I know too many people that can't or won't listen to fair criticism. And even good listeners often fail to change even egregious interpersonal faults that affect them negatively. Very little of our society helps us become emotionally smarter - the most skilled I know seemed to learn everything almost in passing - perhaps some sort of emotional genius. We see glimpses of something similar on HN when a poor comment generates an honest critique yet the commenter keeps repeating the same fault (never learns). https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ seems relevant. Few people ever ask for criticism. Few people give honest criticism.
It always surprises me that we can sometimes recognize someone's personality within 5 minutes of meeting them. We see faults they perhaps can't see or maybe choose to live with (even faults that harm themselves or those near them). And I know a few superskilled that can immediately recognise well-hidden dangers of others.
I'm a middle aged analytical guy. So I've had decades of seeing how difficult it is for us all to acquire wisdom.
We want to be better, but we just don't seem to know how to do it. There's a self-harm industry around self-help books. Pop-psych. A whole dogma and industry around words like trauma, mindfulness. One of of the least insightful people I know is a psychologist. Some of the people I most admire have low-status jobs and little formal education.
I know people that try to make a list of all the attributes they require in a partner. I multiplied out the percentages for one friend, and their chances of finding someone that met all the easy requirements lead to a 1 in 10 billion chance of their perfect partner existing. Even after dropping many other constraints!
[edit] removed naive para where I took it as an article rather than a story. Great writing!
The story is made up. People in real life will not be that good at "curing" their emotional "flaws". This post is a little dangerous if people are reading it as a true story.
> I multiplied out the percentages for one friend, and their chances of finding someone that met all the easy requirements lead to a 1 in 10 billion chance of their perfect partner existing.
You’ve got to be careful with this kind of naive statistical approach: many attributes are positively correlated.
That one in 10B chance is more like one in 10K or 100K because of this.
Moreover, people aren’t selecting partners from a random subset of the entire human population! They meet people in their own area, of their own age, etc…
Especially important is that people tend to meet partners at school or work, which very strongly selects for like-minded people.
Hence they don’t need to meet thousands or millions of potential partners: they’re meeting a good subset that is likely to be in that ideal group.
I mean, sure, if you had completely arbitrary and unrelated requirements and you were on a series of random blind dates selected via lottery from the global population, then things would look bleak. For most normal people wanting normal things, dating feels oddly lucky.
Most definitely. A relevant example here was income and good teeth.
Controlling for correlations is well beyond a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Even explaining correlations is university level stuff that is hard to explain.
I didn't add many other reasonable restrictions - in same city - finds them attractive - yadda yadda.
Their restrictions were unreasonable - the point of the exercise was to show just how unreasonable.
Fortunately it seems that when we meet someone we like, we turn out to be flexible and our restrictions are weak when faced with reality.
One trait I most admire in my dearest friends is acceptance of others without harmful judgement.
I am slowly learning! I think the trick is actually to see the less obvious value in others: e.g. smart but uneducated. The hard part is that it is most hard to recognise ability in others in domains where I am relatively stupid.
Also I tend to try to have the less judgemental self-select towards me by giving myself traits that judgy plastic types (oooo ironic) don't like.
i am old enough that i managed to reduce judgement to one metric: is nice to other people. everything else is irrelevant when it comes to accepting someone as a friend.
for seeking a partner there are further questions related to compatibility of character and also goals, but that often is not what you look at when you are a teenager.
It always surprises me that we can sometimes recognize someone's personality within 5 minutes of meeting them. We see faults they perhaps can't see or maybe choose to live with (even faults that harm themselves or those near them). And I know a few superskilled that can immediately recognise well-hidden dangers of others.
I'm a middle aged analytical guy. So I've had decades of seeing how difficult it is for us all to acquire wisdom.
We want to be better, but we just don't seem to know how to do it. There's a self-harm industry around self-help books. Pop-psych. A whole dogma and industry around words like trauma, mindfulness. One of of the least insightful people I know is a psychologist. Some of the people I most admire have low-status jobs and little formal education.
I know people that try to make a list of all the attributes they require in a partner. I multiplied out the percentages for one friend, and their chances of finding someone that met all the easy requirements lead to a 1 in 10 billion chance of their perfect partner existing. Even after dropping many other constraints!
[edit] removed naive para where I took it as an article rather than a story. Great writing!