How To Build A Community Full Of Lonely People

Seems to me that we have to distinguish between... uhm... relative and absolute unpopularity.

Relative unpopularity is when no one talks to John, because everyone is busy trying to talk to Elvis instead. In theory, people would prefer talking to John to being alone, but in practice they are overestimating their chances with Elvis, so John remains alone.

This can be improved by giving John a moment in spotlight, e.g. by inviting him to give a short public talk about his hobbies. And by splitting the group into smaller groups, so John no longer has to compete with Elvis directly at every moment.

Absolute unpopularity is when people prefer staying alone to talking to John. This can only be fixed by changing John.

I have massively decreased my social time following my noticing the productive people I am trying to emulate instead get a specific high value density social instead of buckets of exploration social.

I am not sure if fixing lonely is something I want to encourage people to work on instead of the hard problems.

Distinctly social strikes me as reading a newspaper. You can do it every day until you die. Compared to publishing a proof and leaving a legacy in the body of knowledge that we call humanity.

I am not saying ignore social, I am saying remember it's place in the total irrelevance of life's features

Is there anybody here who thinks they are good at connecting people with shared interests? If so, how did you learn to be good at it? How would you advise others to build that skill?

I like the idea of spreading popularity around when justified, ie. high status people pointing out when someone has a particular set of knowledge that people may not know that they could benefit from or giving them credit for interesting ideas. These seem important for a strong community and additionally provide benefits to the rest of the community by allowing them to take advantage of each other's skills.

I've been collecting "cues" that help me do a little better in social situations. Here's a couple nice ones.

1) It seems like part of social anxiety is about feeling that you have a relaxed inner core somewhere, surrounded by a tense shell, and sudden attention from other people is threatening to the core. My "cue" is to feel the part that you're protecting, and make it tense as well. You can even find it by looking in the mirror, if some aspect of your posture or face is saying "don't look at me, I'm slack and not quite here", just make it tense! Bring all of yourself right here! Then the metaphorical knife of other people's attention won't feel threatening anymore, because your inside is just as tough as the outside. It even gets fun to "bump" into people's attention and see how they react.

2) When you feel like other people aren't listening to what you say, the problem is often with your voice. Many people advise working on things like breath support, but I've found it more helpful to focus on the shape of the vowels. A nice exercise is to try making an "ah" sound with different mouth shapes, learning to feel the shape of the vowel that comes out. It's both aural and tactile, you can also make shapes silently and imagine how they sound. Then you can experiment with making the vowel shapes emphasize your words, pretty much ignoring volume and pitch. Somehow it helps me say things that are just spontaneously funny, and even helps me sing more precisely in tune, not sure why.