To be honest, I downplayed much of my situation in my post. After all, it is my first post. I have contributed nothing to this community so far. I feel it’s irresponsible and sort of entitled to hose people down with the full weight of my very negative and emotionally draining circumstances as an introductory post. It’s not charming. I kept thinking, while writing this post, “do I really want this to be the first thing I say to these people?” I respect this community more than any other one and understand that it can only absorb so many posts that essentially “take” (or seek to take) more than they offer before the quality standards that set LW apart begin to suffer. I feel a sense of duty to be an interesting conversationalist and add value here, and I hate to be tiresome.
I posted anyway for a couple reasons. For one thing, I have read LW for years. It nourishes something in me that I don’t get anywhere else in my life—the inquisitive, slow-thinking, human-oriented, analytical, diplomatic part of me that I am constantly forced by my life circumstances to suppress in view of the fact that these qualities are considered unfortunate in the world I inhabit.
In other words, I feel very strongly that I “belong” here and can therefore justify asking the community to afford me the luxury of venting and soliciting its assistance without tweaking people’s noses too much. I feel like I can signal in-group membership and long-standing familiarity with LW strongly enough to justify doing this, because it really is my respect for this community’s collective excellence that sets it apart for me as the ideal place to seek advice and insight.
I also figure this could be useful to someone else at some point, so it may also pull its weight in that sense.
But yes, you’re right. There’s more to my circumstances. Of course there is. They’re much worse than I can justify disclosing.
Reaching out to startups on sites like ycombinator is a great idea. It never occurred to me to market to them. Thank you for suggesting it. Your consideration means a lot to me.
I hear you, describing how weird social norms in the world can be. I hear you describing how you followed those norms to show consideration for readers by dressing up a very terrible situation as a slightly less bad one. In social settings where people both know who you are and are compelled by the circumstances to listen to what you say, that’s still the right way to go about it.
The rudeness of taking peoples’ time is very real in person, where a listener is socially “forced” to invest time in listening or effort in escaping the conversation. But posts online are different: especially when you lack the social capital of “this post is by someone I know I often like reading, so I should read it to see what they say”, readers should feel no obligation to read your whole post, nor to reply, if they don’t want to. When you’re brand new to a community, readers can easily dismiss your post as a bot or scammer and simply ignore it, so you have done them no harm in the way that consuming someone’s time in person harms them. A few trolls may choose to read your post and then pretend you forced them to do so, but anyone who behaves like that is inherently outing themself as someone whose opinions about you don’t deserve much regard. (and then you get some randos who like how you write and decide to be micro-penpals… hi there!)
However, there’s another option for how to approach this kind of thing online. You can spin up an anonymous throwaway and play the “asking for a friend” game—take the option of direct help or directly contacting the “actual person” off the table, and you’ve ruled out being a gofundme scam. Sometimes asking on behalf of a fictional person whose circumstances happen to be more like the specifics of your own than you would disclose in public gets far better answers.
For instance, if the fictional person had a car problem involving a specific model year of vehicle and a specific insurance company, the internet may point out that there’s a recall on some part of that particular car and you have the manufacturer as a recourse, or they may offer a specific number that gets you a customer complaint line that’s actually responsive at the insurance company. If the fictional person had a highly specific medical condition, there may be a new treatment with studies that you have to know to ask to get into, and the internet may be able to offer that information.
At this point, I don’t think it would be wise for someone in your situation to do a throwaway account on lesswrong in particular. However, I would seriously consider using several separate throwaways and asking about various facets of the details on the relevant subreddits. Reddit will get you a lot of chaff in the replies, but if you’re sifting the internet for novel ideas, it’s also a good way to query the hivemind for kernels of utility as well.
All that is to say, part of your search for insight and ideas should probably involve carving up the aspects of the situation that you cannot justify sharing here into pieces that you can justify sharing elsewhere, and pursue those lines of inquiry. Those topics contain potential insight that cannot be found under the circumstances you’ve created here, and that’s ok—I just want to make sure not to endorse leaving them un-explored.
