What if you just optimized for the friends you meet along the way as the only goal?
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I'm serious. Not only is "optimize life for X" in general a bad way to think about life, but "optimize for friends" is a particularly bad objective function.
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Humans are a social species, but not *only* a social species. To optimize for friends is to become a sheep-logic degen and descend into hell-is-other-people slowly imagining you're being soulful and large-hearted in your approach to life.
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Hmm interesting. I was being more exploratory with this tweet than ideological. I think youre imagining a stance I’m not sure I have. I agree with most of Ben’s piece there already.
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"optimized for the friends you meet along the way as the only goal?" sounds pretty unambiguous to me :D
isomorphic to "friendly ambitious nerd" thing, which also centers friendship in a way I find rather alarming as the raison d'etre of life itself
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that's definitely true as well, but not what I'm flagging here. Even for very social friendly extrovert people who get a lot of energy from investing in friends, making that the *only* goal to optimize for is imo dangerous to the psyche, a kind of gollumizing one-ring effect
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or to flip it around, to *be* a good friend yourself, you have to be about something other than friendship, which means friendship can't be the only thing you optimize for... there's a potential degeneracy there...
good friend is an oxymoron, and possibly a lie. One has good friendships, optimizing for which is an admittedly Sisyphean labour.


