Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
the world is bizarrely small. some ppl in my social circles today, who i originally met randomly in disconnected contexts: 1. a dude on okc invited me to a castle in france, i flew there knowing nobody. another girl had done the same, shes now independently part of my circles 1/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
2. met a dude in london at a warehouse party who told me i should talk to his friend, so i talked to his friend online, and eventually flew out to visit him, and he had a few other ppl visiting him too, and *two* of those ppl have independently arrived in my circles now
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
3. met
@sashachapin
from the internet i guess, tho im not sure that one counts cause i invited him to a party which i think might have generated the connection to my social circles, but i think a lot was still independent, it sort of feels like he just respawned
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
4. met
@moonboi_
's temporary roommate years ago, and lo and behold she goes and moves to the bay and now is friends with all my friends Or my ex's non-rationalist brother/my old roommate? just somehow ended up in the bay working for rationalist orgs??
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
5. when i was 22 i went on okc date with a guy in seattle, he showed up at my door, we dropped lsd and went to church. he was great; years later im in berkeley eating pizza and he walks by. he'd moved a few blocks down from me and now ofc he is in my social circles
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
idk the world is so tiny, and it just seems to be getting tinier. In some circles, everyone knows everyone, or is one step away from knowing everyone. This seems like something I should have been able to predict beforehand if I'd been better at modeling social dynamics.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
or rather it's like, when i was younger i guess i was optimizing hard for high risk and weirdness, and i ended up accidentally meeting a lot of people who, optimizing for high risk and weirdness, landed in the same cluster, independently of me.
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new acc: @SierraRhodes_
@TeenyGinger18
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Definitely relate, the risk-taking community is very small. I ran into people on the Appalachian Trail who I'd met on the PCT a couple years prior. I was picked up by a couple when I was hitchhiking across the country who also hiked the PCT my year. Just a matter of time!
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Nobody important
@Fizzgig168
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
This is the thing. We create a non-random sampling around us. I used to have the hardest time believing abuse stats because every single person I'd known my whole life was abused. We found each other and stuck together.
jyjjy
@jyjjy
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
The more important thing is that you are completely ignoring everyone you met once then didn't meet again. You just mentioned 5 people who came back into your life independently, how many people didn't do so? Is 5 vs that number strange at all and indicative of a "small world"?
jyjjy
@jyjjy
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Are you even sure that, just by random chance, your number of people that "strangely" came back into your life isn't actually much lower than should have been expected? You need a control of some kind or a justification for your prior beliefs to think it's strange they are wrong.