[brushfoot]

Wonderful! There's a lot of advice online about how essentially evil it is to talk to strangers: They're busy, they have headphones in, they might think you're hitting on them (God forbid; nothing could be more evil than attraction). Ignore it. It often as not boils down to fear and neuroticism from terminally online introverts (and sometimes plain old misanthropists) raised in a hyper-individualist culture and glued to devices sometimes from infancy.

Fair enough if an introvert just wants to be left alone; we should obviously never force our company on anyone (nor do the mentally healthy among us have any desire to do so, because we have empathy). However, people like that will let us know that they don't want to talk when we approach them, either directly or via body language and the nature of their replies. For many others, they're starving for social interaction, and it might make their day for you to reach out. This is what makes outreach worth it, in the end, despite the risk.

[dlivingston]

I find it so bitterly ironic that the people whose opinions we read the most of - the terminally online Redditors and tweeters - are exactly the kind of people we should not be listening to.

Like you alluded to, the terminally online people who post the most tend to be those with neuroticism, isolation, severe anxiety, etc. There's a famous Reddit post about this I can't seem to find - "Everyone Online Is Insane" or something.

I really think this is why the past decade+ of American culture, politics, and society has been so off-the-wall insane. The Overton Window - another overused Redditism - of society has shifted towards the opinions of the neurotic and anxious. Those are the people whose words fill the comment sections and posts that we all read, which then infuse our minds to expect these thoughts as the baseline/median opinion of society.

[47thpresident]

"Every piece of social advice on Reddit is designed to ensure that you die alone"

https://old.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/1kkey4d/every_...

> Doesn't matter who you ask on this site. The incel, the rad fem, the regular liberal, the happily married person, the casanova; they will all tell you some variety to stay in your own lane and shut up. They will all use different language, but the meanings will always be the same: they live a life of constant loneliness and have found kinship with others who agree that to ever do something to counter that loneliness is beyond abhorrent behaviour.

[Abster1]

Yes, this is a theory I've been thinking about too.

Explains the rise of various political leaders very well.

I find it funny that even the people who comment on the "Everyone Online Is Insane" post sound obsessive or outside the norm.

I find it messes with my mental health when I read too many comments. In the real world I normally find people to be nice and kind. But then I go online and the world is totally different - I have to keep in perspective that its just a small outsized fraction.

[wavemode]

> I find it funny that even the people who comment on the "Everyone Online Is Insane" post sound obsessive or outside the norm.

Well, yeah. I agree with the statement that "everyone online is insane", while also recognizing that I myself am online a lot, and think and behave differently from societal norms.

I think that's part of what is needed. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking and behaving differently from other people. What's abnormal is when people become absorbed in the internet, to the point that they fail to recognize that people in real life, people outside their Internet echo chambers, think and behave very differently.

[keybored]

> I really think this is why the past decade+ of American culture, politics, and society has been so off-the-wall insane. The Overton Window - another overused Redditism - of society has shifted towards the opinions of the neurotic and anxious. Those are the people whose words fill the comment sections and posts that we all read, which then infuse our minds to expect these thoughts as the baseline/median opinion of society.

Why should anyone entertain this theory? You’re a comment box.

Edit: Thirty years ago us online freaks would just interact with other online freaks. Because normal people had real hobbies.

But now that we are all doomscrollers: why would normal people be interested in the comment boxes of online freaks? They’ve got YouTube shorts and whatever to watch.

That things like 4Chan has had an outsized effect is a different matter. It’s all mediated through twenty layers. It’s not normal people reading 4Chan and other freaks directly.

[butlike]

What's great about neurotic online personalities is that they're all contained within the little box on your lap or in your pocket. You turn it off and they all go away...

[munificent]

> You turn it off and they all go away...

They disappear to you, but not to all of the other people who you share a society with who are still staring at their little boxes. And, for better or worse, you still have to live in a world with and share elections with those people too.

I agree, completely, that it's good to get offline. But the pervasive societal effects of extremely online psychology can't be solved simply by opting oneself out of the game.

[rootusrootus]

One great failure of the Internet was taking the lonely crazies and putting them in the position of building their own community online. Unable to moderate their thoughts by interacting with normal people, now feeding off one another's neuroticism, and spreading it.

