If the other person doesn't bail, you can stick with the commitment.
That opens possibilities, like getting a better opinion about time spent with that person.
I mean, if you don't bail, the other person(s) might not want to be there.
If "the double bail" does occur; more time to hang out with other people or be alone.
...which is exactly the opposite of the assumption I make with my friends, especially when the stakes are this low.
They each end up spending time with more demanding people who don’t care what they want.
(Because this is the internet: kidding. The app can work, just be honest with the app at least)
Let me tell you a story.
Wednesdays, my friends and I go to the bar to hang out. We grab some beers and some wings, and we have a bit of a chat about, y'know, whatever. Sometimes we're around because someone just wants some company. Sometimes we're around because someone just wants to gripe about something going on. Sometimes we're there because... well, some Wednesdays we're there just because.
And, y'know, it makes me happy to be around when people want to hang out, for whatever reason, because we're friends and that's what friends do.
But sometimes, maybe, I could just as well go home. Like, I'm not opposed to the idea of going: If someone wants to get something off their chest or just really feels like hanging around having a laugh, I'm more than happy to be there with them. But nor, particularly, do I care about being there this particular Wednesday, except for the other guys.
Don't get me wrong: Some Wednesdays I really don't want to go, I've had a shit day at work, I didn't sleep well, and I just want to go home and lay in bed with a book until I crash. Those days, I'll just send a message saying that I'm not up for coming out tonight, sorry.
On the other hand, those nights where I could take it or leave it, I don't really want to send a text saying "hey guys do you want to, maybe, cancel this evening? like, I don't wanna not go, but y'know, I don't want to go either?", because that sounds like some tedious bullshit. And if anyone who didn't particularly give a shit had to announce to the world every time they did not, in fact, give a shit, we'd all get over that really quickly.
The fact that I don't care for sending that message (or receiving a bunch of them either) doesn't really mean a whole lot, in and of itself: It just means that I end up going out more frequently than is, I guess, 'optimal'. And this isn't a problem that needs solving, because eating a couple of wings when I otherwise wouldn't once every two months is hardly a herculean struggle for me, but solving that minor coordination problem isn't exactly an act that devalues my friendships in any way.
Maybe it would make Wednesdays at the pub a little bit more special, because you never have the nights when no one is particularly excited about being there.
It's not complicated, all I did was just summarize how you said you felt in two sentences.
Regardless, I agree, as you say, that this problem maybe isn't really one that needs solving. But I also agree that using some sort of no-communication-needed app to solve this particular coordination problem does not present an apocalyptic threat to human social interactions ;)
We're mostly just agreeing about the idea and nitpicking about the particulars, though.
All just my opinion of course, and spoken from a place of care :)
I do get, you though. This isn't a tool that I'd want to put every single one of my calendar events into, but it's a tool I can see being useful for some class of events, with some other people.
It's such a relief whenever they found out they don't really have to go out today!
They were best friends, and they hardly ever saw each other. At least that's exactly how they described it to me... (or, if anyone else has seen this show and remembers, maybe that didn't happen, but I guess it was believable anyway!)
The "possibility" this opens up is not taking responsibility for your own choices, and keeping really inane secrets from people who are supposedly your friends.
But I understand your point and agree with you. I prefer direct communication. If you don't want to hang out just say so - I like clarity.
The protocol works, but it does avoid emotional honesty. If this is a chronic thing, then perhaps there are some unsaid things that need to be said between the friends.
For others reading this, I suggest a book called Crucial Conversations. If bailing out is a proxy for deeper issues in the friendship, maybe it is time to have a good chat about it.
I have an idea for that! How about an app where you can write things to your friend, which are held in the system's escrow.
"unsaidthings.io"
Then a machine learning algorithm compares them for similarity/reciprocity. If they are similar, then the escrow is released, otherwise neither person knows whether the other submitted anything at all, or whether they did and it was different.
The prototype can skip the machine learning algorithm and instead let the people select from one of 64 possible messages that are compared according to a static table. Or else be allowed to compose sentences out of fragments guided by a "writing assistant" which guides their structure into possibilities that are easy to analyze.
Unreciprocated ideas are exactly the kind of things that need to be addressed most for honest relationships.
In fact I think it's counterproductive because you'd bail more often and get less practice with confronting and overcoming anxiety. Avoidance is really tempting, but not the answer.
It's completely normal -- and expected -- from good friends to join you for a beer or for some other activity they are not thrilled about in order to make you happy. And then you reciprocate, because that's what friends do.
Your friends help you move not because they have nothing better to do, because they are your friends. It's silly for both parties to pretend they like to help each other move, and if you have a solid relationship they'll tell you how much they hate moving but you know they'll still show up.
Lets say you have plans with someone. But then, you decide fundamentally: if the other person would still like to do this, I am happy to. But if not, I'd prefer not to. This is the game theoretic situation this app attempts to solve.
Now lets figure out a way to solve this problem through direct communication. The problem with trying to do so, is often when someone expresses a change to preferences, if you assume that person is empathetic, they will likely be diluting the degree to their change insofar as that change could negatively affect the recipient of the news. Why?
