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EdenicFaithful  Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw  2yr ago (text post)   3829 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 23, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Does anyone here have an idea how to make good male friends? Doesn’t have to be IRL, online is fine. I don’t feel a burning desire for socialization for its own sake, so going to a local X club would really be pointless. Ideally I would like motte-like friends, but for 1:1 discussion which I find much more interesting than subreddit style discussion. I have tried friend-making subreddits and /soc/. Soc users are generally seriously mentally defective, and redditors are well….redditors. Not to mention that any friend-making space online is really just repurposed as a dating space by horny men, ruining it for everyone. Does anyone have close motte-like friends? How did you make them?

Come back to our BotC club lol! We've been experimenting with the rules until we mostly got rid of the annoyances (for example, a limit of 3 whispers per person per day forces most of the interesting information and discussion into the public square, 24h days feel much faster and to the point, we can fast-forward the last day or two when there's nothing much left to discuss, etc), and I guess we also got somewhat better at the game so there are more fun plays.

We are also doing some realtime voice games on weekends now. And there's an offtopic channel where people keep discussing random things. And some people ended on rdrama.net devcord because of course, most notably hbtz who among other things wrote a blackjack bot that hit the 2^31 dramacoin limit.

So I don't know about making close male friends for life, but there are certainly worse ways to find some online buddies to do fun stuff with.

Go to your local SSC meetup. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fLdADsBLAMuGvky2M/acx-meetups-everywhere-list) You'll find a bunch of people there that meet this criteria.

I found a motte-like (almost certainly male) friend by doing a long-term programming project. Since it's online, we mostly talk, and it's mostly talking shop. But, we sometimes talk personal life. It just so happens the project is also a reverse-engineering project, which means the work is already more scientific-method than merely programming.

If you have male-dominated hobbies, are any of them tilted towards high verbal intelligence? Do you like reading a particular obscure philosophy? I recommend a Discord for any of these hobbies, and just start talking. Some individuals might stand out to you. Why does the person have to be male? Or did you specify that as a prediction of the kind of person you like?

This is assuming you are a male.

Guys make friends shoulder to shoulder not face to face. If you are looking for a guy to have long deep talks with, you are going to have a bad time.

Do sonething you like, even he most niche things would have some community around it. You can pick up friends along the way.

Guys also respect competence in other guys, having subpar social skills will be compensated if you are good at the thing you do together.

That also has the added benefit of always being a conversation topic you can fall back on.

While I entirely agree with the spirit of the comment, I've made quite a few friends where the common activity is mostly talking - not talking-for-talking, maybe debating politics or philosophy, etc. But in every case there's significant depth / common interest to it, and it's about something. So you can find a guy to have long deep talks about programming languages if you want.

This entirely is true in my experience.

If you want actual friends, go and do things with people and if the chemistry is good suggest doing more things with them.

I'd suggest asking people here, on lesswrong and other rationalist forums about hobbies you're interested in. The vast majority of users here are reasonable, intelligent adults who I wouldn't mind having as a friend.

Videogames are an obvious way to make friends; for example something chill and relaxing like Civ 5 or 6. Or any coop game.

Books are another obvious one, people love talking about their favorite fiction. See https://old.reddit.com/r/rational/ for examples.

You could look at meetups on lesswrong to find people near you and ask them individually for recreational activities IRL.

Does anyone have close motte-like friends? How did you make them?

I met my best friend while playing World of Warcraft. This was when he was about 11 years old and I was 13. He died earlier this year from Covid, at the age of 28 so I knew him for most of his life. We generally talked about new and relevant topics such as crypto, movies, technology, etc. and regularly played videogames together.

In hindsight, that was incredibly lucky though. It seems there are a thousand NPCs (for lack of a better term) for any one worthwhile person. Hence why I suggest using these kinds of forums; they're already full of high-quality individuals.

Non-mainstream recreational sports leagues. Something like soccer, baseball, or basketball probably doesn't have much of a selection effect.

Other sports are going to have a selection effect based on the type of people that would be interested in them.

I play underwater hockey. Its a team sport that requires organic bottom up cooperation. No coach can really direct the team's strategy from the sidelines. It requires swimming skills which tends to select a little more towards middle and upper class backgrounds. It has benefits for people that go scuba diving or spear fishing, which is again a bit upper middle class of a hobby. All discussions can always fall back to talking hockey strategy, so if someone starts going off on boring tangents you can drag it back. It is a coed sport but there isn't too much inter-sex drama.

Other sports that might be interesting and in your area with an eclectic group of people:

  1. Ultimate Frisby (has changed in recent years to be more competitive, and thus harder to make friends unless you are really good at the sport).

  2. Medieval Martial arts.

  3. Jiu Jitsu

  4. etc

I feel like there are a bunch of sports leagues out there, one of them might be a good fit and an interesting place to meet people.

Sometimes board game cafes will have Open Table nights, where people come to play with strangers and not people they brought with them.

Hobbies. People who want to socialize for the sake of socializing are usually messed up (and holy fuck /soc/ is a parody of that, I thought you must be exaggerating).

Find forums (not subreddits) for things you like, get involved, and make a group of friends you can start meeting up with. Twitter is surprisingly good for generalist hobbies, because discovery is so easy and people will notice you through reputation networks rather than the spastic twitching of reddit voting mobs.

Just do interesting things that attract other people who do interesting things. All my lasting friendships came from niche hobby communities, even in cases where we both ended up dropping the hobby.

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