends? By definition, they're all worse than her, so their average can't be equal to her, unless we're all equal. Anyway, back to t…

Consider an icosahedron. At each vertex a person with a vector pointing outwards. In this example, people are normalized and can be understood by 3 dimensions. There you have 12 unique persons, each of them an average of the 5 surrounding it. Pick one of them as the best, you will see that doesn't in any way violate that it is still the average. Anyway, yeah, it also smells bad, but it could have a grain of truth.