(In the linked article, the author questions what really happens when you invite 100 people for an interview and only hire the best 1. Naively, it seems like you are hiring the top 1%. But actually, some kinds of people are overrepresented at job interviews, namely those who can’t get a job, and those are exactly the ones you want to avoid. And okay, most likely the 1 best out of 100 is not like this, but because the sample is skewed, they are neither the top 1%. Maybe top 10%, or top 50%, or top 99%, depending on how strongly the sample is skewed.)
I assume a similar effect might happen if you had a official place made explicitly for the purpose of finding friends, open to everyone. It would disproportionally attract people who for some reason can’t find or can’t keep friends, and yet they want some. And I don’t mean merely “people who are somewhat clueless about how to find friends, or whose jobs and other duties leave them too little free time to socialize”, but also smelly homeless people, or people who are obviously crazy, drunk, stoned, violent, and otherwise dysfunctional. Then you would realize you are actually not that desperate to have a friend; that you actually only want someone who is kinda like you, or better.
And if it seems like “no big deal, I would just avoid the obviously horrible ones, and try to approach someone who seems normal”, well, the problem is that those horrible people would of course try to approach you. (If there is a social norm that approaching others at that place is okay, then obviously this rule applies to them, too.) Either you would run away screaming, or quickly aproach someone and say: “hey, you look normal, let’s get out of here and talk outside”. Then, most likely you would find out that they also have some undesirable trait that was not obvious at the first sight. Unless you are really desperate, you would probably not come back. Which of course would make the desperate people even more overrepresented there.
But… there are many places where you can find friends, which are absolutely not like this.
Yes, and there is some kind of filtering. Most likely, you have to pay to be there; sometimes the place is difficult to find and not advertized (so you need to be told about it by someone); and there is often an official activity you are supposed to be interested in, and attempts to merely socialize without doing the activity are frowned upon. Also, annoying people can be kicked out, either formally by the owner of the place, or informally by other guests.
These all are the necessary tools to filter out the least desirable kind of people. For a person who identifies as egalitarian, it is unpleasant to think about it explicitly; it is preferable not to think about it at all. And… let’s admit that there is some similarity with the people described in that book. It’s a difference of degree, not substance.
A large part of stigma against people looking for friends (or dates) explicitly is probably just stigma against environments where desperate low-value people are overrepresented. If you could set up a friend-matching website that would almost never set you up with a low-value person, I believe it could become popular. But it would require a lot of honesty, which many people would find offensive, because obviously admitting certain traits would automatically filter you out of most people you would like to meet. There would be a strong incentive to lie, so the question is whether we are going to trust people, or verify their questions somehow (and maybe remove the ones that cannot be verified, because they in effect act as an asshole filter—remove the honest ones, keep the liars). You would need to do this reliably enough so that if you have 1000 low-value users, and 2 average ones, the algorithm will clearly match those 2 together.
I assume a similar effect might happen if you had a official place made explicitly for the purpose of finding friends
This shook loose a memory of my primary school trying to institute exactly that; a bench adjacent to the playground with signage declaring it to be a “find-a-friend bus stop” (may not have been the exact wording), with the idea of it being a rallying point to link up with some other loner and go play together.
Crazy homeless drunks thankfully weren’t a problem. But even at a young age I think we were able to instinctively recognise that there could be nothing more tragic than to be sat visibly alone on the “got no friends” bench, so I don’t think it saw much use.
Might have occasionally been made part of a game, where we tried to push each other into sitting on the bench, on the basis that sitting there was for losers. But I’m not 100% confident of whether that’s a real memory.
Either way I have to assume the organiser behind that idea either didn’t really think it through all the way, or had an overly optimistic take as to how merciless/vicious kids can be.
Low status losers might have a small role to play, as high status persons could use their exclusion and public humiliation at the outer periphery to help boost their own social position.
I think there is a social equivalent of “(not) hiring the top 1%”.
(In the linked article, the author questions what really happens when you invite 100 people for an interview and only hire the best 1. Naively, it seems like you are hiring the top 1%. But actually, some kinds of people are overrepresented at job interviews, namely those who can’t get a job, and those are exactly the ones you want to avoid. And okay, most likely the 1 best out of 100 is not like this, but because the sample is skewed, they are neither the top 1%. Maybe top 10%, or top 50%, or top 99%, depending on how strongly the sample is skewed.)
I assume a similar effect might happen if you had a official place made explicitly for the purpose of finding friends, open to everyone. It would disproportionally attract people who for some reason can’t find or can’t keep friends, and yet they want some. And I don’t mean merely “people who are somewhat clueless about how to find friends, or whose jobs and other duties leave them too little free time to socialize”, but also smelly homeless people, or people who are obviously crazy, drunk, stoned, violent, and otherwise dysfunctional. Then you would realize you are actually not that desperate to have a friend; that you actually only want someone who is kinda like you, or better.
And if it seems like “no big deal, I would just avoid the obviously horrible ones, and try to approach someone who seems normal”, well, the problem is that those horrible people would of course try to approach you. (If there is a social norm that approaching others at that place is okay, then obviously this rule applies to them, too.) Either you would run away screaming, or quickly aproach someone and say: “hey, you look normal, let’s get out of here and talk outside”. Then, most likely you would find out that they also have some undesirable trait that was not obvious at the first sight. Unless you are really desperate, you would probably not come back. Which of course would make the desperate people even more overrepresented there.
But… there are many places where you can find friends, which are absolutely not like this.
Yes, and there is some kind of filtering. Most likely, you have to pay to be there; sometimes the place is difficult to find and not advertized (so you need to be told about it by someone); and there is often an official activity you are supposed to be interested in, and attempts to merely socialize without doing the activity are frowned upon. Also, annoying people can be kicked out, either formally by the owner of the place, or informally by other guests.
These all are the necessary tools to filter out the least desirable kind of people. For a person who identifies as egalitarian, it is unpleasant to think about it explicitly; it is preferable not to think about it at all. And… let’s admit that there is some similarity with the people described in that book. It’s a difference of degree, not substance.
A large part of stigma against people looking for friends (or dates) explicitly is probably just stigma against environments where desperate low-value people are overrepresented. If you could set up a friend-matching website that would almost never set you up with a low-value person, I believe it could become popular. But it would require a lot of honesty, which many people would find offensive, because obviously admitting certain traits would automatically filter you out of most people you would like to meet. There would be a strong incentive to lie, so the question is whether we are going to trust people, or verify their questions somehow (and maybe remove the ones that cannot be verified, because they in effect act as an asshole filter—remove the honest ones, keep the liars). You would need to do this reliably enough so that if you have 1000 low-value users, and 2 average ones, the algorithm will clearly match those 2 together.
This shook loose a memory of my primary school trying to institute exactly that; a bench adjacent to the playground with signage declaring it to be a “find-a-friend bus stop” (may not have been the exact wording), with the idea of it being a rallying point to link up with some other loner and go play together.
Crazy homeless drunks thankfully weren’t a problem. But even at a young age I think we were able to instinctively recognise that there could be nothing more tragic than to be sat visibly alone on the “got no friends” bench, so I don’t think it saw much use.
Might have occasionally been made part of a game, where we tried to push each other into sitting on the bench, on the basis that sitting there was for losers. But I’m not 100% confident of whether that’s a real memory.
Either way I have to assume the organiser behind that idea either didn’t really think it through all the way, or had an overly optimistic take as to how merciless/vicious kids can be.
Low status losers might have a small role to play, as high status persons could use their exclusion and public humiliation at the outer periphery to help boost their own social position.