[butlike]

To push back on your last point, I truly believe that yes, they can.

[rdevilla]

Very naive for you to say that.

[Miraltar]

Post you mentioned (Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

[thenoblesunfish]

It's true but then again, for most things, the correct answer is somewhere there, amongst the BS, so if you have a good BS detector and want some ideas, you could do worse. You can't outsource the part where you see for yourself if stuff works, and form your own opinions.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and misanthropy than reddit.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1o87cy4/oc...

Redditors want you to cut contact with all your loved ones so you can spend more time on reddit, telling people to cut contact with their loved ones. It's like a cult.

[gjulianm]

I think this mindset is maybe too close to being just "people that don't think like I do are just crazy" and dismissive of people's actual concerns.

[Nition]

And now those words are infusing the training runs of LLMs as well. The words of the extrovert who's already outside living life aren't written down.

[TFNA]

> they might think you're hitting on them (God forbid; nothing could be more evil than attraction)

You can find legions of people, particularly women, who do not want to be hit on unless they already find the other person attractive. Being hit on by an unattractive person may even quality for them as something akin to danger, already along the spectrum towards stalking or assault. Has nothing to do with being terminally online and has been reported since long before there was ever an internet.

> For many others, they're starving for social interaction

HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture. What people might be starving for are serious, long-term social bonds, of the kind that used to be common through large extended families, the parish church, team sports, and school friends who stay put and don’t move away. A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.

[cubefox]

> Being hit on by an unattractive person may even quality for them as something akin to danger, already along the spectrum towards stalking or assault.

Just trying to initiate a conversation with someone simply is not stalking nor assault, even if it is perceived that way. Their "perception" is mistaken in this case.

> HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture.

I don't know what country you are from, but it is highly probable that even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years. Which means that the amount of interactions was higher than it is now, even within the same culture.

> A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.

The gym example of this article points in the opposite direction, or do you think that gyms in your culture work differently?

[TFNA]

> Their "perception" is mistaken in this case.

It’s their right to decide how they perceive being approached by a stranger. And most of society is going to empathize with them and their feeling of unsafety, not with the stranger approaching them.

> even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years

The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries. What has changed are that the substantial family and institutional bonds I mentioned earlier have declined.

> do you think that gyms in your culture work differently?

They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.

[cubefox]

> It’s their right to decide how they perceive being approached by a stranger.

Okay, I suppose everyone is entitled to their own delusions. But believing that initiating a conversation with a stranger is stalking or assault is just false.

> The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries.

How then do people come to know each other in the first place? Every familiar person has been a stranger at some point.

> They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.

I read one of my home country (saying that you would get arrested if you did this) and I assure you it is false.

[astro-lizard]

I am a woman, height is on the shorter side. I want to add my thoughts around this phenomena.

Oftentimes, a stranger coming up to you on the street spells danger, it has nothing to do with how attractive or unattractive they are.

It's hard to explain if you've never been in a woman's shoes, but you feel like prey. A chance conversation can quickly turn into a decades-long stalking event, one never knows. Unwanted attention for women can feel really dangerous, I have often been catcalled/followed when not with my husband (which is infuriating as an adult woman), and have been followed/catcalled on the street from the moment I turned 14, which you can imagine makes strangers coming up to on the street feel loaded.

[HeartStrings]

> You can find legions of people, particularly women, who do not want to be hit on unless they already find the other person attractive.

Tough luck, cupcake. Often you don’t know if she is into you til you approach. Often they are shy. If you keep overthinking this and afraid of being cringe, being filmed or being judged, then your genes will die out and your bloodline will end. But hey, at least you never made anyone awkward and lived a “safe” life. This will sit right with you at deathbed I’m sure.

[shpx]

Computers are feedback loops that ultimately are trying to take up 100% of 100% of people's consciousness seconds, so it makes sense that the winning/dominant ideologies on the internet are just whichever ones cause you to not spend time on anything except the screen.

