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Hello.
Female / Web developer / 41 years old / rural Indiana native
I've commented a few times, but not many.
Some tidbits:
Be prompt, generous, and sincere in your compliments. Ideally, don't use plain adjectives - use descriptions. (Exceptions here are compliments on articles of clothing - "your boots are AWESOME!" is kosher.) It only feels silly from your end. If you are just trying to make friends, avoid anything that (given your and the potential friend's genders) would appear laced with sexual interest, unless you can pull it off with genuine innocence and then reliably follow up with genuine innocence instead of changing tacks midway.
Have a "standby" interaction prompt that you can pull out in lulls which isn't threatening, is generally well received, and provides a hook for further conversation. I usually offer people food. I'm sure there are others that would do - if you're trying to conduct an informal survey of something, for instance ("Hey, I'm trying to find out different ways people celebrate St. Patrick's Day, what do you do?), that would probably work too.
Learn to pick apart people's dialogue for followup questions - you can practice this on fictional dialogue; just take a good-sized sentence and write down five followup tangents. Example:
"I went out to Cape Cod last week with my friend Tess and we found some sea glass."
Followups:
"Ooh, do you go to Cape Cod a lot?"
"Neat, what else did you do there?"
"Wow! How long did you stay on the cape?"
"Cool - what are you going to do with the sea glass?"
"Hm, I don't think I know Tess - tell me about her?"
Note that these all prompt the potential friend to talk, rather than providing an excuse for you to do so (any of the above would be preferable to, for instance, "Hey, I went to Cape Cod once and had the most fantastic lobster...") Also note that each sentence started with a particle that shows interest. Eliminating these runs a significant risk of making it sound like you're just interrogating the person. And: it is quite important that you actually want to know the answer to the question you pick. If you can come up with lists of five but don't give a crap about how any of them would be answered, you're talking to supernaturally boring people, you're a misanthrope, or you're doing the exercise wrong.
Go ahead and be the first to suggest exchanging contact information. On the internet, this means e-mail or better, IM. In person this means a place to meet next, or possibly phone numbers or addresses (or e-mail or IM). It's scary to most everybody else, too, so don't expect them to do it. Leave a line of social retreat if they never want to hear from you again, avoid any requests for contact info customarily laced with sexual tension, but do make it clear that you think they're neat and you'd like to be their friend. You can even haul out the elementary school line "Wanna be friends?" - if it makes you feel more comfortable with it, go on a brief tangent about how "we lose so much when we leave elementary school and it's no longer socially acceptable to make friends by walking up to someone on the playground and asking if they want to be..." beat... "Wanna be my friend?".
Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I'll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I'd never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket. (It was my florally embroidered denim thing, by far the loudest thing I own). I was trying to make friends, so instead of thanking her and looking away, I fired back with a compliment on her cloak and soon had her talking up a storm about knitting. When she was interested in what I did with my spare time, I didn't talk about school, even though that was most salient to me at the time - I talked about cooking, gambling that the domestic handicrafts have some overlap in their aficionados. I told her I planned to make pumpkin bread as soon as I had a can of pumpkin. Which it just so happened to turn out that she had in her cupboard, and she lived in my apartment complex. So I went home with her, accepted the can of pumpkin, went home and made bread, and brought one of the loaves over to her place, where I hung out for another couple of hours chatting about textiles, her Hassidic Judaism, and her multiple personalities. (I am no longer friends with her over differences of opinion on a political/ethical matter, but it's still a great making-friends story.) Social spontaneity is what let me go to a stranger's place for canned pumpkin and bring her a loaf of bread later.
Thanks for this. It looks like very useful advice.
In response to
Ureshiku Naritai
"I threw myself into developing the skill of making friends on purpose"
I'd be interested in a comment or post about how this is done. I've never been able to do this.