It's because there's a catch-22 in this situation between empathy and honesty. Empathy dictates we try to maximize utility between the parties. When expressing this new preference, if one is empathetic, one expresses it in a way to try to maximize the likelihood that the other party interprets it in a way they can still act selfishly to the maximally acceptable degree. However, the recipient of the information, if empathetic, can anticipate this, and hence may interpret the person's statement as pre-diluted, so in order to maximize utility from their perspective (out of empathy) they in turn may yield due to the imperfect information and assume the preference expressed is stronger than implied by the statement directly. In other words, if I hear this from someone, I put even odds that the person is being completely honest (out of valuing honesty), or, that they actually would really want to skip this plan if it would not cause me emotional pain, and have chosen to continue to express it in a way that leaves the option open (out of valuing empathy.) I know people who would do one or the other, and I don't consider either approach a sign of a moral failure.
In reality, both sides of the communication wrangle with the conflict between empathy + utility maximization in framing their expression, and honesty, which (despite its virtue) runs the risk of being misinterpreted given the other party may assume it is being diluted to maximize utility out of their empathy. Diluting the statement or being direct about it are both rational, depending on how important maximizing utility is due to empathy vs expressing honest preferences.
This app neatly solves this problem. It's not about reducing social awkwardness, it's about preventing the need for mutually-empathetic individuals to have to make trade-offs between the competing desires for objective communication (out of the value of honesty) and trying to maximize utility (out of the value of empathy and selflessness.) If one could be certain another party is being honest, this kind of technique would not be necessary, but since dishonesty in this situation falls out of empathy, its potentially virtuous and comes down to a preference of one's values in how to deal with the situation.
If your friends are mature adults, they can handle being told that someone doesn't want to hang out with them sometimes, without taking it personally. If they can't handle that, that's a problem that needs to be addressed--it's not a kind or empathetic thing to walk around on eggshells and let that problem fester and grow. This isn't a "kind lie" even if such a thing exists. What you're describing isn't empathy for your friends, it's fear/anxiety that your friends won't react well, and if your friends are quality friends at all, it's not a rational fear.
To be clear, moral failure has nothing to do with my argument: I don't even believe in morality in an absolute sense. My argument is that, assuming people want to have cooperative, enjoyable interactions with friends, the best way to achieve that is to tell the truth about what you want and expect the same from your friends.
You are seriously overthinking this. Empathetic people can still communicate.
I'm not sure who the "you" are addressing here, I'm talking about this problem from a game theoretic perspective which abstracts over all people.
It some situations there will be no lack of clarity - for example, if two people prefer honesty over empathy (shorthand for "will people be more honest even if they are concerned it will not maximize utility between the parties, or they are aware such utility is not at risk"), there will be no source of moral confusion. It's when there's unrevealed information about value judgements this problem manifests.
It seems like this is a reasonable response to andrewzah, but to be clear, my argument has nothing to do with virtue--I don't even believe in virtue ethics.
I also know people who don't express preferences directly when they think those preferences will harm me. We can call this empathy or we can call it fear, but what it comes down to is that it's irrational: the end result is that they don't get what they want from the relationships in their life, and that comes out in negative behaviors.
This isn't a moral judgment of these people, it's just not something I want to deal with: I'll try to help these people work through their social anxiety, but if that doesn't work, that's going to limit how close we can be, because I can't trust them to be honest with me.
It's not kindness/empathy to coddle these people, either: that's just enabling them in a behavior that is going to limit them in many aspects of their life.
It has to do with the health of the relationship, whether people can really be connected with each other. A good chunk of drama that happens among people happen unnecessarily, often because they don't feel they can be honest with each other. They cannot be who they really feel.
Are there times people going to have white lies? Yes. Or how about withohlding information out of concern for them? Sure.
Figuring out whether you want to go the bar is one thing. It's when these things really matter, where people are not aligned in what they want out of the relationship that trying to keep things from each other makes things fall apart quickly.
Even simple things like, a friend who keeps asking you to go hangout with him, would borrow money from you and never return it. You feel used. But you also feel you cannot say anything for whatever reason. How can you tell this person, this behavior is not OK while keeping him as a friend? (Do you even want him to remain a friend?)
A married couple with kids. One of them is offered a promotion, but it requires moving overseas. It is a big opportunity, potentially career-defining. The other partner would have to leave a job and it would be highly disruptive to the kids, and does not want to move. Do you think putting this into a communication escrow app will help with talking this out? I don't think so.
Labeling things like "ignorance" and "poor social skills" as "disparaging" isn't particularly useful. When I say someone is ignorant or has poor social skills, that's not a statement that they're a bad person, it's an identification of a problem they have (which is correctable).
> I don't consider this category of dishonesty to be one that a person necessarily needs to correct
It sounds like this may be the core of our disagreement.
I won't say that a person "needs" to correct it--instead I would say that the person, and my friendship with that person, will be significantly limited by not correcting this problem.
I'm not suggesting it's something they need to correct. The problem tends to solve itself through selection. Flaky people hang out with other flaky people. Dishonest people have dishonest friends. Mercenary and opportunistic people have friends who are likewise.
Why bother with these elaborate rationalizations to justify dishonesty?
I disagree that avoiding the trade-off makes things better off.
But at least you've made your views known and so have I.
This is one of the exact things addressed in Crucial Conversations:
(1) The authors recognize that a lot of people feel this way. That they are either brutally honest or they don't talk about it.
