Someone who will happily mislead me is not a good ally.
They don’t see it as “misleading”. They are teaching you the socially approved reaction to a stimulus (but they obviously wouldn’t use these words), which is exactly what a good ally in their world is supposed to do. Unfortunately, such precious gifts are wasted on nerds, who try to translate them into maps of territory instead of memorizing and repeating them as a part of social performance. From their point of view, they are cooperating with you… it’s just that they play a completely different game.
I have a few friends among normies, but I usually don’t go to them asking for advice about the real world (unless they happen to be domain experts at something). Normies can be a wonderful source of warm emotions; that’s what their world is mostly about. Any factual statement needs to be triple checked (without telling them about it), though.
Note that I am not dismissing friendship with normies here. Warm emotions are important. And so is domain expertise, because I can’t always go and ask a fellow rationalist about some obscure detail (also, nerds are prone to overconfidence at domains they lack expertise in; no, you can’t replace tons of data with mere high IQ). But trying to bring normies on your travel at exploring the real world is an exercise in frustration.
They don’t see it as “misleading”. They are teaching you the socially approved reaction to a stimulus (but they obviously wouldn’t use these words), which is exactly what a good ally in their world is supposed to do. Unfortunately, such precious gifts are wasted on nerds, who try to translate them into maps of territory instead of memorizing and repeating them as a part of social performance. From their point of view, they are cooperating with you… it’s just that they play a completely different game.
I have a few friends among normies, but I usually don’t go to them asking for advice about the real world (unless they happen to be domain experts at something). Normies can be a wonderful source of warm emotions; that’s what their world is mostly about. Any factual statement needs to be triple checked (without telling them about it), though.
Note that I am not dismissing friendship with normies here. Warm emotions are important. And so is domain expertise, because I can’t always go and ask a fellow rationalist about some obscure detail (also, nerds are prone to overconfidence at domains they lack expertise in; no, you can’t replace tons of data with mere high IQ). But trying to bring normies on your travel at exploring the real world is an exercise in frustration.