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wedrifid comments on How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious - Less Wrong
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For several years I have known that I 'max out' at groups of five. If I'm in a conversation with up to four other people I'm charming and relaxed. Add a sixth and I clam up and turn into a totally different person. My working explanation is that my, as you call it, social modeling circuitry gets saturated and can't handle the combinatorial jump. For me it feels like an exponential increase in difficulty. I can't get the timing right, I don't feel like anything I say is interesting enough to cut in.
Interestingly, I am excellent at public speaking, because there's no need to model the audience on an individual basis.
Can you train yourself to pretend certain people do not even exist?
I trained myself to pretend that people exist. This is maybe the achievement I'm most proud of, besides this.
My training is pretty useless when someone stops earning the effort. They effectively stop existing.
I'm pretty sure this is the most joke-theoretically perfect joke I've ever encountered. Not only did I laugh, but 3 minutes later I was still laughing again for new reasons.
Joke theory is such that the maximisation thereof is bestiality puns? I mean, it cracked me up too but my theoretical conception calls for a perfection where the lewdness is on the subtle side of the spectrum!
I'm of the Michael O'Donoghue school. Jokes should be like Teflon-coated "cop killer" bullets. The subtlety part of the compression algorithm is only there to ensure delivery.
Thank you. Six years ago, I was working as a mover and carrying a box labeled "DR" for dining room. There was a Lab running around the customer's front yard. Suddenly!
Could you expand on that?
I'm exaggerating a bit. Of course I didn't ever think I was hallucinating other people (although I did fantasize as a kid about being the only real person on Earth -- everyone else was part of an alien experiment that centered on me). Rather, my subjective other-human-caused mental sensations vacillate between obliteratingly intense and nearly nonexistent. So by "trained myself to pretend that people exist" I really mean that I've improved my ability to modulate my perception of other-people-radiation so it isn't a choice between trickle or firehose in the face. Which has allowed me to communicate better and form lasting relationships.
To observers it probably seems like I'm an occasional solipsist, but that's just a coping mechanism.
I'm now being entertained by contemplating the difference between an occasional solipsist who believes that they are occasionally the only real person in the world, and one who occasionally believes they are (and have always been) the only real person in the world.
Sounds like something Oliver Sacks would write about.
I wonder what the first kind of occasional solipsist would think happened to all the other people when they became the one real person.
Well, if one considers p-zombies a coherent idea (which I don't), I can't see how it's noticeably less plausible to have someone who is sometimes genuinely conscious and sometimes a p-zombie. From there, to the idea that everyone is like that, seems a small step.
Of course, this also allows for the occasional solipsist who believes that occasionally there's only one real person in the world and it isn't them.
Years ago someone said to me "There are only forty-seven real people in the world, the rest are just bad special effects" to which i replied "I take exception to that: I am a damn good special effect!"
I actually find a variation on the part-time zombie to be...spot on, In terms of what the algorithm feels like. All you need is a bit of sleep deprivation.
That is the funniest thing I have seen in quite a while.
Wow. That is a really brutal joke.
I'll take that as a compliment...?
Yes. You shocked me.
Fascinating suggestion. Worth a shot.
This is a decent suggestion, but limited. I'm similar to moridinamael (except I find my cliff isn't as steep; 6 is when I start feeling my ability degrade and ~9 is where it's almost gone), and I find it easy to see most people as irrelevant in technical contexts (lectures, work, etc.) but not in most social contexts. If I'm at a party with 12 people, the only way I've found effective to stay talkative is form a subgroup that's 5 or fewer and just focus on them. Writing off active participants is a recipe for awkwardness / hurt feelings, which shutting down prevents.