(2) That people often feels this way because they don't know how to talk about difficult things. It does not have to be this way.
The authors lay out the steps for being able to communicate difficult conversations with anyone. Is it still going to be unpleasant? Yes. But it does not involve an either-or choice of being "brutally honest" and being "empathetic".
These are especially important in conversations these authors call "crucial conversations": important conversations that people have a lot of stake in its outcome, when opinions differ, and emotions run high. These are literally the underpinning of every relationship I know, be them romantic partnerships, to relationship with friends, with bosses, with people who work for you.
The key thing to getting out of that seeming either-or trap, is to understand that you can talk to anyone about anything if they trust you. They trust you because you sincerely want something that includes them. That you are not out to get them or trap them into things. That perhaps, you both want the same things though you might not see it. That you both are sharing in some shared meaning together.
It is a very practical book. It lays things out in ways that are catchy and easy to remember.
It's the book I gave to a friend of mine for a wedding present after I have been married for three years, something I wished I had known about when I got married.
There might be a $1b company in there if someone finds a generalized solution to this problem :)
It would be valuable information to say, used car salesmen.
They could look up a prospective customer wandering around the lot. If the customer asks for a test drive, check the "flake metric" and deny it for high flakers, who are probably just noncommittal tire-kickers.
:)
Like most data collection, this is far too sparse a dataset to ever be useful.
A) the number of degrees of discomfort between, "I can talk about this any time with no effort", and "I literally can't talk about this".
B) how normal it is for certain types of people to struggle with this kind of interaction in general.
On the first point, I am perfectly capable of being frank with friends. I am perfectly capable of telling them how I feel. And when I need to have confrontational conversations with friends, I do. But that's not the same thing as feeling no aversion or worry at all about disappointing someone. And if a crutch exists that mitigates part of that problem, I just don't see the harm in that crutch.
There are dozens of tiny, inessential affordances everyone gives themselves every day to help manage non-crippling problems. That's normal. It shouldn't be weird to anyone that people with even mild anxiety around friendships might want similar affordances. Sometimes it's not about necessity, people just want a tool that makes their life easier.
On the second note, I'm not going to go in depth here, but people who don't struggle with social anxiety usually don't understand how many other people do, or what their experiences are actually like. There's a pretty wide range of different annoyances or aversions that people can have about this stuff, and I really don't want to pretend to speak for other people. Some introverts don't struggle with this at all, some struggle in completely different areas.
I am speaking in very broad generalities. But I consider these to be very common situations for someone like me:
- going to an event I'd rather not just because I don't want to disappoint a friend or make them think I don't enjoy their company.
- actively not inviting a friend to an event because I'm worried they'd only come out of obligation and would resent that I asked.
- feeling like if I just express interest in changing plans a friend will accommodate me even though they had their heart set on something.
I'm not going to say people like me are a majority: we're definitely not. But we're not that rare. If you've never had even a casual acquaintance like me, you're not looking very hard.
> I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
I realize this is somewhat blunt and a little uncharitable, and I don't mean it as an attack or as a character flaw -- but in the general spirit of being confrontational and open: when I hear this, my immediate thought is, "this person probably doesn't have many introverted friends, and they probably don't have many deep, honest relationships with the few introverted friends they do have."
Your perspective definitely isn't uncommon, and it shouldn't surprise me when I hear it, but I'm always surprised anyway. :) It's like seeing someone who lives in a completely different world, to the point where when they see the world I'm familiar with it's not just unexpected to them, but so unexpected that they think, "there must be something wrong with that."
I think absolutes are silly to use as arguments, and sure, there are certainly some people for whom it's really difficult to proactively cancel plans. Sometimes I'm that person. But I choose to suck it up and act like a human instead of (if I were to use this app) hiding behind a computer to let it do my dirty work for me. I certainly grant that there are some people who just can't do that sometimes, or even more often than sometimes.
It's hard to believe that there are enough people like that for an app. My feeling is that most people who use this would actually otherwise actively cancel plans, but will use the app instead just to be socially lazy or to avoid even a hint of confrontation, and the effect will be to lower the quality of social interaction between people overall.
The reason you find that hard to believe is not because those people are wildly uncommon or because they're hiding, but simply because you don't personally know how to recognize them, or that (ironically) you haven't been in a position yet where one of them talked to you that openly about their feelings.
What I'm trying to get across is that people like me are not aberrations, and our personality traits are not debilitating character flaws.
To try and get across how weird your perspective feels to me:
Imagine that one day you showed a friend Candy Crush, and their immediate reaction was, "but who would ever install this? Sure, occasionally even I get bored, but when I do I just sit silently and motionlessly like an adult. I don't need constant distractions."
Imagine trying to convince your friend that:
A) Installing Candy Crush doesn't actually mean that you have undiagnosed ADHD, and that
B) It's actually not that big a deal if people occasionally pull out an app to keep themselves from getting bored during long flights, or train rides -- that the fact that some people get bored sometimes is not a big societal problem that needs to be addressed by altering their personalities.
Phrases like this stick out to me,
> act like a human
because from my perspective, I'm not sure I can think of many things more human than caring a lot about other people's preferences, even occasionally to the point where I dismiss what I want to do. And I don't see how using an app to accommodate someone else makes that accommodation suddenly robotic.
