This may be a stupid question: How old are you? From the pattern of your posts I seem to detect a vague hint of an American high school. Please observe: American schools are severely broken. (1) Inability to function in such a place is not necessarily a sign of insanity. Consider whether, perhaps, you may simply be surrounded by hormonal teenagers with nothing better to do than assert idiotic status hierarchies. If you’re not already familiar with it, Paul Graham’s essay on nerds may be relevant to your interests.
That aside: Are you sure you are really trying to be rational, as opposed to performing some ritual of cognition? It’s hard to use oneself as a control group, you certainly cannot do so double-blindly, but what happens if you drop your attempts at rationality and act without thought, or with less thought than you are currently using? For all you know, that may give even worse results; but at any rate it seems to me that your problem is desperately in need of a control, or baseline. When you debug, it’s no use saying that the error must be somewhere in module X. Comment out module X and see if the crash still happens.
Footnote 1: I read this on the Internet, so it must be true.
He is older than 23 per this comment. But reading his posts, either you have some extremely high standards for high school students or I am terrible at estimating someone’s level of education. (Unless you were measuring emotional maturity somehow).
In any case, I would find it pretty disheartening if someone asked me if I was in high school in a post about my own mental health. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be rude, but I find it hard to believe that this response would be anything but patronizing or insulting to anyone who isn’t a high school student.
High school is a formative experience, socially speaking. When I was 23, my social skill were heavily effected by routines I’d learned in high school that I hadn’t yet realized with dysfunctional given my goals. I found Graham’s essay very insightful, and I might have found it even more helpful before I put all that effort into improving my social skills.
Or you can click here to read “Why Nerds are Unpopular.” Short answer: being popular is a lot of work, and nerds prefer doing other things that don’t leave them with the time to develop popularity skills. At the margins, popularity is a skill, not a talent.
I did consider that the post was very well written, but then, it is precisely the child prodigies who have the greatest difficulty in high school. The language is not out of reach for a high-intelligence teenager who both reads and writes a lot.
I understand, and I do think you gave good advice (I love pg’s writing).
On a related note, I just get a little worried when these threads come up. We like to hide behind computing jargon and Spock-like introspection; this does help with efficient communication, but probably makes us look more resilient than we really are. These kind of LW discussion posts are probably of very high social value to the OP and the tone of the responses have more of an effect than we would like to admit.
So helping the OP to see hard truths is all well and good, but it seems to me that we could use a bit more finesse. It’s easier to understand the root of a problem when we have such precise words for everything, but it also means our pontifications must be just as precise or miss the mark completely—possibly hitting something we weren’t aiming for.
I am 38 years old. And I agree—American schools are severely broken; regrettably, so are most American corporations. All of my social experience has either been from American schools or American corporate jobs, which often seem like more a vicious extension of the American school social environment.
This may be a stupid question: How old are you? From the pattern of your posts I seem to detect a vague hint of an American high school. Please observe: American schools are severely broken. (1) Inability to function in such a place is not necessarily a sign of insanity. Consider whether, perhaps, you may simply be surrounded by hormonal teenagers with nothing better to do than assert idiotic status hierarchies. If you’re not already familiar with it, Paul Graham’s essay on nerds may be relevant to your interests.
That aside: Are you sure you are really trying to be rational, as opposed to performing some ritual of cognition? It’s hard to use oneself as a control group, you certainly cannot do so double-blindly, but what happens if you drop your attempts at rationality and act without thought, or with less thought than you are currently using? For all you know, that may give even worse results; but at any rate it seems to me that your problem is desperately in need of a control, or baseline. When you debug, it’s no use saying that the error must be somewhere in module X. Comment out module X and see if the crash still happens.
Footnote 1: I read this on the Internet, so it must be true.
He is older than 23 per this comment. But reading his posts, either you have some extremely high standards for high school students or I am terrible at estimating someone’s level of education. (Unless you were measuring emotional maturity somehow).
In any case, I would find it pretty disheartening if someone asked me if I was in high school in a post about my own mental health. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be rude, but I find it hard to believe that this response would be anything but patronizing or insulting to anyone who isn’t a high school student.
High school is a formative experience, socially speaking. When I was 23, my social skill were heavily effected by routines I’d learned in high school that I hadn’t yet realized with dysfunctional given my goals. I found Graham’s essay very insightful, and I might have found it even more helpful before I put all that effort into improving my social skills.
Which essay is Graham’s? Abandoning Cached Selves to Re-Write My Source Code?
I meant the one linked by Rolf in the grandparent post.
Or you can click here to read “Why Nerds are Unpopular.” Short answer: being popular is a lot of work, and nerds prefer doing other things that don’t leave them with the time to develop popularity skills. At the margins, popularity is a skill, not a talent.
Now I feel silly, as I read that. Thanks for your time.
I did consider that the post was very well written, but then, it is precisely the child prodigies who have the greatest difficulty in high school. The language is not out of reach for a high-intelligence teenager who both reads and writes a lot.
In any case I sit corrected on the OP’s age.
I understand, and I do think you gave good advice (I love pg’s writing).
On a related note, I just get a little worried when these threads come up. We like to hide behind computing jargon and Spock-like introspection; this does help with efficient communication, but probably makes us look more resilient than we really are. These kind of LW discussion posts are probably of very high social value to the OP and the tone of the responses have more of an effect than we would like to admit.
So helping the OP to see hard truths is all well and good, but it seems to me that we could use a bit more finesse. It’s easier to understand the root of a problem when we have such precise words for everything, but it also means our pontifications must be just as precise or miss the mark completely—possibly hitting something we weren’t aiming for.
I am 38 years old. And I agree—American schools are severely broken; regrettably, so are most American corporations. All of my social experience has either been from American schools or American corporate jobs, which often seem like more a vicious extension of the American school social environment.