In response to
Undiscriminating Skepticism
There's an additional issue of subtlety that isn't addressed here. People will typically reveal "improper" views by starting small and seeing if their audience is sympathetic, not because they are irrational, but because they aren't stupid and they care about consequences.
That is, if I'm in some highly religious town, I'm not going to open my conversation with, "So, this whole God thing makes about as much sense as Santa Claus, am I right?" I'm going to open with, "You know, there's something about the story of Job that just doesn't sit right with me," or something else small, safe, and exploratory.
Agreed. There's another reason why people might give religion the "respect" of treating it worthy of debate, while not doing so with astrology. One might feel that religious people are taking their agendas into politics and school classrooms to the detriment of society in a way that astrologists are not, and might therefore give religionists the respect necessary to engage them in debate and hopefully change their minds.
We're nearly all of us materialists here; how many of us would still be if we had a powerful religious experience?
I once experienced "Hag syndrome", I must have been around eleven. I woke up during the night, unable to move and convinced I had a witch sitting on me.
The next day when I could think about it in bright daylight I thought it was kinda cool that my brain could make me believe something so clearly supernatural, but it seemed just as obvious it had only been the same kind of thing as a nightmare, only more powerful. I didn't mention it to my parents or anything, just filed it as "one of those things". (It was downright scary at the time though; I don't recommend the experience, which as you can see still, um, haunts me.)
I had very strong religious experiences in my past, and became an atheist/materialist later, if that counts. So I'm guessing a later one could be similarly worked around.
Most of the examples you stated have to do more with people fearing a "not so good life" - old age, reduced mental and physical capabilities etc., not necessarily death.
Not sure what you're responding to. I never said anything about fearing death nor a not-so-good life, only immortality. And my examples (jadedness, boredom) have nothing to do with declining health.
That was eloquent, but... I honestly don't understand why you couldn't just sign up for cryonics and then get on with your (first) life. I mean, I get that I'm the wrong person to ask, I've known about cryonics since age eleven and I've never really planned on dying. But most of our society is built around not thinking about death, not any sort of rational, considered adaptation to death. Add the uncertain prospect of immortality and... not a whole lot changes so far as I can tell.
There's all the people who believe in Heaven. Some of them are probably even genuinely sincere about it. They think they've got a certainty of immortality. And they still walk on two feet and go to work every day.
"But most of our society is built around not thinking about death, not any sort of rational, considered adaptation to death. "
Hm. I don't see this at all. I see people planning college, kids, a career they can stand for 40 years, retirement, nursing care, writing wills, buying insurance, picking out cemetaries, all in order, all in a march toward the inevitable. People often talk about whether or not it's "too late" to change careers or buy a house. People often talk about "passing on" skills or keepsakes or whatever to their children. Nearly everything we do seems like an adaptation to death to me.
People who believe in heaven believe that whatever they're supposed to do in heaven is all cut out for them. There will be an orientation, God will give you your duties or pleasures or what have you, and he'll see to it that they don't get boring, because after all, this is a reward. And unlike in Avalot's scenerio, the skills you gained in the first life are useful in the second, because God has been guiding you and all that jazz. There's still a progression of birth to fufilment. (I say this as an ex-afterlife-believer).
On the other hand, many vampire and other stories are predicated on the fact that mundane immortality is terrifying. Who can stand a job for more than 40 years? Who has more than a couple dozen jobs they could imagine standing for 40 years each in succession? Wouldn't they all start to seem pointless? What would you do with your time without jobs? Wouldn't you meet the same sorts of stupid people over and over again until it drove you insane? Wouldn't you get sick of the taste of every food? Even the Internet has made me more jaded than I'd like.
That's my fear of cryogenics. That, and that imperfect science would cause me to have a brain rot that would make my new reanimated self crazy and suffering. But that one is a failure to visualize it working well, not an objection to it working well.
In response to
A Much Better Life?
I don't know if anyone picked up on this, but this to me somehow correlates with Eliezer Yudkowsky's post on Normal Cryonics... if in reverse.
