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ChristianKl comments on Survey Article: How do I become a more interesting person? - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: casebash 18 October 2015 10:04AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 18 October 2015 11:37:30AM 1 point [-]

interesting person

What does that phrase mean to you? To me it's interesting means that if you are at a party other people want to talk to you.

When it comes optimizing my own life for myself I don't focus on being interesting but rather attempt to do meaningful things that are good for me and the world around me.

Comment author: casebash 18 October 2015 12:01:37PM 0 points [-]

It means the kind of person that people would want to meet. Being good at discussion is hugely important, but that's exactly why I want to put it into its own article.

Comment author: ChristianKl 18 October 2015 12:49:30PM *  1 point [-]

Everybody who reads LW and integrates what they read into their lives is an interesting person provided they can tell stories about it.

If someone asks you what you do with your free time and you tell him that you read LW with is a community about getting rid of biases and fallacies that isn't interesting.

If you tell him you read LW and there you learned to fix your sleep that's interesting. If you tell him how you now take Melatonin and have now much more energy in your life that's a conversation they can remember a year later, provided you tell the story well.

Applied rationality provides for experiences that make good stories, provided you are good at story telling. On the other hand I don't think my Salsa dancing provides for experiences that make good stories that will likely to be remembered a year down the road.

I went to that extreme that my life was interesting enough to have two reporters with a camera man coming along to film a talk I was given at the Chaos Computer Congress for a Quantified Self documentary and at the same time seeing that I'm not socially interesting and feel like I can't tell interesting things at the end of 2011.

Having "interesting to journalists" but not "interesting for standard social interaction" covered might be a personal extreme that isn't true for everybody in LW, but I think most people here are basically interesting and there issues with other people not finding them as interesting as they would like lies in an inability to communicate interesting stories.

Comment author: CAE_Jones 18 October 2015 06:06:01PM 1 point [-]

Having "interesting to journalists" but not "interesting for standard social interaction" covered might be a personal extreme that isn't true for everybody in LW,

Second datapoint: I've been interviewed by journalists a few times, am terrible at people in general. (A whole half of these would have been dull and pointless interviews if not for my visual impairment. The others I could see happening regardless.)