> Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them?
The scientific consensus would tell the author that judgement in humans happens already the moment they see a person and it is immediate, even if the person not doing anything:
>across three studies, we find that first impressions [...] made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls
Edit:
Okay this was completely misunderstood. My point was that the "normal" people in the study immediately internally know if to like or not like a person. Hence why first impressions DO matter the most. Which is why I simply disagree with the argument in the OP that anyone has control over their perception.
You also cannot win people over if the most respected person in a group dislikes you. The others will follow boot.
The article describes how neurotypical people, i.e. the average Joe would come up with a decision to like or not like a person based on first impressions before the person being judged even talks. Fairly sure in an article about how people are thinking how they are perceived by others this is relevant. But I get it can upset people that it is out of their control entirely.
I disagree. I think the article is about the motivations of people with social anxiety. I'd agree it makes assumptions and paints with a broad brush but it feels relevant to some of the socially anxious people I know.
I edited and rephrased a lot of my posts and the other replies and maybe my though process is clearer now. I didn't word it all too well, forgive me for not being a native, I struggled to bring my point across in an enunciated way.
Thank you for the improvements, I think it does read better now. Thank you for making the effort to converse in a second language.
I still think you are making a point that feels orthogonal to the article. The author presents (supported by public expressions of the opinion) that some people believe social anxiety is based on wanting to be liked. While to that point your study indicating that autistic people may be at a disadvantage on the getting people to like them front, the author is then rejecting that proposition (i.e. that the socially anxious are actually concerned about avoiding dislike). I suppose your point can be understood relevant there too, in that for the autistic population, the baseline "disliked" level is higher. However, the article remains about the internal focus of those with social anxiety (whether it over generalizes or not) between "liked" and "not disliked" which seems orthogonal to any baseline "likability" considerations for one or any other sub-population.
[edit: s/"liked" level is lower/"disliked" level is higher/ for higher congruence with context]
Curious, yet the most people suffering from anxiety as secondary comorbid psychiatric condition are the depressed, autistic and ADHD sufferers.
The article is definitely a mental health topic. A little harmless stage fright before a presentation is not real clinical generalized anxiety and affects most normal people.
You can be diagnosed with GAD or social anxiety disorders without being autistic. The comorbidity isn't total.
I think there's a good question about whether people can tell you're anxious at a glance but worrying about that will make your anxiety much more visible.
> I think there's a good question about whether people can tell you're anxious at a glance
Which is why I linked the nature article? It's plain obvious an interesting point I tried to make that "normal" people will instantly perceive someone as likeable or unlikeable. Which the article in the OP goes great lengths to discuss.
I mean I can live with people immediately going against my point, I just see they didn't even gave it 5 minutes of thought. Which is not necessarily directed at you, I cannot possibly convince anyone and reply to anyone at the same time.
Social anxiety is significantly more prevalent in the general population than autism. So sure, the article may be less applicable to people with autism, who have other visible symptoms besides what comes from “mere” social anxiety.
The (very weak) Caesar cipher was used in ancient Rome though and cryptography in general way before. It could be a silent nod to how far our achievements have gone and that encryption is a basic human desire since millennia.
My drone has several sensors that make it nearly impossible for me to crash it into anything. If I tried to slam it into a big object like a crane it would slow to a crawl and eventually stop. Not perfect, I would like it to have ACAS and ADS-B and be able to turn down RemoteID to .1 milliwatt.
No surprise! I assume the average HN poster possesses more ethics than a tech bro. If you ever submit a post about your hobby I'd probably enjoy reading it. Love seeing people building their own 433 MHz antennas and adding stereoscopic cameras do drones. Is LIDAR a valid solution?
That was a good read and it resonated with me from personal experience. Often the groups I was in were fragmented or I'd be suddenly invited into a second group with someone else removed. Glad it wasn't me, would have been too hard on me to realize I'm suddenly alone in a ghost group.
I wonder what the cut-offs are for "group is too small" and "group is too large", but that certainly depends on the subject the group is about. A philosophy book reading group probably doesn't work well with the bestselling crime novel audience.
I've thought a good bit about the "too large" side (author here under a different name). The magic rule for me has been to consider whether each member actually has a function within the community, in the sense that they contribute something unique to the group which is not contributed by anyone else, and for which the community would be hurt if they aren't there. The idea was originally put into my head by C.S. Lewis, in his work on Membership: "If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables." E.g. if you were to remove a random poster from HN, it wouldn't affect anything much at all, because they end up a number. However, if you were to remove dang, their presence would be missed because they contribute to the uniqueness of HN's community in some way. IMO, if the group doesn't pass this test, you haven't actually found the real community yet.
Of course, all of this is quickly-written thoughts for a HN post. Maybe at some point I'll edit them down and post them properly, but I need to discuss it with more people so I'm sure my thoughts actually strike reality.
