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30 minutes with a stranger

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Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#301

Post by popularonion »

ngriffiths wrote: post #277
teiferer wrote: post #258

There is a huge selection bias there. People who are very disagreeable and hard to talk to tend to not participate in such a thing. Of course the average participant was open to talk to somebody and connect.

Fair, but it's still interesting that people underestimate how much they will enjoy the conversation, even if it's with a random person on a bus who did not volunteer for an experiment.

The participants in the train study were essentially given a "job" to talk to strangers, which completely changes the mental framing.

People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.

If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".

Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#302

Post by Shocka1 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #290
alex-moon wrote: post #39

I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear. https://www.sciencedirect.com…

> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected One discovery I've made is that they really don't. Nothing terrible happens if you don't correct people. You can really just accept that people have some flaws and appreciate their positive sides!

Agreed. I just let people talk and have for many years now, no matter how well I know the person. Someone might start talking about chem trails or maybe another conspiracy and I always entertain them for the most part. Here and there I might do a "have you thought about it this way, or that?", but other than that, there isn't much reason to argue/debate unless it's at work or something that actually matters in the grand scheme of things.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#303

Post by andruby »

chasd00 wrote: post #233
lordnacho wrote: post #115

It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression. You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting…

> For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy. this gets old fast, it's like being emotionally vomited on.

That's a very negative reaction.

I enjoy helping others, and I like hearing someone's life story. Not everyone needs to like that though, people are different.

Hearing the same story from the same person can be very tiring and I have family members like that, but with strangers it's a different person, different context, different story.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#304

Post by kadonoishi »

lordnacho wrote: post #115

It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression. You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting…

> Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.

A dramatic line. I made a note of it.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#306

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

whartung wrote: post #292
sentinelsignal wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dehumanisation of online dialogue is interesting. Is it because of 'anonymity' or is there more at play?

I think it's the bandwidth, or lack there of. A lot of it happens in out of band posts like these. It seems to happen less in interactive (i.e. chat, etc.). Make no mistake, it absolutely happens there. But not as much as in async posts (I don't think). I don't think it happens much at all with video. Most of it is surrounded by context (or lack of). How difficult it is to communicate (typing like this is not easy, a…

That sort of is what I find.

I know that my idea is completely rectally-sourced, but I feel that the less time that we have to think about an element of an interaction, the less likely we are to go into the nasty "flame mode" we see.

But there's exceptions to every case (especially when human nature is involved). I actually know people that are so emotionally broken, that every interaction that they have; regardless of the context and medium, is a fight.

They tend to be lonely and angry. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#307

Post by istjohn »

sixothree wrote: post #247
lordnacho wrote: post #115

It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression. You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting…

> Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. I really hate saying this, but I live in the Deep South and people here can quite repulsive under the veneer of manners. The amount of hate, anger towards people different from them, and just rampant racism is quite difficult to deal with. And these are things that get exposed when having these conversation…

Yes, moral injury. Thanks for giving me a new way to frame that experience.

The natural impulse to be sociable and get along with people combined with minor insecurity or social anxiety has led to social experiences that when I reflect on them, I can only cringe in shame at my timid response to some awful statements.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#308

Post by [deleted] »

lordnacho wrote: post #115

It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression. You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting…

[deleted]

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#309

Post by qcnguy »

Ukv wrote: post #94
qcnguy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing. The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers d…

> People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have. It can be in people's/companies' rational self-interest to act in a way that is detrimental to society as a whole. We can recognize harmful behaviour and legislate such that it's no longer profitable, but…

It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years.

That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are. It's reminiscent of Thatcher's observation that there's no such thing as society in the sense the left use the word. There are families and coworkers and employers and so on, but there's not some monolithic unit called society that can be anthropomorphised and given preferences.

Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite: a society without ads would be a planned communist dystopia well beyond anything seen even in the USSR (which had advertising!). Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry.

People who don't believe this is true are typically in the "don't have information others do" bucket. But a few are just trying to dress up animalistic anti-capitalism in more respectable sounding clothes.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#310

Post by dolebirchwood »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #184
saberience wrote: post #68

I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text. As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentratio…

It's art. They did it because they wanted it to be seen exactly this way. Accessibility was not the goal.

That's cool, but not all art is good. A lot of it sucks, regardless of the technical acumen involved in its production. This is one of those cases.
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