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Kawoomba comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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You are sitting so close to someone that parts of your bodies probably touch, you smell them, you feel them, you hear them. The one doing the forcing with all that is the evil aircraft company, and though it's customary to regard such forced close encounters as "non-spaces" by pretending that no, you're not crammed in with a stranger for hours and hours, the reality is that you are.
The question is how you react to that, and offering to acknowledge the presence of the other and to find out their wishes regarding the flight is the common sense thing to do. Like pinging a server, if you will. If you don't ask, you won't find out.
Well, if there are non-verbal hints (looking away etc), by all means, stay quiet. However, you probably clearly notice that a protocol which forbids offering to start a conversation would result in countless acquaintances and friends never meeting, even if both may have preferred conversation.
In the end, even to an introvert, simply stating "Oh hello, I'm so and so, unfortunately I have a lot on my mind, I'm sure you understand" isn't outside the bounds of the reasonable. Do you disagree?
Only for an extrovert.
Yes.
As someone who has been "trapped" in dozens of conversations with someone seemingly nice but uninteresting it's surprisingly hard to straight up tell someone you don't want to talk to them. I
Exactly. I would be far more ok with a social norm that condoned introducing oneself to (and starting conversations with) people on plans if there was also a social norm that condoned saying "I don't want to talk to you. Kindly go away and leave me alone." Current social norms regard this as rude. (I take it our esteemed extrovert colleagues see the problem here.)
Datapoint: I don't care for Achmiz's hostility but I do agree with his point here. There is no polite way to explicitly tell someone you don't want to communicate. This is a bug that should be fixed. It harms both parties; the silent one can't indicate that without paying a social cost, and the talkative one can't really be sure they're not annoying their counterpart.
(it is possible the talkative one doesn't actually care if they're annoying their counterpart. If so, fuck them.)
FWIW, I am an introvert, and I agree with you. I have no desire to start conversations with strangers on the plane, but I understand that extroverts do. I refuse them politely along the lines that you suggest here, and nobody has ever thought me rude because of it. (Or if they did, they were polite enough not to say so.)
Personally, as quite an extreme introvert, I would probably not make any excuses to get out of the conversation, but I would wish they had never spoken up in the first place.
We live in a culture of extroversion, where transparent excuses to avoid talking to another person overwhelmingly tend to be viewed as rude.
While I sympathize with extroverts who would be discomforted by a long train or plane ride in close proximity with no conversation, starting one in a place where the other person does not have the option to physically disengage, even without applying intentional pressure against their doing so, does carry a risk of discomforting the other person.