[ZpJuUuNaQ5]

I have never met anyone on the street who wasn't mentally ill or tried to sell me something. Types like this ignore your brief answers, facial expressions and body language, and continue to yap on. Honestly, I cannot imagine a single situation where a random interaction with a stranger on the street would be a positive experience. No, I do not strive for you to "reach out", on the contrary, I avoid you like a rotting carcass of a pigeon.

[keybored]

In this Northern European country of mine, I’ve got as much of a neutral third party that I can think of: a friend born and raised to adulthood in the Third World. They’ve got more “extrovertism” in them than 99.9% of the natives. Yet this advice from socializing entrepeneurs with One Weird Trick doesn’t seem to hold up. People here are not all hypnotized by their screens and low self-esteem, or whatever, and then lifted up when their poor social-starved selves get attention from a kind stranger. We are just... like that. Not genetic. Not immutable. But it runs deep. Very deep. Deeper than what an “extrovert” all by themselves can penetrate.

So if there is a cultural pathology it takes way more than what socializing entrepeneurs seem to think.

> Fair enough if an introvert just wants to be left alone; we should obviously never force our company on anyone (nor do the mentally healthy among us have any desire to do so, because we have empathy). However, people like that will let us know that they don't want to talk when we approach them, either directly or via body language and the nature of their replies. For many others, they're starving for social interaction, and it might make their day for you to reach out. This is what makes outreach worth it, in the end, despite the risk.

[deleted]

> However, people like that will let us know that they don't want to talk when we approach them, either directly or via body language and the nature of their replies. For many others, they're starving for social interaction, and it might make their day for you to reach out. This is what makes outreach worth it, in the end, despite the risk.

Nope.

Normal people—not freaks like me—in my culture will fume in private. Yes: any slight by a stranger will be relegated to complaints to your friends. Much more likely than sending any bad vibes. We’re cowards like that.

I’m reminded of some anecdote about Westerners being struck by how helpful Japanese people are. (This is from memory and may be wrong.) The context is that they are tourists. Well, apparently Japanese people have very strict social norms about being polite and helpful. This is amazing for tourists: they get all of the social upsides while not having to pay anything in return (because they are oblivious to it).

[tomjen3]

I will happily stop and chat with you if you demonstrate that it is worth the time and interruption (if I was lost in thought, that will take at least 5-10 minutes to get back to).

If not, I will not let you know. I will just fume, blame and judge you for some time after.

[philangist]

"Hey sorry, I've got some things on my mind right now and can't really talk. Have a nice day though".

That takes less than 10 seconds to say, let's you protect your time and peace of mind, and as a bonus there's no need for fuming, blaming, and judging that the other person won't ever even know about.

[gjulianm]

The people likely to talk to strangers unprompted are also likely to ignore those kind of messages. Anything that can lead to further conversation can be used (like "oh, what's worrying you?") so actually politely nodding and smiling without giving any footing to further conversation works better than being assertive.

[cubefox]

> The people likely to talk to strangers unprompted are also likely to ignore those kind of messages.

No, that obviously false. They might be more likely, but they are certainly not likely.

[gjulianm]

I don’t think it’s false, much less obviously false. On one hand I have my personal experience about it, on the other you can see there’s only a small range in the “I want a conversation” scale where they want it enough to ignore the nonverbal signs that the person doesn’t want to talk but not enough to ignore the verbal ones.

[cubefox]

Well, I don't see a "small range" at all. It's the opposite, extroverted pleople usually have better social skills than ones with social anxiety.

[SchemaLoad]

This requires social skills many HN users are lacking.

[tomjen3]

>let's you protect your time and peace of mind

Not even close.

[nathanielks]

> If not, I will not let you know.

This is 100% completely on you, then. If you don't inform people you're being interrupted or that what they are doing is bothering you, they have no data to telling them to stop, and any energy you spend on silently judging them or being frustrated is only harming yourself.

[Kiro]

No, it's on you. You can stop before you even begin by simply not interrupt and bother people for no reason. You're creating a problem and then blame me for not stopping it.

[nathanielks]

You realize _anytime_ someone needs to talk to you would qualify as interrupting and bothering someone else? Your expectation is unreasonable. Good luck with that.

[HeartStrings]

This guy gets it.

[gitowiec]

"(God forbid; nothing could be more evil than attraction). " - is it sarcasm?