Comment by Pierre (pierre-1) on Intentionally Making Close Friends · 2021-07-01T13:35:05.566Z · LW · GW

I talk to a friend I met in a videogame, because it was bonded out of joy. Strangely then myself, I value the "how" more than the "who". It was purely bonded. It was not out of financial interest. Maybe we have to be careful that "engineering friendship" is an impossibility, because the value is in the process. Like in Le Petit Prince, there are countless foxes, but you can only tame a few. This might seem daft but it's a biological possibility, that there is a friendship-mechanism which allows only mostly "organic" encounters (because there is value in a network of peers which is organized differently than in a direct-interests metric). Now you might be able to "override" that mechanism... Like in these tailored questions.