Hey thanks for noticing and replying! I approve of your point to curate the members, this is exactly what a friend told me after linking him your post. Fittingly he posted an image of Machiavelli under his reply and I told him I don't see it in such a controlling way.
Thinking more about it, you see this both in forums and IRL:
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
(Minus the trolling aspect as in groups there is no anonymity as in a forum.)
Often rich people associate only with people of equal wealth in cigar lounges or country and golf clubs. It's to be expected many hidden filters apply to online and messaging culture as well. Your C.S. Lewis quote and idea of how this applies even to HN is very positive. Indeed I only could reply because I saw your article at the right time in my feed and happened to be online and browsing entries.
In the past I liked to read a lot of Scott Alexander Siskind, SSC/ACX and LessWrong, even if often disagreeing with some points. Don't be afraid to be wrong when blogging. It is an iterative process and to be honest, I would like a blogger who does a review of his old posts after a year and write where their opinions changed. Not in full, but selecting a few opinions that got refined over time. And don't fear your audience being small. Often I vote up content because it is different or prompted me to self-reflect.
Always assume companies will gather, use and share your data in all ways they legally can. The burden of proof is never on the user that companies don't milk us. Calling it "misinformation" as someone further above did is bizarre. This is the default business model of big tech.
Okay this was a tough read even if not bad. Allow me to elaborate why I struggled reading it, especially with inanimate or non-thinking objects "having no incentive". A plant's genetic coding has a strong incentive on producing as much seed pods as possible (and some plants want to be eaten by animals enjoying the fruit around it, so their faeces spread the seeds across the earth). Plants are competitive in growing larger to have more sun than a moss cover that evolved to thrive even in low light.
Even a rock containing an ore had an incentive to form. The behaviour of elemental orbitals determines which phases and minerals crystallize first and last (see HFSE).
You can take this further that even sand dunes have emergent behaviour governing their formation and movement in a desert. Is everything still going to crap when we run out of energy and reach a final state of entropy? Sure! But this is one hell of a ride.
Now in regard to Doctorowian Enshittification: Companies favour short term solutions these days because they cannot function like something that evolved over millions of years to perfection. We started with probably 3 streaming services (for movies), now we have 30 and they wonder why we cannot pay each of them 55 USD as we had to with cable and 100+ paid channels?
They don't know (yet/ever) the real incentive is to find an evolutionary niche to thrive on. You can never cater to all tastes at once. Explain this: Why do most restaurants focus on one nationality? (the owner can have a different nationality and it still works). Now you have hit the jackpot to de-shittify.
Note if you look at the paper, you notice a close but not entirely perfect normal distribution, but nothing you cannot fix with UDNs and Irwin-Hall. For reference how that is done you can read the bottom of this very useful RNG article:
https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/RP2040/C...
My overall verdict on the tech in OP is that it is amazingly promising!
In the Physicists from 1961 (German: Die Physiker, F. Dürrenmatt) the central theme is that scientists cannot "uninvent" something. Encryption is here to stay. Mathematically proven. Period.
The criminals will just flock to the "real encryption" and not the honeypots/backdoored messengers as they are being caught. In the end word of mouth will spread: "This is safe, this is unsafe."
Just because a few Kremlin bots on Telegram are brainwashing people in the west, the west doesn't have to become North Korea.
Defending the innocent law abiding adult Joe, just wanting to send their honey pics in private is a distractor in this argument. I will not sacrifice my western standards just because 0.1% people are inherently evil.
>The criminals will just flock to the "real
encryption" and not the honeypots/
backdoored messengers as they are
being caught. In the end word of
mouth will spread: "This is safe, this is
unsafe."
Actually the opposite seems to be true. Criminal gangs are particularly susceptible to honeypots precisely because they don't trust the mainstream services.
2 prominent example was that huge sting operation a couple of years back where a supposedly "secure" service was being run by the FBI. And then you have the infamous pager plot, which is admittedly very different but it perfectly illustrates how shaky alternative communications can be.
>Just because a few Kremlin bots on
Telegram are brainwashing people in
the west, the west doesn't have to
become North Korea.
From the hysteria this has generated you would think it was the most crippling threat western democracy has faced since communism.
Actually the reality was the honeypots were illegal to use as evidence in court. So these criminals are now smarter and more dangerous as we taught them OPSEC.
> Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them?
The scientific consensus would tell the author that judgement in humans happens already the moment they see a person and it is immediate, even if the person not doing anything:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep40700
>across three studies, we find that first impressions [...] made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls
Edit:
Okay this was completely misunderstood. My point was that the "normal" people in the study immediately internally know if to like or not like a person. Hence why first impressions DO matter the most. Which is why I simply disagree with the argument in the OP that anyone has control over their perception.
You also cannot win people over if the most respected person in a group dislikes you. The others will follow boot.