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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I disagree? I think friend-making (in a broad sense - to include status and mating advantages) *is* the main goal behind most endevours.
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What I mean is you don't have to make it the goal, it is.
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C'mon this is like a cartoon darwinism version of solve-for-friendship 🤣
"Only the friendliest survive!"
"Survival of the friendliest!"
"Friendliness selection!"
"Nature red in tooth, claw, and LinkedIn connections!"
The airport pop-sci book titles write themselves
I think what you and Visa are doing is more sophisticated than this cartoon, but I think you haven't yet found the right language for talking about it properly. So "solve for friendship" is almost a placeholder for something more interesting, which is why I restrain the jokes :D
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Curious which qualities of Anna and Visa's (distinct) work seem important, but missing from friends-language?



