My heuristics for interacting with humans \ stacker news ~meta

My heuristics for interacting with humans dynomight.substack.com/p/humans

1155 sats \ 7 comments \ @0fje0 12 Oct 2023 meta

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @0fje0 OP 12 Oct 2023

From the article:

Consider internet writing. Most people read something in the hopes of getting some kind of value. They want to like it. Yes, a small minority can get triggered by weird things and another small minority just enjoys picking things apart. But there are an infinite number of things for these people to get upset about. If you try to satisfy everyone, you’ll add lots of unnecessary clarifications that will bore and annoy the people who want to play along. (You’ll also drive yourself insane.)

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 12 Oct 2023

If in doubt, act assuming that other people won’t be unreasonable.

Avoid applying game tree search to social dynamics.

I think I've come to the same conclusion out of shear laziness. What the author calls not unreasonable, I call trustworthy. Not unreasonable is a better, more skeptical framing.

lest you become a sneaky snake yourself

Part of me assuming people are trustworthy leads me to assume sneaky snakes don't want to be sneaky snakes and just spent too much time around predisposed sneaky snakes ... at least until they begin to slither around me.

Sneaky people fucking suck.

There's no generic predictor of sneakiness, but I've noticed more sneakiness in insecure people. "With no other way to win the game," they think to themselves, "I will violate the rules of the game." Upon reflection they say, "everyone does it. These aren't not the rules of the game. I'm just super clever and found the hidden rules."

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @0fje0 OP 12 Oct 2023

I call trustworthy.

That reminds me: I still wanted to check out that talk you gave on, was it web of trust? The one where the slides wouldn't load in Safari.

Is it available somewhere?

35 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 12 Oct 2023

It wasn't recorded, but the demo is open source: https://github.com/huumn/wot-demo

If you don't program it might be not very revealing. The demo is still live here: https://www.charlottesweboftrust.com/

I gave a very conceptual overview of web of trust here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d0nzwMmrTk

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @0fje0 OP 13 Oct 2023

Thanks, that was really helpful.

Even understood at a high level a little bit of the javascript.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 13 Oct 2023

Love this.

A thing I don't think it mentioned, but that I believe with all my heart is true, is that there's a massive amount of people who will be transformed by you in the course of your interaction. Regardless of who they "really" are at the start, if you are kind and generous, they will become better. If you're angry and hostile, they will become worse.

So your generous behavior maybe will produce a better outcome with Alice, and that would be good; but even if not, there's something you yourself gain when you act in an expansive way; and that you lose when you act small, even if acting small is warranted by the other person's behavior.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0fje0 OP 13 Oct 2023

Very wise words, thanks!

act in an expansive way

I've never heard it expressed this way, but this is such a beautiful, simple phrase that should make it easy to live by.