I don’t even see groups

I want to foreground part of the subtext in my recent post on community and my problems with it. One underlying problem appears to me to be that I simply don’t perceive groups. Slate Star Codex writes about how important group membership is for making friends:

If I had written this essay five years ago, it would be be titled “Why Tribalism Is Stupid And Needs To Be Destroyed”. Since then, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve found that I enjoy being in tribes as much as anyone else.

Part of this was resolving a major social fallacy I’d had throughout high school and college, which was that the correct way to make friends was to pick the five most interesting people I knew and try to befriend them. This almost never worked and I thought it meant I had terrible social skills. Then I looked at what everyone else was doing, and I found that instead of isolated surgical strikes of friendship, they were forming groups. The band people. The mock trial people. The football team people. The Three Popular Girls Who Went Everywhere Together. Once I tried “falling in with” a group, friendship became much easier and self-sustaining precisely because of all of the tribal development that happens when a group of similar people all know each other and have a shared interest. Since then I’ve had good luck finding tribes I like and that accept me – the rationalists being the most obvious example, but even interacting with my coworkers on the same hospital unit at work is better than trying to find and cultivate random people.

Scott’s original social strategy is exactly how I go about making friends. Where it didn’t work, I just kept upgrading my social skills for one-on-one interactions. This I think is part of why some people think I have unusually poor social skills, and others say I have unusually good ones. I developed them unevenly relative to the norm. Continue reading →

Somaticization is the tendency to experience mental distress as physical distress. For instance, some people with depression don’t report low mood, but instead things like nausea or pain.

A 3-stage model of emotions mediated by somatic responses would explain this fairly well. In most people, the cognitive processes that generate emotions do not directly generate qualia, but only affect our physical and mental behavior. These in turn are read by other mental processes that summarize them into feelings. Somaticizers, by this model, are people who are acutely consciously aware of the intermediate somatic stage of their feelings, but for whom the summarizing processes are either suppressed or weak to begin with.

In talking with friends about their experiences, I’ve noticed that this process can run in reverse as well - physical ailments with non-mental origins can get picked up by processes that are looking for somatic symptoms of emotions: Continue reading →