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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It doesn't need much context. If someone asks you "How are you?" you can reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk that happens between normal people doesn't have much content.
It doesn't help if you catch up with popular culture while you are looked up in your room. The problem is being locked up in a room and being socially isolated instead of the specific content that you consume.
Instead of spending 2 hours locked up in your room to catch up with popular culture spends that time going out and talk to people.
I've downvoted this for being bad advice that I explicitly requested you refrain from giving.
I think that the advice is well suited to your situation. I suspect that you don't realize this because you spend so much time isolating yourself from people to study math.
I think it's great that so many people here are extremely intellegent, but one can hardly expect to relate very well to most people when one spends most of their time studying extremely obscure subjects alone while they sit down and barely move. That's pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.
Balance intellectual activities with specifically non-intellectual activities that are not based around the passive consumption of media. Actually get out into the world, move your body in new ways, interact with a variety of people, seek novel experiences, travel around to new places far away and try to find new aspects of the area where you live. Basically just do the opposite of limiting your physical mobility and emotional expressiveness in order to focus on logical thinking about intangible intellectual subjects.
Would it surprise you to learn I'd recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world's largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I've given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
With respect, you have no knowledge of my "situation". Please don't presume to offer me advice on the basis of whatever assumptions you've incorrectly conjured up.
Those sound like pretty good topics for conversations with people.
To a degree. Swing dancing in Sweden is a fairly unusual way to spend your summer holiday.
I think you and I have had exchanges about "optimising for awesomeness" in the past. In some ways, having "awesome" talents or hobbies or experiences is no more relatable than having insular and nerdy ones. It's just cooler.
What? I'm under the impression that there are a much larger number of people who enjoy hearing me talk about trips around Europe or exams while drunk than about models of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray propagation.
I think we're talking at crossed purposes here. Relatability isn't popularity. If I wrestled a Bengal tiger into submission and rode it across the subcontinent, I'm sure a lot of people would want to hear me talk about that. But unless they'd also ridden across India on a subdued tiger, it wouldn't foster a sense of empathy, kinship or mutual understanding.
Those all sound like some pretty awesome activities!
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable balance of sociability vs. studying?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but it seems you're essentially saying that when you (temporarily) hyper focus on solitary, intellectual activities you (temporarily) encounter more difficulty in conversations. This doesn't surprise me and it seems evident that the only real solution is to find the right balance for you and accept the inherent trade offs.
It's not like I have some slider on my desktop, with "sit in a box, autistically rocking back and forth, counting numbers" at one end, and "rakishly sample the epicurean delights of the world" at the other. I have time and work and study commitments. I have externally-imposed scheduling. I have inscrutable internal motivation levels that need to be contended with.
It's a case of resource management, and occasionally when managing those resources I'll have to focus on one area to the exclusion of another. That's fine. It's not something there's a "solution" to. It's a condition all moderately busy people have to operate under.
For certain people that's not an option (“phdcomics is a documentary” -- shminux).
You know there's a huge fraction of the people in the developed world who willingly spend a sizeable fraction of their waking time watching TV, right?
Watching TV is not an intellectual activity in any real sense. Most TV stimulates the senses and evokes emotions in the viewer through storylines and such. This is obviously very different from studying mathematics seriously.
I'm under the impression that that often doesn't work very well with most males -- I find it relatively hard to emotionally relate with them unless we have something in particular to talk about. (Then again, biased sample, yadda yadda yadda.)