Comment on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 06:16:15 GMT

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.

I don't think I could make a very good friendship via the internet.

Why not?

I don't know how to to strike up conversations.

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?"

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