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You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

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Re: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

#81

Post by Eliezer »

pingswept wrote: post #79
eipipuz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, and I had assumed we were scalars! But you're right, and what's even better is that the icosahedron case generalizes to people walking on the surface of a sphere (assuming they're evenly spaced).

Erm, I could be wrong but wouldn't the icosahedron be the maximum "evenly spaced" set of people on the surface of a sphere (that weren't all confined to a great circle)? Lots of regular polygons, rather fewer regular polyhedra.

(Of course if we make the jump to a 4D sphere we can put 600 people into the largest regular polytope, the hexacosichoron. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_regular_4-polytope)

EDIT: I am wrong, it'd only take a uniform polyhedron, not a regular one. E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icosidodecahedron

Re: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

#82

Post by hkmurakami »

irahul wrote: post #72
buf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That "brogrammer" part was ambiguous, and it wasn't clear whether it was meant as a compliment or a complain. Reading the next paragraph about her going to meetups and advancing her career does make it clear that it was meant to be positive, but I still find the premise and conclusion inconsistent.

Agreed, it would have read clearer had the (a) sarcasm been more apparent, or (b) the effect been immediately described as beneficial.

Re: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

#84

Post by Sapient »

prophetjohn wrote: post #63

I don't understand how the title of the article is relevant. I'm inclined to believe that there's some truth to it, but after reading the blog, I didn't gain any insight on the topic. It just seemed like a nice story about a girl who turned her career around. At the very least, I don't see how an automation engineer is the mean of two Google engineers, a brogrammer, an architect, and a soccer team president.

Perhaps you also have to average in her previous job?

Re: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

#85

Post by lloeki »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #67
brc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't this hinge on the definition of 'bettering yourself'. To me, your comment isn't mutually exclusive with the original. People discussing things they've learned, ideas and activities who, by my definition, are bettering themselves. You might like your friends, then probably, your friends are bettering themselves, and so are you. You mightn't realise this, but spend some time with people who have a social ci…

If you broaden the definition of "better yourself" to enough to include all constructive human conversation, then maybe you could read this statement as a truth. But if you read it as plain English it's obvious that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about a very specific sort of conversation around improving one's career and skills.

From the article:

> Today, Jane doesn’t know what the celebrity gossip is.

I venture to suggest that it actually refers to the former one you mentioned, which, being constructive, leads to the latter one in various occasions (but not exclusively).

Re: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

#86

Post by ars »

terrellm wrote: post #16

I've been in technology for 15 years. In that time I went from QA to networking/IT to independent software development. Along the way I learned how to run a business, optimize my websites for search engines, create persuasive marketing copy, and a lot more. With each new skill I acquired, I have one or more friends who I attribute to helping me along the way. I could not have done it without them. You definitely are…

And I did more or less all that stuff too and I have no one I attribute it to except myself.

I would definitely not say definitely. Some people are highly influenced by friends, some are not.

Re: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

#87

Post by zyfo »

Confusion wrote: post #83
MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #11

I'm a 99% introvert, with an EQ of 42. This post really fails to account for outliers; sometimes people are simply far out of line with respect to the average.

There is no post in the world that accounts for all outliers.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

Re: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends

#89

Post by goblin89 »

Seems like most people strongly disagrees with that bottom line about friends, ignoring the rest of the post, which is very inspiring. Thanks!

I actually somewhat agree with that bottom line. The whole point is lost when we try to put it more softly and ‘appropriately’. It just sounds too unnatural for us social creatures. But it is in some way true, as it is true that your environment influences you much:

For example, people born in poor families have little chance to become rich and successful no matter how hard they work—it just requires different mindset. That mindset, it seems, can be acquired by either a) moving away from friends and family that drag you down (the earlier the better) or, probably, b) being an introvert, asocial person. I've had myself a similar experience.

I think I've read somewhere that the more social a species is, the less smart its representatives are at average—take for example dogs and cats. (I would appreciate if someone would confirm or disprove that information. And it should still be mentioned that individual intelligence doesn't appear to matter much in a group work anyway http://lesswrong.com/lw/3mh/link_collective_intelligence/.)

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