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30 minutes with a stranger

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Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#81

Post by myrmidon »

koliber wrote: post #73
999900000999 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday. In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction. At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods. Not everyone, but just having a role…

I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it. A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now. Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did…

I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion.

The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less.

While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental.

If you want product updates or information, getting that from dedicated, independent 3rd parties is preferable in literally every situation I can think of.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#82

Post by narmiouh »

koliber wrote: post #73
999900000999 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday. In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction. At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods. Not everyone, but just having a role…

I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it. A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now. Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did…

The way ads are run these days is almost completely wrong!

- Lies are ok

- Thrusting your product in a users face, doesn't care if the user cares, Just because I like golfing, doesn't mean every new golf ball brand needs to hit me up all the time.

- Product with Money wins, not necessarily the right product

- Most people are oblivious to their psychological drivers, Ad makers have learnt to exploit those to drive sales.

This is one area AI can be very helpful as it improves, I face a problem, I let my agent loose and it finds the right solution and thus right products, provides comparative data for me to choose without the products being thrust in my face everywhere I go (behavioral ads) or also when I don't need it.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#84

Post by federiconafria »

rahulnair23 wrote: post #65
rkagerer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of this is due to social media sites and how the choice to interact that way (where the medium is geared to show off shallow facets of our achievements or amplify polarized opinions) is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.

Isolating tech goes earlier than that. I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.

That's what I was thinking, if social media was not there, would we be more social? Or is it really the fact that our necessities can be covered without being social the real "problem".

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#85

Post by federiconafria »

rkagerer wrote: post #48
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…

I wonder how much of this is due to social media sites and how the choice to interact that way (where the medium is geared to show off shallow facets of our achievements or amplify polarized opinions) is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.

I think your ordering is wrong, we don't need to spend time together anymore so we fall back to social media. I wonder how things would look like if we had social media on top of a more social world.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#86

Post by kruffalon »

hackboyfly wrote: post #38
willemlaurentz wrote: post #30

Following the book "The Power of Strangers" I once did an experiment with talking to random strangers, it is amazing what you'll learn from random conversations: https://willem.com/en/2023-10-13_hello-stranger/

I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude. Would be cool if there were a serious version of those random cam chats like omegle.

Well, that's not entirely true, you just have to be a bit particular about when and how to start the conversation.

Things I find work most of the time in Sweden to get started is complaining about something mutually bothersome, annoying or scary that you don't have any power over, things like:

- A third party being rude. So if you notice that someone gets annoyed by someone else you can huff and puff a little over that.

- the weather, obviously and often!

- if someone hurts themselves or trips (doesn't have to be as big an injury as in the article)

- children are great conversation starters, regardless if they are cute, loud, awake, still or whatever. And this is one of the few positive topics that work.

The trick is also to not keep talking about the annoying thing, because that is quite boring!

If you get more courageous you can also just ask about a place, piece of public art or even the way to some random thing, in my experience (a whole life) swedes are very helpful :)

My favourite question is to ask people who clearly hope to see me go away about the names of places, I don't know why that topic works so well to tear walls down, but it does.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#87

Post by kruffalon »

skeezyboy wrote: post #71
hackboyfly wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude. Would be cool if there were a serious version of those random cam chats like omegle.

> I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude. you all sound like a lovely bunch. is this a modern thing?

Not who you asked, but no, old ingrained cultural thing!

The trick is to trick us into not realising we are interacting, then we are quite friendly and polite :)

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#88

Post by qcnguy »

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…

All three of those links are claiming right wing people are mentally ill.

Academics have all kinds of indirect theories for why people outside of academia don't agree with their politics. Ironically given the subject of the website, one thing they almost never do is just go outside of academia, sit down with people who disagree with them and talk to them as equals. They spam bot-filled websites like Mechanical Turk with surveys trying to prove things about the imaginary people in their own minds, and then publish "findings", but they don't actually talk to people.

The most obvious and logical explanation for why right wing people exist is that they disagree with left wing politics, believing them to lead to bad outcomes. Papers like those three are a dime a dozen, but one thing you'll never find is studies that just directly ask people disagree with common academic beliefs. Instead it's taken as axiomatic that leftism is moral and correct, so anyone who disagrees must have some other deeper psychological reason to disagree (loneliness, reading the wrong websites, not getting enough sex, whatever). Lots of non-replicable studies get produced, grants are awarded, and academics give lots of interviews to the NYT about their search for One Weird Trick to convert people to their worldview that doesn't involve any actual policy changes.

The professors doing such studies should look in the mirror. If they're saying social isolation and informational monoculture leads to extremism, then it's hard to find somewhere more isolated and monocultural than universities. But of course they lack sufficient insight to consider that.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#89

Post by RianAtheer »

I think spending 30 minutes with a stranger can be surprisingly powerful. You never know what perspective, idea, or connection might come from an unexpected conversation. I remember that once spent 30 minutes with a stranger at a cafe who turned out to be a trader in a completely different market than mine. In that short conversation, I picked up a few strategies and a perspective on risk management I’d never considered before. It reminded me that sometimes the most valuable insights come from unexpected places and just half an hour with the right person can change how you approach your work.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#90

Post by darkwater »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #45
darkwater wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you and I actually love these "special scrolling" websites. They are much closer to a truly work of art exactly because of the different design. To the haters: why do we have churches or buildings with marble statues in the walls or column instead of a standard stone wall, which was designed to do the job in a standard way?

Niches (recesses in walls for statues) and columns in church buildings are actually central features that serve the primary purpose of the building. Niches provide spaces for statues for remembering the dead, or prayers and veneration (for Catholics), enhancing the link between the spiritual and corporeal realms. Arguably they're also used to encourage payments from patrons for a church building's upkeep or construct…

All these things you mention are corollary to the construction of the building per-se, but are central to the "spirit" of the building. The same applies with this kind of websites and scrolling. The website has a goal in itself, uses a more creative scrolling feature as both a way to better convey the information and a work of art to be more attractive to the eye.

My parallel was that the typical HNer just ignores this and think "don't touch my browser standard scrolling behavior", that would be akin to someone just wanting a plain wall to keep the roof up, ignoring everything else: "I pray there anyway, I don't need that statue to remember it".

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