prompt: “what’s one thing / field / etc you know irrationally too much about? how did you come to that field? what’s the quick takeaway for civilians?”

I have to think for a while about this one. what do I really truly know best? It’s a bit of a challenge, because my nature is such that I know a little bit about a lot of things. And so… I think I’m going to go with a riff on that.

I irrationally know too much about “being a polytribal weirdheart”. By that I mean, I have spent an unusual amount of time participating in many different groups and communities, sometimes groups that are completely opposed to one another. And this has given me a sort of deft-and-nimble navigational touch. Everybody can do this to some degree, the same way everybody is able to tell a joke and get a laugh, but not everybody is able to get on stage keep a paying audience entertained for an hour. I’m a bit more deliberate and intense about this than most people. Another way of framing this whole thing might be “i’m pretty good at ‘how to win friends and influence people online“.

Here’s just a few things I should mention to signal that I know what I’m talking about:

• I have multiple posts on multiple subreddits that have thousands of upvotes. I’ve had posts get to the top of Hacker News, I was Quora Top Writer 3 years in a row until I got bored of the place. Each place likes a certain thing, each place has a certain style that’s associated with quality content.
• I used to participate quite actively in /r/theredpill on reddit (‘manosphere’), and I actually got “points” (which is a sort of special, moderator-issued upvote) for my posts – which are consistent with my own views (ie I didn’t make up a position I didn’t believe in – that would be too easy). I would get comments like “this is the best content I’ve seen here in ages”, despite me technically not being politically aligned… I felt like an atheist receiving applause in a church for giving wholesome speeches that never once mentioned God. I just spoke about all of the things we had in common.
• I used to blog about Singaporean politics, and got popular or “significant” enough to be invited to meet the Prime Minister (along with other bloggers; I’m not that important – was kind of in the right place at the right time).

The point of saying all of this is… over the years, I’ve developed an uncommonly good ability to walk into a “room”, pay attention to what people care about, figure out what the whole place is all about, identify the game everybody is playing, and then figure out how to play it better than about 80% of them. 90-95% of them if I’m particularly interested in cracking it. I’m a sort of good-faith, good-intent, non-malicious social engineer. Feels weird to say it out loud like this, because it’s something I do quite naturally. I’m just uncommonly good at “online socializing”, because… it felt like I needed to be. I’m definitely a little pathological about it – I’ve mentioned before that I’m partially motivated by fear – that I don’t trust any particular in-group to look out for me, so I have to build relationships with good humans, one person, one tweet, one DM at a time.

I spent a lot of time online as a teenager – I used to play in a band, and I managed our MySpace page, and I helped us build our fanbase and get gigs without ever getting particularly exceptional as musicians. I mean, we were okay, often below-average for people who were getting gigs. But we built good relationships with lots of people in the scene, and we would show up on time, and sell tickets to people who liked us for who we were.

(It all began, probably, with me being a child on an internet gaming forum, lying about something, getting called out on it, and deciding that I was never going to be shamed or beaten in the “community game” again. I’ve evolved my perspective on this a lot over the years, but that’s where it all started.) 

Quick takeaways for civilians:

– Be very clear about what you want. Write down what it is that you think you want, and then interrogate it. Why do you want this? To what end? Why is that an end you desire? Are you able to pay the price or cost of what it takes? If you’re going to be play this game where you’re actively participating in the social commons, you need to be clear about what you want out of it or you’ll be swept away by every passing current.

In my case, I’ve decided that I’m optimizing for building great relationships with new friends, a diverse group of people who are thoughtful and sensitive and interesting. Everything else is secondary. The more precise you are about what you want, the clearer your “brand” becomes (I don’t really care for that particular word, but you get the idea), and the easier it is for people to know how to interface with you in a way that’s net-positive for both of you. It’s my experience with my alt accounts that it helps a lot to target a very specific niche, even if you have a wide range of interests. But ultimately you’ll have to figure out your own style. It’s not really worth forcing yourself to follow another person’s style if it’s doesn’t feel natural to you.

– Once you know what you want, ask for help in simple, clear, actionable ways. These requests should be really easy to say yes to. People are generally bad at asking for help, and they underestimate how much other people are willing to help them. Other people LOVE to help… as long as it’s a simple, discrete action that they can take (eg send you a meme to make you feel better). Everyone wants to build social capital! But they don’t want to be saddled with the responsibility of your well-being. But if there’s a small thing someone can do to help you achieve a goal, lots of people will help! I recently noticed that Scott Adams is really good at this. @ramit is really good at this too. There’s a whole phenomenon here to be studied and appreciated – I think of it as the Boaty McBoatface phenomenon – people like to make interesting, funny or cool things happen if they can be reasonably confident that their little contribution will make a difference towards that outcome.

– When trying to break into a new circle, prioritize the people who are likeliest to respond and reciprocate. Suppose you want to get involved with a circle of friends on Twitter. (I’ve done this several times.) You always want to start with the people who are most responsive to strangers. I don’t follow any particular schedule or system or anything, I just trust my intuition at this point. But if you wanted a “method”, the “method” is really just “be present, be interesting, be useful, be helpful, don’t be too overbearing, and space out your interactions so you don’t intimidate or overwhelm anybody”. Just follow people, favorite tweets of theirs that seem uncommonly good, and reply when you’re fairly confident that your reply is useful, helpful or interesting to them. You yourself should have an interesting timeline that is relevant to their interests; you should be posting regularly about things that your chosen tribe cares about.

I have oodles and oodles to say on this topic, and have tweeted a bunch about it. Maybe I’ll update this post with links and format it as time goes by.