Everyone’s posting evidence for this, which is great and LW is awesome, but I’m also interested in any rebuttals of the sort like “I expected it to hugely change my social life but it didn’t really”
In particular, for me:
I found out about CFAR from LW and attended a CFAR workshop
I’ve attended a couple of meetups in the bay area
I found out about 80000 hours, GiveWell, MIRI, and effective altruism in general, which has been a large force in my life
I’ve met many interesting people working on many interesting things in spheres that I care about
Declaring pseudo-Crocker’s rules...
Not soon after I found out about LW, I expected to e.g move into a rationalist community, immerse myself in the memespace, etc. But there’s a distinct qualitative difference that I feel when I’m hanging out with my friends whom I’ve met from other more prosaic circles (house parties, friends of friends, college, etc) than when I’m hanging out with people at the meetups I’ve been to and even the CFAR workshop. I find it hard to really connect with most people I’ve met through LW in a way that gives me the fuzzywuzzies, even though many of us share similar values and are working towards similar goals.
Yes, my friends are stoners, entrepreneurs, weirdos, normals, hot people, people-probably-more-concerned-social-status-than-LWers, whatever. Some of them know about LW and are familiar with rationality concepts. But I just have a really fun time with them, and I haven’t had that in my experiences so far with LW people. I suspect (at the risk of sounding insulting) that there’s a difference in social acumen and sense of humor or something. I honestly found some of my social experiences with LWers kind of alienating.
Please note I’m not drawing a hard and fast line here, (and obviously there’s a selection effect) but I’m just curious if anyone else has had the same experience.
I find it hard to really connect with most people I’ve met through LW in a way that gives me the fuzzywuzzies
That interesting. Do you find it normally easy or hard to connect with people? Are you a computer programmer or something similar?
At the community camp in Berlin I got the feeling that maybe the idea that introverts get drained by social interaction is wrong. They get drained by interacting with people who are not like them. Many people at the event reported that they normally feel drained through social interaction but didn’t at the event.
I’m personally normally not drained in energy by social interaction but felt the weekend incredibly draining.
I could make up a story, but how would that help? The fact that I felt drained is a very direct observation. It’s data. I don’t have a counterfactual universe where I could alter certain factors about the weekend to see which of those factors is responsible for me feeling drained.
I don’t have a counterfactual universe where I could alter certain factors about the weekend to see which of those factors is responsible for me feeling drained.
This is certainly true. But I was hoping that you might be able to tease out the main differences between that LW weekend and occasions where you did not feel drained. It could even boil down to something like “I happened to be feeling stressed about something else during the community camp, which could explain why I felt drained more easily”.
I created this post, and the previous one about business networking, with an open mind as to whether LW does or can create person-to-person connections.
The surveys are certainly not scientific, and as you point out, few people are going to say “I didn’t meet anyone through LW and don’t intend to.” Still, my sense after all this is that few person-to-person connections, business or otherwise, happen because of this community.
By “few,” I suppose I am comparing to what happens in the high-density Bay Area rationalist community, or what happens in certain religious or ethnic groups or in certain school or university settings.
I’m actually reading the backlog of comments on this thread to write a post on people successfully asking personally important questions, and getting good responses, on the suggestions of users Gunnar Zarnacke, and [Peter Hurford}(http://www.lesswrong.com/user/peter_hurford). I’m mining this thread for more examples to use to improve the eventual post in Discussion. However, afterward, for due diligence, I intend to write the reverse-post, one in which I ask for people to report failure modes of taking advice and/or changing their lifestyle based on information they received through Less Wrong. Send me a private message if you would like to help write this post with me.
I’m curious if there is any other variables that might account for you not achieving what you hoped you might by connecting through Less Wrong. For example, many regular attendees of the Vancouver meetup have wanted to get great jobs, move into a house with their rationalist friends, or move to the Bay Area to be part of the central party. However, they haven’t done much of this yet, despite having wanted to with other local rationalists for a couple of years. The fact that most of us are university students, or have only recently launched our careers, throws a wrench into ambitious plans to utterly change our own lives because the effort my friends might have directed towards that is already taken up by their need to adapt to regular responsibilities of fully-fledged adulthood. On our part, I figure the planning fallacy, and overconfidence, caused us to significantly overestimate what we would really achieve as members of a burgeoning social subculture, or whatever.
