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Alicorn comments on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I only know a handful of people who I could fairly sum up as having "social roles" in the same way you describe your brother as having. This could be a deficiency on my end, or I could know weird people - or this could be an inadequate model of how social interaction works, and my bet is on the last thing.
Have you considered making friends with girls? There will probably be less (though still some) of the things you list among girls, depending on what you mean by "inauthenticity". (What do you mean by "inauthenticity"?)
Have you considered making friends with upperclassmen or socializing with professors you like? Why do your friends have to be your age?
Just how small is this college? Mine had like 400 people and there were types, if not outright subcultures.
Is there a game store? Those often host gaming events.
Do your friends need to be in-person?
This one could be a problem. Are there any known ways around or through it that are relatively easy to exploit?
Be there to do something else too, and focus (verbally) on that thing (while striking up conversations, of course).
Honestly not sure how. I've never really ever made friends "on purpose" with people in general. That's probably a lot of my problem. Then there's more issues involved when I have to deal with girls, because I have to deal with gender roles or different expectations or whatever.
I'm not intrinsically opposed to the idea. My issue is that I don't know how to: 1. Become friends with people unless I interact with them a lot, and that's not really happening. 2. Become friends with girls specifically, I assume the issues there with getting to know someone will be even more challenging.
You're dealing with a social wreck here, basically.
I also don't think girls tend to be very authentic at my age, but it's not as though they'd be worse than the guys.
I don't know how to make friends with people I don't interact with on a more or less daily basis. My friendships have always just "happened", I've never actively pursued them before.
600 in my grade, 2000 something total. Maybe I'm just wrong here and am unobservant.
I should check for game events in my area, I guess. There's not one on campus or anything.
Preferably. I don't think I could make a very good friendship via the internet.
Not sure, I need to fight it.
Just about everyone arrives to events in groups and I don't know how to to strike up conversations.
So I'm getting the sense that you were only restricting the demographics of potential friends by default, which is good, since it means there's more space to look in than you thought. Professors in particular might be good if you mostly want to have intellectual conversations! Show up to office hours, and have intellectual conversations with them!
There's "authentic" again - what does that mean? My best guess right now is "not wrapped up in signaling" in which case - well, you're gonna have a bad time. Humans do that. (Though I begin to suspect that you're oversensitive to it and may be seeing more of it than there is.) But maybe you mean something else.
Why not?
Go up to someone. Ask them a question ("do you know if the food here is any good?", "can I borrow a pen?", "is the line for tickets?") or pay them a compliment ("awesome t-shirt!", [laughter at a joke they just made], "your presentation just now was fantastic, my favorite part was [x]!") or stand near them and their group (without being followy if they try to leave) and pick up on something someone in the group says when there's enough of a break to do it ("yeah, Communism would only work for nonhuman aliens", "that's funny, when I was in Japan I didn't see any kaiju at all!", "cool, so snakes don't even have ears? Can they sense vibrations?"). Or the classic standby of: Stick out your hand. "Hi, I'm [chaosmosis]! What's your name?"