I'm seeing a bunch of people on here who (as far as I can tell) have a view of introverted relationships like they're this completely impersonal thing that comes down to never wanting to see another person's face or deal with conflict in any way. And the reality is that of course introverted people have conversations and conflicts. In reality, what these relationships often look like is just friends accommodating each other a bunch and going out of their way to make each other feel comfortable via tiny, almost invisible gestures.
My proposal: in moderation, maybe that kind of relationship can be nice sometimes, and you don't have to be frightened that society will collapse if more people do that -- even if that involves using an occasional app?
If that's what you're trying to get across, I'll agree that we're common, and social anxiety isn't a character flaw.
However, your life and the lives of people around you will improve significantly if you take steps to deal with your social anxiety.
> I'm not sure I can think of many things more human than caring a lot about other people's preferences,
That's not what you're doing.
I prefer not to be lied to, and I think most people prefer not to be lied to, or would prefer not to be lied to if they understood how this sort of lying plays out.
I get it that you think that what you're doing benefits others: that's why I'm not saying you're a bad person. Motivation does matter. What I'm saying is that your belief that hiding your preferences from other people benefits them is false.
You're misunderstanding what the point of an app like this is. It's not to lie to friends, it's to get them to be more honest with me. If I tell a casual acquaintance that I'm not feeling great about an event, 99% of the time they will say it's not big deal and cancel. They will almost never tell me honestly whether or not they were excited about it and really wanted me to come anyway.
That tendency is not an introverted vs extroverted thing, it's just a thing everybody does. It's the same anomaly that makes it hard to choose a restaurant, because everyone just says, "oh, I don't care, lets do what the group wants."
What is an introverted thing is that I have a lot of experience with people going out of their way to accommodate me in ways that that mask the problem that they have needs I'm not meeting. I have a lot of experience with people feeling like I don't like them because I haven't talked to them in a while -- and not just doing the sensible thing and coming to me and saying, "hey, I wish you would call more." As a result, there will always be a small part of my brain thinking, "you're just saying this is not a big deal." There will always be a small part of my brain thinking, "is there some non-confrontational way I could get you to be more honest with me about your expectations in this friendship?"
The affordance here for me is being able to skip an awkward conversation where I try to convince someone else that I don't want the polite answer, I want to know whether or not they're disappointed. It's not so I can lie to friends, its so I can express my preferences without worrying that I'm being lied to.
Would it be better if no one, introverted or extroverted, ever hid what they wanted? Maybe, but I'm not convinced that's true. I could also sit down with all of my friends, one on one, and say, "you need to promise me that if I ask if it's OK to cancel, you will always tell me whether or not you're disappointed in me." I've done that with a few very close friends, but in general, I've found that kind of a conversation is a good way to creep out casual acquaintances.
Or maybe I should just change my personality to not care at all if I'm disappointing those people? I want to re-emphasize the idea that everyone hides preferences and insecurities all the time, that everyone has quirks, and that we all tolerate mild social lubricants that make friendships easier. Except when those lubricants are designed for introverts, in which case suddenly they're problematic.
The problem people have here is not that they think politeness is the same as lying -- otherwise all of these commenters would have already joined the radical honesty movement. The problem is that the particular kind of politeness this app is designed to facilitate and the particular kind of insecurity it's designed to ease doesn't code as normal to them.
You're assuming that I don't understand this: I do understand it, I'm saying that this does not increase honesty in your relationship, it just enables social anxiety. Even if people are really honest through the app (and I'm not sure why you're assuming they will be), this is enabling the overall behavior of not communicating their preferences and needs. You're fixing one symptom but exacerbating a larger problem.
> If I tell a casual acquaintance that I'm not feeling great about an event, 99% of the time they will say it's not big deal and cancel. They will almost never tell me honestly whether or not they were excited about it and really wanted me to come anyway.
a) That may be true, but that's their choice, not yours.
b) That doesn't justify you not communicating your needs.
> That tendency is not an introverted vs extroverted thing, it's just a thing everybody does.
I agree that this isn't an introverted/extroverted thing, but it's absolutely not a thing I do, or that my close friends do. I've met people who do this, but failure to effectively communicate is going to be a major hindrance to our relationship becoming close.
> The affordance here for me is being able to skip an awkward conversation where I try to convince someone else that I don't want the polite answer, I want to know whether or not they're disappointed.
I understand that, and I'm saying this is not a desirable outcome. That sort of awkward conversation is absolutely fundamental to relationships becoming closer. If you can't say, "Hey, I'm not feeling psyched about hanging out today" or "Hey, just so you know, I won't be offended if you don't want to hang out, and I'd prefer to only hang out if you're feeling excited about it", those are the easy conversations. If you can't say those things, how are you going to say, "Hey, I'm really feeling insecure about what that girl said to me yesterday," or "Hey, what you just said kind of hurt my feelings". The answer is: you won't. Becoming close enough to have a deeply vulnerable conversation like that doesn't just happen ex nihilo, it grows out of having less important conversations that require just a little vulnerability.
> It's not so I can lie to friends, its so I can express my preferences without worrying that I'm being lied to.
But you're not expressing your preference to your friends. On the contrary, you're avoiding expressing your preferences to your friends, out of fear that they'll lie to you if you express your preferences.
