Item — HN Reader

As a neutral 3rd-party who wants to help you speed-run your self-growth (because I like your energy):

- Yeah you come across as aggro. That's okay, sounds like you went through some stuff.

- Sounds like you've identified you grew up in a weird situation. That sounds bad, sucks you had to go through that.

- But it also sounds like there's a piece of you that's trying to overcorrect. I understand, it's common among us nerds -- you grow up in a situation where you aren't as appreciated as you should be and you try to turn off that feeling entirely somehow. Unfortunately these types of attempts to hack our own feelings are usually worse than the problems in the first place. Usually the best course is to slowly try to remind yourself (over years) "That was a bad situation, it was bad luck, it meant nothing, and it's not the norm. I don't need to fundamentally change to not have that happen again."

1 comments

I do appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I still believe that you and the two other commenters here are misreading or misinterpreting me.

That's a lesson for me to choose my words more carefully, but only to avoid misinterpretation in an online forum; everything I said, I 100% stand by, and it's honestly unsurprising that a comment about being provocative and to-the-point, not always progressively self-disclosing, has made some people uncomfortable.

> Unfortunately these types of attempts to hack our own feelings are usually worse than the problems in the first place

I want to stress that I mean this in the most constructive, positive way possible, but it feels like your comment projects a bit onto me in an attempt to find common ground. I welcome the attempt but I do want to point out that I don't try to "hack my feelings", and I don't organize my life and behaviors under some fear that my childhood is somehow going to happen again. I am very in touch with my feelings, I value emotional intelligence and reflection. I don't pathologically worry about others appreciating me.

I brought up my past to show how such a perspective might form, but the perspective is not some kind of defense mechanism. It is a playbook for how to live my life in a way that aligns with my ideals and goals, and it's one of the only good things to have come out of my childhood. I cherish my perspective and how it's allowed me to help both myself and others.

Well the reason I said it sounds like you were trying to "hack" feelings was that you mentioned you came up with your own social "algorithm" for testing people you meet that could make them uncomfortable. It's been my observation that most attempts to optimize conversation backfire.

But I'm not really trying to convince you, I don't have a horse in this race. If you want maybe ask an AI and see what it thinks, they are great neutral tool for being a judge on human tone or being a social mirror.

> you mentioned you came up with your own social "algorithm" for testing people you meet that could make them uncomfortable

I didn't say that, reread my comments. I have no interest in "testing" people like some sort of sociopath. You mentioned the algorithm of progressive disclosure. I said that I specifically do not do this whenever I can help it, and mused about why that is, and why it might be so for others raised in certain communities.

I said I quickly like to discover who other people are and communicate who I am, to skip all of the progressive disclosure crap and either come to terms with the fact that we aren't compatible, or to find a thread to start pulling and weaving into a relationship.

> It's been my observation that most attempts to optimize conversation backfire.

Progressive disclosure is an optimization. It's just optimizing for different things. I don't walk into a random conversation with someone planning to control how the conversation unfolds, or "optimize" it. But anyone with experience in public speaking, or leadership, sales, political organization or other environments which necessitate the ability to navigate and calibrate conversations, will learn a few tricks for keeping things on track or avoiding dull moments.

Conversational speaking is a skill, and getting better at it for the sake of improving your ability to communicate is not "hacking" or "optimizing" the conversation. I think you have decided on a bunch of behaviors in your head that I simply do not engage in.

> If you want maybe ask an AI and see what it thinks, they are great neutral tool for being a judge on human tone or being a social mirror

I have dumped my entire HN history into chatbots to study my conversational approach and learn from it. Self-betterment is always a work in progress, but I simply do not engage in the behaviors you've decided I engage in without even meeting me.

This thread has turned into a series of misunderstandings from multiple users, none of whom ever stopped to seek to understand or ask for more detail before making assumptions. Instead, I had to field several bad assumptions from people who were ironically claiming that someone whom they've never met, but simulated in their head based on a single comment, is aggressive or annoying to be around. It's ironic because, from my perspective, all of these assumptions represent missed chances for us to seek understanding from each other, and shift this from a conversation to a debate, which to me is aggressive.

I simply shared my perspective. This thread did not need to evolve this way. If I were the first user replying to my post, I would ask more questions to clarify my understanding before just deciding for myself that someone is annoying to be around because they said they like to be themselves from the jump when meeting others.