Diversify Your Friendship Portfolio

Strongly agree. Another benefit is that it exposes you to a broader swath of the world, which makes your models of the world better / more generalizable. I often feel like the rationalist community has "beliefs about people" that I think only apply to a small subset of people, e.g.

• People need to find meaning in their jobs to be happy
• Everyone thinks that the thing that they are doing is "good for the world" or "morally right" (as opposed to thinking that the thing they are doing is justifiable / reasonable to do)

I see how the idea is sensible for some, but I've never felt satisfied with compartmentalised friendships where I share a small facet of myself with each group.

In addition to diversification being somewhat alienating, there are some benefits of tight-knit groups you'd struggle to replicate in diversified social portfolio:

• Lowered social transaction costs - when you divide your social time between fewer people you have more time to learn how best to work with each person
• Easier trust coordination - repeated interactions over a long period of time mean you have a lot of past data to evaluate someone's trustworthiness
• Emotional investment - loyalty is rational when each person isn't a replaceable commodity. Having tough conversations that will cause friction but pay off in the long run is worth it if there's actually going to be a long run.

Like financial investing, this has drawbacks as well. If there is a social group which is an especially good fit or especially beneficial to you, then diversifying away from it makes you get less overall value from friendships. Only if you don't have any idea where the gains/losses are coming from should you diversify for diversity sake.

Once you've sampled a number of different groups, you can allocate your social time disproportionally to those you get the most from. And still perhaps keep the others - this is more a hedge than a diversification strategy.

UNLIKE financial choices, you're investing time and emotional energy into friends. This is a FAR more limited, precious, and non-fungible resource. And the rewards are also non-fungible and non-storable (and in many cases, non-linear with investment size), very unlike money. The things that are no-brainers for financial decisions (diversity among categories and individual investments, reinvesting, deferred payouts) don't always directly apply to other life decisions.

The one thing I think this post is most missing, if it's primarily aimed at rationalists, is how introverted rationalists can go about making new friends. I've met a lot of people drawn to the rationality community because they don't know how to otherwise join of group of people to befriend, who they also have enough in common with that they would want to befriend them. Not saying that this isn't a good article (I strongly upvoted it, based alone on how important I think this signal/message is), nor that I know the best way to write about "how to make more friends (outside the rationality community)". I'm just saying if you have it in you, I think that would also be a post worth writing.

"Making new friends" or "Joining a New Group of Friends" or "Joining a New Community" might seem so obvious that it doesn't merit writing up how rationalists can do that. Yet, again, I've met rationalists who before they joined the rationality community that thought themselves so unable to make new friends in adulthood, they consider themselves lucky to even have fallen ass-backwards into the rationality community.

This is advice that I endorse but struggle to follow myself.

Something it's somewhat in tension with is a different set of advice I've been trying to adopt, which is to try to cultivate a small number of close friends rather than a smorgasborg of acquaintances.

The most important claim here is that the thing that passes for friendship these days, among most people in your target audience, is best thought of not as a irreplaceable human relationship, or perhaps one of many ties to a richly embedded community, but an asset in a portfolio.

It can be helpful to have that, but it implies a pretty awful world in a lot of other ways, and I'm very sad to see advice about how to get along in that world that doesn't even mention the possibility of trying to make things better.