> Would it be better if no one, introverted or extroverted, ever hid what they wanted? Maybe, but I'm not convinced that's true. Could I sit down with all of my friends, one on one, and say, "you need to promise me that if I ask if it's OK to cancel, you will always tell me whether or not you're disappointed in me." I've done that with a few very close friends, but in general, I've found that kind of a conversation is a good way to creep out casual acquaintances.
Well yeah, if you lead in with that, that's pretty intense.
It's also a pretty big assumption that everyone needs to be told to be honest with you.
> Or maybe I should just change my personality to not care at all if I'm disappointing those people?
No--I'm saying change your behavior to get the results you want. If you want close relationships where you can be open, honest, and vulnerable with each other, then starting off hiding something minor like this is not the way to get there.
> Again, I cycle back to this idea that everyone hides preferences and insecurities all the time, that everyone has quirks, and that we all tolerate mild social lubricants that make friendships easier.
Tolerating things is not the same as leaning into them so hard that you build an app around them.
Yes, people make mistakes, and we should allow for humans to be humans.
> Except when those lubricants are designed for introverts, in which case suddenly they're problematic.
Wait, I thought you said this wasn't an introvert/extrovert thing?
> The problem people have here is not that they think politeness is the same as lying -- otherwise all of these commenters would have already joined the radical honesty movement.
I try my best to be radically honest. :)
Whether I succeed, I dunno. I'm certainly more honest since I started trying.
But in the same way that there are gradients of anxiety, there are also gradients of friendship. I do not need to be comfortable having difficult conversations with my coworkers. I can have difficult conversations with my coworkers if it's important, but there is no inherent virtue in forcing myself to go through that unpleasantness just so we can plan a board-game night.
Your view also discounts the extent that relationships develop over time. You do understand that immediate, radical honesty isn't how relationships work:
> Well yeah, if you lead in with that, that's pretty intense.
But you don't follow through with that thought to its natural conclusion. If I'm not going to lead with something like this, what you're essentially saying to me is, "you should be uncomfortable around our calendar until I feel comfortable having this conversation with you."
My understanding of your position is that if I don't force myself to feel safe talking about small things, I won't ever feel safe talking about big things. Frankly, I don't think that's a realistic or practical view of relationships, and I guarantee if you applied that standard equally to all of the other social graces you extend to everyone around you, you would not have many friends (deep or otherwise). I disagree that accommodating some behaviors necessarily means that relationships can't deepen over time.
Of course practicing vulnerability is important for relationships, but it is equally important to practice grace and care. If you show people you care about making them feel safe rather than pressing every issue, then they might eventually feel safe enough to trust you to be gentle when they're really insecure about something serious.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I deal with people who will get incredibly lonely or feel incredibly disliked if they're left alone for a long period of time. I'm curious, if I built a calendar app for my friends that reminded us every 3 or 4 days to call that person and catch up with them, would you say that's an unhealthy technological solution that's stunting the relationship?
My take on this kind of 'dishonesty' is that sometimes friends agree to handle each other's quirks and work around their specific issues rather than barreling through them head-on, and that doesn't mean they're avoiding responsibility or undermining the friendship. It just means they care about each other and want to meet each other's personalities halfway.
> Tolerating things is not the same as leaning into them so hard that you build an app around them.
I don't want to get too off-topic or dismissive, but I think this is a somewhat uncritical view of how modern relationships work among most 'normal' friends. We've built Tinder and designed blind dating apps to help people get around their social anxiety asking strangers for dates. People go to bars and drink substances designed specifically to bypass the restraint parts of their brain so they'll be less guarded with their friends. We've built apps like Facetime so that people who lack the ability to emotionally connect to written messages can get the visual and auditory signifiers they need to feel connected to other people. We build games that are designed to let people avoid boredom. We use online polls among friends to avoid conflicts around small decisions. We build bar-room trivia apps for people who have problems interacting with each other or picking conversation topics without 3rd-party intervention.
I pretty regularly go out of my way to build systems, use systems, and structure my life to accommodate behaviors that do not make sense to me, and I still manage to avoid thinking that every person with those behaviors is broken and needs to be fixed.
> But you don't follow through with that thought to its natural conclusion. If I'm not going to lead with something like this, what you're essentially saying to me is, "you should be uncomfortable around our calendar until I feel comfortable having this conversation with you."
No, I'm saying that your uncomfortable-ness around this is irrational until you see some reason to believe the person will lie to you, and if you're close enough to recognize that someone is lying about wanting to hang out, then you're close enough to have that conversation.
Making this about concern for other people is just a foil to avoid looking at yourself. This isn't about them: it's about your social anxiety, not theirs.
> I'm curious, if I built a calendar app for my friends that reminded us every 3 or 4 days to call that person and catch up with them, would you say that's an unhealthy technological solution that's stunting the relationship?
No. I think that's a great way for you to deal with forgetfulness to achieve a kind goal.
The problem isn't technical solutions. The problem is that this technical solution doesn't solve the real problem, which is solvable, and instead enables it.
> I don't want to get too off-topic or dismissive, but I think this is a somewhat uncritical view of how modern relationships work among most 'normal' friends.
Again, "normal" isn't my goal.
> We've built Tinder and designed blind dating apps to help people get around their social anxiety asking strangers for dates.
And while that has worked out for some people, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that it has actually empowered people to ask strangers for dates, or more importantly, to create meaningful connections.
