Poor Perception of Friendship Ties Limits the Ability to Promote Change (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Poor Perception of Friendship Ties Limits the Ability to Promote Change (2016)

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It kinda makes sense that more people would think their friends like them more than they like their friends. People are popular because they make their friends feel liked. So there’s some economy of scale to being popular that the receiving friends don’t notice. It might even be a genuine friendship, but ultimately someone with 5 friends is gonna place greater weight on them than someone with 50 friends, and just by numbers the person with 50 friends will be on the other side of the 5 friends more times than the person with 5 friends will be the friend of someone else with 5 friends.

The friendship paradox, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

When in doubt as to whether to refer to someone as a "friend" or as a "colleague", I normally ask myself "how many meals have we shared?"

I wonder if “non-work meals” is a better measure?

There were years where I had far more lunches with colleagues than dinners with non-work friends. Many of those frequent lunch compatriots were clearly just colleagues.

My measurement is "would I accept/tolerate to host them for months if they’d lose their home" and vice-versa.

(It’s not would I do it because I think that I would it for more people that I know than just my friends just by empathy, but more if it would bother me)

Wow I really like this model. Maybe months is a bit extreme, I wouldn’t even tolerate my brothers living with me for months. But that’s more about me feeling obligated to host, than them being annoying.

So if I set aside my feeling of obligation, just considering who would I not mind running into at all hours of the day, and who would I not mind feeling a bit more exposed to… Living with people tends to create compromising situations that the workplace does not.

I can honestly think of a couple folks this would work with, which makes me feel incredibly lucky.

Note that this may be a better model of friendship, but according to TFA we ought to be looking for a measure which is symmetric: if we ask X if Y is their friend, we'd like to get the same answer as if we ask Y about X.

With that desideratum in mind, any measure proportional to "[non-work-related] hours spent voluntarily together" is relatively symmetric.

Yeah, months just sounds extreme.

To me, it would be "host them for a weekend" or something. Even that narrows the circle of people I know considerably.

The title is a garden path sentence. It took me a while to figure out it's not about perception which ties limits to something.

Agreed. Maybe better: ‘Poor Perception of Friendship Inhibits the Ability to Promote Behavioral Change’.

title character limit

“Persuasion is at the core of norm creation”

Nope. Norms, or ‘social facts,’ are primarily a function of the culture within which one is raised. Persuasion has nothing to do with it - children have no previous positions to alter. And very rarely do people with widely diverging viewpoints make good friends.

More social science study nonsense that somebody had to write to justify their social science grad degree.

Zoomed out, you are correct.

If you zoom in a little, every group of people has its own morés, from peer organizational groups at work to a group of 5 friends going on a hike together. Norms within these groups can be dynamic, but it takes some compelling or otherwise persuasive force.

Norms change as they are imposed on a culture by outside authorities. Peer "persuasion" is more like eventually-accepted commiseration.

Perhaps by "norm creation" they're referring to the emergence of new norms rather than the persistence of existing ones.

This is contradicted by reality. If it was true, it would be impossible for norms to change. Norms have changed throughout history. Therefore it cannot be true.

Norms change only due to availability of technology.

Are you trying to persuade us with this comment?

that's a gotcha. analyzing norms is a matter of fact, and not itself normative. I happen to disagree, otherwise e.g. education wouldn't cause people to be more liberal.

Culture creation and change is persuasion. Parents persuading eachother. Friends persuading parents.

Views don't have to be hugely different for influence. If you think church members or school children don't influence each other, you are crazy

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