#striderisms

Thanks, Frank.

I'm interested in a lot of different things right now, and it's hard to describe where I'm interested in them.

I think the most basic thing is "social relations," though I also care about the kinds of things that affect social relations and "have" a social impact, including e.g. social justice and science. Social relations in general (but also "all" social relations specifically) are interesting to me for reasons that may be familiar to the rationalists – for instance, they're like games, but with more of an underlying meaning to them. I like the fact that social networks tend to be (sometimes extremely) intricate and interconnected, and I like the fact that social networks can have really important properties that no computer program or abstract entity ever will.

This is probably obvious to most people who have read a lot about this stuff. (Though maybe "liking complexity" and "liking social structures" aren't the right concepts, I dunno.) I don't like things with very few interconnections – like I don't mind a very "isolated" object (e.g. a sphere) so long as everything is happening in different "pockets" like an isolated object is supposed to. (But my interest doesn't stop there – I also don't like a "unified" object without lots of different things going on inside it, like a homogeneous material, or a monotone, uniform, or "all-of-the-way" emotion. I don't mind a monotone material so long as it isn't a material of that type or a material with lots of lots of different parts.)

There's a lot of stuff that's fun because you're a social animal with social connections. I'm not so much into the more "objective" stuff (I mean stuff that doesn't have the "social" in "social" – you know what I'm talking about – it isn't quite like … "music" in that way, but it's like "biology" that way. I can feel the same way about "biology" even though it's kind of "objective" … ) but I'm into a lot of stuff that's fun for social reasons (e.g. making connections between things, finding relationships or patterns in things). (I mean in addition to what I just said about "things that matter," which is part of why I like things that have lots of interconnections – I think a lot of the things I like have lots of interconnections, so it's like I'm connecting the dots between them in a way other people don't have to.) I'm really into stuff that's about "lots of people with lots of connections to lots of other things," e.g. "the network of interconnected things" in the sense that I said about the social networks.

I'm a member of a community of people who spend a lot of time reading a book (The Big Five Delusion) and looking at related articles (which we can find through a website), talking and thinking about the book on Facebook, and then talking about all this on an audio blog. It's the only community I'm in. I'm not really happy about all this, but it's too late to leave – I made friends through it.

I have an (irrational) "fear" of social interaction, and it's really annoying. But I think the only way to cure it is to engage in the kind of stuff I just described (and other stuff that cures it). So I don't really feel like I'm doing anything wrong by doing this stuff. (Even though I'm pretty nervous around other people!)

In fact, I think I'm interested in more people than other people are interested in. I'm a nerd, I'm interested in (and am very good at) talking about interesting things, and I'm very interested in what others are interested in. Sometimes this interest can feel "awkward" or "lacking" or "bad at communicating," but mostly it seems natural – I'm trying to talk about things other people are interested in, and things that I'm interested in are things others are interested in, and so on, it seems like that's normal.

I'm also kind of a huge nerd. I want to do all the things that nerds do. I love computers, and I'm a little bit obsessed with computers. I think about computers a lot. This might have some kind of consequences. I like science fiction, and it seems like I spend a lot of time talking about the future, so I kind of feel like people think I'm into science fiction, when I'm not. I'm just like that. I feel like this is the kind of thing people wouldn't notice unless I talked about it … or talked about it in ways that make me "look" different from other people.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time imagining myself as the smartest, coolest, sexiest, and best kid around. I wanted a lot of things I couldn't have, so I wanted to be like the other cool kids, who had cool things. I had lots of imaginary friends, and imaginary enemies. I had a cool friend with cool parents, and a cool enemy who hated everything about me. A lot of my stuff was pretty cool and a lot of it was pretty un-cool, and so I wanted to be a mix of both … sort of like a cool, sexy person that everyone thought was a nerd, except that I had some cool, sexy traits. This made me interested in what other people thought, and it made me feel like an outsider to "normie" life – which I wanted, because I was kind of an outsider to every other kind of thing. This is the kind of nerd stuff I talk about sometimes (though I do kind of feel like I've kind of lost my way and become a lot less cool lately).

As a result, I was kind of an outsider in a bunch of high school social networks. The people who weren't outsiders wanted to be like the people who were outsiders … but those people were the "cool" kids, the ones who were so cool that they were an "overtly" un-cool "nerd" … like what I said about me when I was a kid … and I was trying to play the same role as the "cool" people I admired … which made it hard for me to fit in. I was the outsider who was "neotenous" (I thought the word was "neotenous"), which I understood as someone who was too young to be "cool" and yet who wanted to be "cool" in the same way as the coolest people in high school. And that made it hard for me to relate to my classmates, and made my classmates think I was either a creepy weirdo or an attention-seeking creep – or a creep who was trying to do both. I was a guy with a very high IQ and I was kind of obsessed with this stuff, so there were a lot of things about myself that felt hard to relate to other people. Even though my interests are "pretty" in some ways, it all seemed like "weird nerd stuff."

(I was obsessed with programming … I'm still pretty obsessed with programming, but when I was in high school and college that became "programming," I was "cool" because I was "an engineer," but "weird nerd stuff" because I was into "programming," and other people "saw through" that my interest in programming wasn't "nerdy" and just thought I was a nerd, or wanted to think I was a nerd, and I don't really know how to deal with that stuff – like I said about the "friendship" stuff … and I think the problem is worse at some things than others. Even though I'm interested in lots of different things, maybe I just happen to be really interested in "nerd stuff," which isn't like "nerdy" in the way they "do" nerd stuff. When I'm "cool," I can talk about computers a lot and it kind of makes me look like a nerdy geek, and it makes it hard to talk to people who don't understand computers or who don't like computers as much as I do.

honestly? yeah lmao