> People go to bars and drink substances designed specifically to bypass the restraint parts of their brain so they'll be less guarded with their friends.
And while that works for some people, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that it actually results in positive, deep relationships. While deep relationships might involve some alcohol, the reasons they are deep aren't based in drinking together from my experience.
> We've built apps like Facetime so that people who lack the ability to emotionally connect to written messages can get the visual and auditory signifiers they need to feel connected to other people.
Yes, and that helps bridge the gap when face to face interactions are not possible--I'd view this as a positive thing. But it also can't fully close the gap with relationships where touch is important.
> We use online polls among friends to avoid conflicts around small decisions.
Do we? I've never even seen this, and probably just wouldn't respond if a friend spammed me with a link to some poll site. If people do this, I'm pretty sure it would be ineffective for that goal.
> We build bar-room trivia apps for people who have problems interacting with each other or picking conversation topics without 3rd-party intervention.
Trivia games are a way more complicated topic that fulfills a lot of human needs. I don't think (after doing a lot of work) that I have a hard time interacting or picking conversations, but I'd still be down for trivia for a lot of reasons unrelated to this.
I'm going to reiterate that a lot of the things you're attributing as solutions to social anxiety, would be better addressed by actually seeking help for social anxiety.
Surely, a much kinder goal would be to help that person deal with their anxiety around being abandoned? /s
> that helps bridge the gap when face to face interactions are not possible
Wouldn't those people be better served by seeking help for their inability to emotionally connect to others without visual cues? /s
> But it also can't fully close the gap with relationships where touch is important.
In a global society where you will almost definitely be required to maintain long-distance relationships at some point, isn't the reliance on touch for emotional connection the actual problem to solve? /s
With the examples I brought up, I wasn't trying to get your opinion on specific technological solutions; I was trying to point out that many interpersonal needs are not, strictly speaking, rational. Human beings aren't rational, and in many cases we're both fine with building systems to accommodate that.
> I'm going to reiterate that a lot of the things you're attributing as solutions to social anxiety, would be better addressed by actually seeking help for social anxiety.
You can say this about literally any irrational human behavior. Some of the behaviors I describe above are weird to me. It is weird to me that people feel like they're abandoned if they haven't spoken to anyone else for 3 days. I don't see how that person's insecurity is fundamentally different than anyone else's insecurity about overburdening friends. And while I admit some anxieties are so severe that they can become a real problem, in general when I meet people with anxieties that are weird to me, I just try to accommodate them. I don't usually refer them to specialists.
A bias towards normalcy means treating common insecurities as fundamental and essential parts of being human, while simultaneously treating less socially acceptable insecurities as problems to be solved.
> Surely, a much kinder goal would be to help that person deal with their anxiety around being abandoned? /s
Sure, it would be nice, but their anxiety is their responsibility: you're not obligated to.
> Wouldn't those people be better served by seeking help for their inability to emotionally connect to others without visual cues? /s
Well, these people are already emotionally connected, or they wouldn't care that they can't see the person. They'd be best served probably by being colocated with the people they care about, but that's not always possible realistically.
> In a global society where you will almost definitely be required to maintain long-distance relationships at some point, isn't the reliance on touch for emotional connection the actual problem to solve? /s
Perhaps, but good luck rewriting a few million years of evolution. It would be better to focus on solutions that are actually possible.
> With the examples I brought up, I wasn't trying to get your opinion on specific technological solutions; I was trying to point out that many interpersonal needs are not, strictly speaking, rational. Human beings aren't rational, and in many cases we're both fine with building systems to accommodate that.
Sure. But we should build systems that actually try to fix the problem, instead of enabling it.
If you want to fix people's social anxiety, a good solution would be to educate people on social anxiety, create better educational materials, fund research, and make help available to people.
What you're arguing for is essentially like giving a wheelchair for a person who is paralyzed by a curable, reversible disease. Sure, we have the technology and it would improve one small aspect of their life, but why would we not just encourage them to seek treatment?
> > I'm going to reiterate that a lot of the things you're attributing as solutions to social anxiety, would be better addressed by actually seeking help for social anxiety.
> You can say this about literally any irrational human behavior.
No, you can't. That's nonsense. We don't have tools to address every irrational human behavior. We do have tools to address social anxiety for individuals who decide to work on it.
> Some of the behaviors I describe above are weird to me. It is weird to me that people feel like they're abandoned if they haven't spoken to anyone else for 3 days.
I don't think it's weird. I also don't care about things being weird/normal, and I'm really not sure why you're bringing it up.
> I don't see how that person's insecurity is fundamentally different than anyone else's insecurity about overburdening friends.
I don't see how it's fundamentally different either. It seems like both people could benefit from working on their social anxiety.
> And while I admit some anxieties are so severe that they can become a real problem, in general when I meet people with anxieties that are weird to me, I just try to accommodate them. I don't usually refer them to specialists.
Sure, you're not obligated to help people.
> A bias towards normalcy means treating common insecurities as fundamental and essential parts of being human, while simultaneously treating less socially acceptable insecurities as problems to be solved.
No, this is not what I'm saying: if anything I'm biased against normalcy because it's boring.
I AM NOT saying people with social anxiety should seek help for their social anxiety because it's weird: I don't really think it's weird.
