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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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It depends.

My husband and I are both high openness introverts, who are now raising high openness introvert children. One of the children did spontaneously strike up a conversation in the check out line today with a little kid sitting in a cart. On the other hand, the response rate for cute little girls smiling and waving at a store is something like 1/20, and I would expect for a non charismatic grown man to be significantly worse (and occasionally actually negative, whereas for the kids it's at worst neutral), so that's a pretty low value situation.

The strategy of just showing up somewhere and seeing if anyone looks friendly works pretty well, even for introverts. Either way, we'll have seen a thing, wandered around, and that's fine. Or maybe there is someone friendly there, and that's even more interesting! Lots of people all over the place are more outgoing than we are, so we've had a lot of interesting experiences this way. We just have to go take a nap afterwards. But we are all very high Openness in the Big 5 sense, so ymmv.