Eliezer was making a passionate case that not choosing cryonics is irrational, and that not choosing it for your children has moral implications. It's made me examine my thoughts and beliefs about the topic, which were, I admit, ready-made cultural attitudes of derision and distrust.
Once you notice a cultural bias, it's not too hard to change your reasoned opinion... but the bias usually piggy-backs on a deep-seated reptilian reaction. I find changing that reaction to be harder work.
All this to say that in the case of this tale, and of Eliezer's lament, what might be at work is the fallacy of sunk costs (if we have another name for it, and maybe a post to link to, please let me know!).
Knowing that we will suffer, and knowing that we will die, are unbearable thoughts. We invest an enormous amount of energy toward dealing with the certainty of death and of suffering, as individuals, families, social groups, nations. Worlds in which we would not have to die, or not have to suffer, are worlds for which we have no useful skills or tools. Especially compared to the considerable arsenal of sophisticated technologies, art forms, and psychoses we've painstakingly evolved to cope with death.
That's where I am right now. Eliezer's comments have triggered a strongly rational dissonance, but I feel comfortable hanging around all the serious people, who are too busy doing the serious work of making the most of life to waste any time on silly things like immortality. Mostly, I'm terrified at the unfathomable enormity of everything that I'll have to do to adapt to a belief in cryonics. I'll have to change my approach to everything... and I don't have any cultural references to guide the way.
Rationally, I know that most of what I've learned is useless if I have more time to live. Emotionally, I'm afraid to let go, because what else do I have?
Is this a matter of genetic programming percolating too deep into the fabric of all our systems, be they genetic, nervous, emotional, instinctual, cultural, intellectual? Are we so hard-wired for death that we physically can't fathom or adapt to the potential for immortality?
I'm particularly interested in hearing about the experience of the LW community on this: How far can rational examination of life-extension possibilities go in changing your outlook, but also feelings or even instincts? Is there a new level of self-consciousness behind this brick wall I'm hitting, or is it pretty much brick all the way?
"Rationally, I know that most of what I've learned is useless if I have more time to live. Emotionally, I'm afraid to let go, because what else do I have?"
I love this. But I think it's rational as well as emotional to not be willing to let go of "everything you have".
People who have experienced the loss of someone, or other tragedy, sometimes lose the ability to care about any and everything they are doing. It can all seem futile, depressing, unable to be shared with anyone important. How much more that would be true if none of what you've ever done will ever matter anymore.
I agree - I think the original post is accurate in what people would respond to the suggestion, in abstract, but the actual implementation would undoubtedly hook vast swathes of the population. We live in a world where people already become addicted to vastly inferior simulations such as WoW already.
I disagree. I think that even the average long-term tortured prisoner would balk and resist if you walked up to him with this machine. In fact, I think fewer people would accept in real life than those who claim they would, in conversations like these.
The resistance may in fact reveal an inability to properly conceptualize the machine working, or it may not. As others have said, maybe you don't want to do something you think is wrong (like abandoning your relatives or being unproductive) even if later you're guaranteed to forget all about it and live in bliss. What if the machine ran on tortured animals? Or tortured humans that you don't know? That shouldn't bother you any more than if it didn't, if all that matters is how you feel once you're hooked up.
We have some present-day corrolaries. What about a lobotomy, or suicide? Even if these can be shown to be a guaranteed escape from unhappiness or neuroses, most people aren't interested, including some really unhappy people.
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I sometimes wonder, though, if giving one's own experiences greater weight in situations like these (though not in the thermometer situation) is rational:
If I have a sneezing fit every single time I encounter a bullfrog, and no one's ever heard of a bullfrog allergy, and medical science doesn't support the notion, it's still going to be difficult (and I think possibly irrational) to arrive to the pond without a kleenex. It seems to me that in gray-area situations with strong personal evidence, admitting you don't know why you don't know why is at least as rational as concluding you're wrong.