the thing about “oh no i can’t do X what if people think i’m weird” is that you constantly participate in the process of deciding what is weird and what is normal. do something with enough relaxed confidence and the local definition of weirdness warps to accommodate you
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generally there’s a pattern of talking about social stuff esp. status that i see nerdy men in particular fall into, of talking about social norms as if you don’t have any control over them. but you constantly participate in the process of deciding local social norms!
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“i don’t have any control over social norms” can become very self-fulfilling; if you continue to believe it you’ll continue to not try to exert any such control and social norms will continue to feel like they are something that happen to you
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which is not to say that all you have to do is believe it’s possible. there are real social skills involved in syncing up enough with a group of people to influence them. but i think it mostly boils down to
1) be somewhat likable
2) find something about them to like
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nice
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Replying to @visakanv and @QiaochuYuan
seek out the support of 5 real human beings who give an actual shit about you and you can let go of being terrorized by the hallucinated spook of some vague amorphous anonymized authority
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this is the sort of shit that at the extremes produces stuff like theranos, charismatic cult leaders with strong reality distortion fields, etc. so i don’t intend to say that this kind of thing is purely good, it’s power and power is abusable. use it for good!
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the thing about “oh no i can’t do X what if people think i’m weird” is that you constantly participate in the process of deciding what is weird and what is normal. do something with enough relaxed confidence and the local definition of weirdness warps to accommodate you
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it’s funny for me to get this feedback, i’m somehow still not used to thinking of myself as someone who’s good at getting and wielding social power but also i guess i kinda am 😅 so maybe idk what it’s like not to be. it helps to have experience working with kids?
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
I think you're slightly underselling how difficult this is
basically the process is that if you acquire social status & power, you can buy the ability to influence norms/be weird with them
you and I are good at easily acquiring social status and power, but not everyone is
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if you’ve ever been a summer camp counselor or similar that’s a position where it’s relatively natural and easy to wield social power - you enforce rules on the kids and stuff - so you can start to notice the effects of treating the kids different ways, different implicit norms
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as long as you don’t fuck up so bad that the kids lose respect for you, they want to impress you and conform to your conception of what’s good and cool. it’s kinda wild. helps you feel like you should get your shit together, to know that kids look up to you