I AM saying people with social anxiety should seek help for their social anxiety because it would improve their own enjoyment of their lives.
I used to be very introverted and shy, and I still hate doing things like answering the phone or talking in person to people I don't know (and I still work on improving there). But I've learned that communicating with the people around me who care about me (and vice versa) is nothing to be anxious about. It's taken literally decades for me to get here (I now consider myself a somewhat-shy extrovert), but I do feel that my life is better having (mostly) left that anxiety behind. I don't see this as some "personal preference" type of thing; I mean, social anxiety disorder is, well, actually a disorder listed in the DSM.
Your analogy about Candy Crush doesn't really speak to me, because I absolutely agree that there's nothing wrong with killing time with a silly game when you're in a situation where you have to wait (with the exception of games that deliberately and maliciously hook into addictive tendencies). But I do think that an inability/aversion/anxiety around basic communication between friends is actually a problem. I'm not saying that people who have these issues are bad people or anything like that, but I would hope that people with those issues actually view them as issues, and not just a "style of communication" or whatever.
Beyond that, one possibility is that this app just won't gain much traction, and it'll either fail or find a small niche. Otherwise, I just don't see this as something that people will use in moderation. I feel like the people who do genuinely need it (due to introversion or social anxiety or something like that) will use it frequently, and will end up bailing on more activities than they would have otherwise (which sometimes will be good and sometimes will be bad). And I think other people, who don't really have introversion issues, will use it as a way to make rude flakiness easier to justify, and have a normalizing effect on that kind of behavior.
So yes, I can see a world where someone uses an app or system like this to avoid conflict to an unhealthy degree. And to be clear, a friend that refuses to meet your extroversion halfway or that demands that you jump through excessive hoops to interact with them is a bad friend, period. But I really disagree that the potential for that kind of abuse means that introversion is somehow a problem. I don't see a difference between boredom and small-scale social anxiety.
There is a well-meaning kind of person that I will occasionally run into that is very interested in getting rid of personality traits I have that they consider problematic. And often I find myself eventually tolerating more quirks in them than they will tolerate in me.
Friendship is, in part, about people accommodating for each other and helping each other -- that's the part that makes friendship special. So I provide affordances for people who get incredibly lonely if I haven't spoken to them in a week, because I recognize they can't just 'act like an adult' and take it at face value that I haven't abandoned them. I provide affordances for people by adjusting my body language, how I talk to them, and where I look while I'm talking to them, because I recognize that some extroverts have trouble emotionally connecting to other people without a lot of extra signals of affirmation. In the same way, I make affordances for people by calling them instead of texting them, because some people place more emotional importance than I do on hearing a voice.
All of this is, to be blunt, crazy. It's just that some people have a random chunk of their brain constantly making them feel anxiety over the fictional idea that "I love you" means more when it's heard in someone's voice then when it's written on a piece of paper.
But generally, we don't describe those people as having a problem. It's not a problem that they have a section of their brains that says, "if someone doesn't make small talk, then that means they're being confrontational or angry." But it is a problem for some reason that I have a section of my brain that says, "if you ask someone for a favor, maybe they didn't actually want to do it, and maybe they might lie about their preferences." And I do kind of regard that as a double standard, because when I accommodate extroverted behavior, I just feel happy to help my friends -- I'm not thinking in the back of my mind, "that person should see a specialist."
I dunno. Every day, everyone here tolerates tons of personality quirks that seem to me to be way, way more crazy, and way more debilitating, and way more problematic for society than something as trivial as being anxious about disappointing friends if a movie night gets canceled.
Any personality trait or quirk, if taken to the extreme, will become a disorder. What is different about introversion that means it's dangerous to accommodate it?
I don't think I'm underestimating it, I just don't see any of these degrees of discomfort as justification for my friends not telling me their preferences when they're relevant to me.
> B) how normal it is for certain types of people to struggle with this kind of interaction in general.
I think you're making some pretty big assumptions about my experience in an attempt to explain our differences in worldview.
Social anxiety is normal/common. But being "normal" is not a goal I have, nor is it a goal I think other people should have. The fact that it's normal/common has turned it from a personal problem some people have, to a social problem that most people have to deal with even if they don't have social anxiety themselves.
The fact that it's normal/common doesn't mean we should just accept it as inevitable. This is a fixable problem.
To be clear, I myself have struggled with social anxiety a lot. I'm not saying people are bad people because they have social anxiety--I'm saying they should address their social anxiety. This isn't some moral/ethical "should", it's something they should do because it would benefit them and everyone they come in contact with.
For what it's worth, I wish I had addressed my social anxiety sooner. Working on my social anxiety has been some of the most beneficial work I've ever done on myself, and I've seen similar trends with my friends who have worked through their social anxiety.
> I realize this is somewhat blunt and a little uncharitable, and I don't mean it as an attack or as a character flaw -- but in the general spirit of being confrontational and open: when I hear this, my immediate thought is, "this person probably doesn't have many introverted friends, and they probably don't have many deep, honest relationships with the few introverted friends they do have."
On the contrary:
1. I'm an extrovert, but I tend to make friends with introverts, and I tend to have <10 deep friendships and almost no acquaintances.