Everyone’s posting evidence for this, which is great and LW is awesome, but I’m also interested in any rebuttals of the sort like “I expected it to hugely change my social life but it didn’t really”
In particular, for me:
I found out about CFAR from LW and attended a CFAR workshop
I’ve attended a couple of meetups in the bay area
I found out about 80000 hours, GiveWell, MIRI, and effective altruism in general, which has been a large force in my life
I’ve met many interesting people working on many interesting things in spheres that I care about
Declaring pseudo-Crocker’s rules...
Not soon after I found out about LW, I expected to e.g move into a rationalist community, immerse myself in the memespace, etc. But there’s a distinct qualitative difference that I feel when I’m hanging out with my friends whom I’ve met from other more prosaic circles (house parties, friends of friends, college, etc) than when I’m hanging out with people at the meetups I’ve been to and even the CFAR workshop. I find it hard to really connect with most people I’ve met through LW in a way that gives me the fuzzywuzzies, even though many of us share similar values and are working towards similar goals.
Yes, my friends are stoners, entrepreneurs, weirdos, normals, hot people, people-probably-more-concerned-social-status-than-LWers, whatever. Some of them know about LW and are familiar with rationality concepts. But I just have a really fun time with them, and I haven’t had that in my experiences so far with LW people. I suspect (at the risk of sounding insulting) that there’s a difference in social acumen and sense of humor or something. I honestly found some of my social experiences with LWers kind of alienating.
Please note I’m not drawing a hard and fast line here, (and obviously there’s a selection effect) but I’m just curious if anyone else has had the same experience.
That interesting. Do you find it normally easy or hard to connect with people? Are you a computer programmer or something similar?
At the community camp in Berlin I got the feeling that maybe the idea that introverts get drained by social interaction is wrong. They get drained by interacting with people who are not like them. Many people at the event reported that they normally feel drained through social interaction but didn’t at the event.
I’m personally normally not drained in energy by social interaction but felt the weekend incredibly draining.
Would you mind explaining why?
I could make up a story, but how would that help? The fact that I felt drained is a very direct observation. It’s data. I don’t have a counterfactual universe where I could alter certain factors about the weekend to see which of those factors is responsible for me feeling drained.
Thanks for replying!
This is certainly true. But I was hoping that you might be able to tease out the main differences between that LW weekend and occasions where you did not feel drained. It could even boil down to something like “I happened to be feeling stressed about something else during the community camp, which could explain why I felt drained more easily”.
I created this post, and the previous one about business networking, with an open mind as to whether LW does or can create person-to-person connections.
The surveys are certainly not scientific, and as you point out, few people are going to say “I didn’t meet anyone through LW and don’t intend to.” Still, my sense after all this is that few person-to-person connections, business or otherwise, happen because of this community.
By “few,” I suppose I am comparing to what happens in the high-density Bay Area rationalist community, or what happens in certain religious or ethnic groups or in certain school or university settings.
I’m actually reading the backlog of comments on this thread to write a post on people successfully asking personally important questions, and getting good responses, on the suggestions of users Gunnar Zarnacke, and [Peter Hurford}(http://www.lesswrong.com/user/peter_hurford). I’m mining this thread for more examples to use to improve the eventual post in Discussion. However, afterward, for due diligence, I intend to write the reverse-post, one in which I ask for people to report failure modes of taking advice and/or changing their lifestyle based on information they received through Less Wrong. Send me a private message if you would like to help write this post with me.
I’m curious if there is any other variables that might account for you not achieving what you hoped you might by connecting through Less Wrong. For example, many regular attendees of the Vancouver meetup have wanted to get great jobs, move into a house with their rationalist friends, or move to the Bay Area to be part of the central party. However, they haven’t done much of this yet, despite having wanted to with other local rationalists for a couple of years. The fact that most of us are university students, or have only recently launched our careers, throws a wrench into ambitious plans to utterly change our own lives because the effort my friends might have directed towards that is already taken up by their need to adapt to regular responsibilities of fully-fledged adulthood. On our part, I figure the planning fallacy, and overconfidence, caused us to significantly overestimate what we would really achieve as members of a burgeoning social subculture, or whatever.