To be honest, I downplayed much of my situation in my post. After all, it is my first post. I have contributed nothing to this community so far. I feel it’s irresponsible and sort of entitled to hose people down with the full weight of my very negative and emotionally draining circumstances as an introductory post. It’s not charming. I kept thinking, while writing this post, “do I really want this to be the first thing I say to these people?” I respect this community more than any other one and understand that it can only absorb so many posts that essentially “take” (or seek to take) more than they offer before the quality standards that set LW apart begin to suffer. I feel a sense of duty to be an interesting conversationalist and add value here, and I hate to be tiresome.
I posted anyway for a couple reasons. For one thing, I have read LW for years. It nourishes something in me that I don’t get anywhere else in my life—the inquisitive, slow-thinking, human-oriented, analytical, diplomatic part of me that I am constantly forced by my life circumstances to suppress in view of the fact that these qualities are considered unfortunate in the world I inhabit.
In other words, I feel very strongly that I “belong” here and can therefore justify asking the community to afford me the luxury of venting and soliciting its assistance without tweaking people’s noses too much. I feel like I can signal in-group membership and long-standing familiarity with LW strongly enough to justify doing this, because it really is my respect for this community’s collective excellence that sets it apart for me as the ideal place to seek advice and insight.
I also figure this could be useful to someone else at some point, so it may also pull its weight in that sense.
But yes, you’re right. There’s more to my circumstances. Of course there is. They’re much worse than I can justify disclosing.
Reaching out to startups on sites like ycombinator is a great idea. It never occurred to me to market to them. Thank you for suggesting it. Your consideration means a lot to me.
I hear you, describing how weird social norms in the world can be. I hear you describing how you followed those norms to show consideration for readers by dressing up a very terrible situation as a slightly less bad one. In social settings where people both know who you are and are compelled by the circumstances to listen to what you say, that’s still the right way to go about it.
The rudeness of taking peoples’ time is very real in person, where a listener is socially “forced” to invest time in listening or effort in escaping the conversation. But posts online are different: especially when you lack the social capital of “this post is by someone I know I often like reading, so I should read it to see what they say”, readers should feel no obligation to read your whole post, nor to reply, if they don’t want to. When you’re brand new to a community, readers can easily dismiss your post as a bot or scammer and simply ignore it, so you have done them no harm in the way that consuming someone’s time in person harms them. A few trolls may choose to read your post and then pretend you forced them to do so, but anyone who behaves like that is inherently outing themself as someone whose opinions about you don’t deserve much regard. (and then you get some randos who like how you write and decide to be micro-penpals… hi there!)
However, there’s another option for how to approach this kind of thing online. You can spin up an anonymous throwaway and play the “asking for a friend” game—take the option of direct help or directly contacting the “actual person” off the table, and you’ve ruled out being a gofundme scam. Sometimes asking on behalf of a fictional person whose circumstances happen to be more like the specifics of your own than you would disclose in public gets far better answers.
For instance, if the fictional person had a car problem involving a specific model year of vehicle and a specific insurance company, the internet may point out that there’s a recall on some part of that particular car and you have the manufacturer as a recourse, or they may offer a specific number that gets you a customer complaint line that’s actually responsive at the insurance company. If the fictional person had a highly specific medical condition, there may be a new treatment with studies that you have to know to ask to get into, and the internet may be able to offer that information.
At this point, I don’t think it would be wise for someone in your situation to do a throwaway account on lesswrong in particular. However, I would seriously consider using several separate throwaways and asking about various facets of the details on the relevant subreddits. Reddit will get you a lot of chaff in the replies, but if you’re sifting the internet for novel ideas, it’s also a good way to query the hivemind for kernels of utility as well.
All that is to say, part of your search for insight and ideas should probably involve carving up the aspects of the situation that you cannot justify sharing here into pieces that you can justify sharing elsewhere, and pursue those lines of inquiry. Those topics contain potential insight that cannot be found under the circumstances you’ve created here, and that’s ok—I just want to make sure not to endorse leaving them un-explored.