2. I think you're equating introversion with social anxiety, and they are not equivalent. There are introverts without social anxiety, and and extroverts with social anxiety (I am in the latter camp, though my social anxiety is probably 90% fixed at this point). Extroversion/introversion is just a statement about how much social interaction you prefer, it doesn't inherently mean you'll have any anxiety about stating those preferences.
I use 'introvert' and 'extrovert' out of lack of a better word, because the connotations you have around 'anxiety' are also not representative of everyone who might want to use this app. But again, you're correct to point out that this is a very broad, kind of incorrect generalization.
However, I do still believe that if you genuinely can't imagine being friends with someone who would want this app, you are in a bubble. If you genuinely can't imagine friends with deep, meaningful relationships using something like this, you are in a bubble. To take that a step further, while it's completely feasible that none of your friends fall into this category, I would very cautiously advise asking them -- because it's also feasible that some of them do relate and just haven't ever talked to you about it.
On that note, if this app idea creeps you out, please allow me to creep you out a lot more. ;)
When I was in college, a friend and I came very close to setting up a system I could use to ask them for favors. The plan was, I would send an email asking for the favor, and based on how much I needed it, a system would be given a 0-50% chance of not delivering the email. That way, if the email was delivered and the friend didn't want to do the favor, they could delete it without worrying quite as much about my reaction. And if I didn't hear a reply, I would be less tempted to read into that.
I don't think we ultimately followed through (the payoff wasn't worth the technical work it would have taken to build), but there were a lot of policies like this -- there were a lot of systems that allowed us to gel, and that allowed us to cut through issues that would have made it more difficult for us to connect.
Now, you could reasonably assume that the dynamics I describe above would contribute to a pretty messed up, fragile relationship, but to this day, I would consider that person to be the closest friend I've ever had, and I think they understand me as a person on a different level than almost anyone else I know. Far from being unable to communicate, there were a number of topics and conversations that (at the time) I felt like I could only have with that friend.
I can't speak to your experiences, I can't speak to your personal needs as an individual, I can't tell you what's healthy for you. I can just say that when you imagine that people working around anxiety can't have deep friendships, you're wrong. There's a dimension to these relationships that you don't understand.
Dude, no. I don't need to talk to my friends to find people who can relate to wanting to use an app like this, because I can relate to wanting to use an app like this. You're not the only person with social anxiety in this conversation.
The difference, here, is that I've spent a lot of time working on fixing my social anxiety, and recognize wanting to use an app like this as the voice of my social anxiety, rather than a solution to it.
> On that note, if this app idea creeps you out, please allow me to creep you out a lot more. ;)
It doesn't creep me out.
> Now, you could reasonably assume that the dynamics I describe above would contribute to a pretty messed up, fragile relationship, but to this day, I would consider that person to be the closest friend I've ever had, and I think they understand me as a person on a different level than almost anyone else I know. Far from being unable to communicate, there were a number of topics and conversations that (at the time) I felt like I could only have with that friend.
No, I don't think that leads to a messed up friendship. I think, from the sound of it, that in a very socially anxious way, the two of you were communicating your fear about the friendship to each other: you, your fear of asking favors, and him his fear of saying no. That's vulnerable honesty, the opposite of the app you were building, and of course that would lead to a closer friendship.
But don't you see the irrationality of your email idea? If this is a person you can share your deep, vulnerable feelings with and he doesn't reject you, wouldn't it also be rational that he'd be a person you can ask a favor of?
You are a human, who, because you are a human, deserve to take up space in the lives of the people around you. You deserve to ask for favors. You deserve to not fear that people are just lying about being okay with doing favors. You deserve to spend time with people. You deserve to not fear that people aren't actually enjoying spending time with you.
Sure, you can relate from the perspective of someone who's said they had crippling anxiety that needed to be dealt with. With respect, you are not the best person to evaluate whether everyone else's anxieties are in the same league as yours. You are coming at this from the perspective that social anxiety is a problem that needs to be solved. In some cases, I agree. In other cases, I don't.
The part of this that you don't understand is not what it feels like to be anxious. The part you don't understand is what it feels like to feel OK about feeling anxious -- that there are people in this position that don't want or need to be changed. You don't understand their perspective.
In your very first comment, you write:
> I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
That sentence is your bubble. I can trivially imagine being friends with someone like that. And more to the point, I can imagine enjoying being friends with that person. I have intimate experience with being friends with people in this category, and I like nearly all of them.
Your take on my email example emphasizes one specific part of friendship: being vulnerable. But in your focus on that particular element, you are missing the broader principle that makes me value this particular friendship so much: that my friend and I genuinely like each other's personalities, warts and all. When we built systems to accommodate each other, we were not sharing our fears -- we were expressing to each other that we were worth accommodating.
Of course, I try to improve my personality when possible. But my relationship with myself is not hostile. There are vulnerabilities and fears I have that I am OK with having, because they are the natural consequences of parts of my personality that I consider to be strengths. When my friends accommodate them, it doesn't make me feel robotic or weaken those relationships. It just makes me feel like my friends care about me.
The solution to this problem is sending a text that says, "Hey, I'm not feeling like coming out today after all. Rain check?" This app is a worse solution than the obvious solution.
Trying to be empathetic: if you feel the need to use something like this, I'm not qualified to diagnose you as having social anxiety, but I would suggest you talk to someone who is qualified to diagnose you with social anxiety.