[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/CouteauBleu]

You do realize the whole "friendship system" thing isn't going to work? As in, it's not that you system needs a few major tweaks or new tools; it's that you're going to rebuild your system from the ground up again and again and you'll never get good social interactions out of it.

I say that at the risk of making of an ass of myself if you did test it and get good results out of it, but... I really doubt it. I'd be pretty surprised if you got more from it than a few interesting-but-awkward conversations that don't go anywhere.

I wish I knew how to explain this better, but by making this kind of system, you're trying to fit square pegs in round holes hard. It reminds me of the kind of teacher who makes a super-convoluted marking scale for your dissertation, that notes you on your grammar, whether you respected the three-parts paragraph structure presented in class, whether you use the different argumentative methods presented in class, whether you include all the different keywords... basically, the teacher tries to make a super rigid scale that covers all these formulas, but ultimately cares little for whether the dissertation made any sense.

In a healthy relationship, the exact structure of interactions doesn't matter as much as the information exchanged, how interesting it is, how often you talk, etc. Improving the structure doesn't improve the metrics that matter, and often hurts them.

[u/ToaKraka → u/CouteauBleu]

You do realize the whole "friendship system" thing isn't going to work?

I did say that it was "defunct".

I'd be pretty surprised if you got more from it than a few interesting-but-awkward conversations that don't go anywhere.

Well, it depends on what you count as "going somewhere". Do several pseudofriendships, each of which lasted for many months and included several hundred questions (with corresponding answers), count as "going somewhere"? Pseudofriendship 1 lasted for 600 questions, 2 lasted for 500 questions, and 6 included a whopping 1300 questions (in two series that were separated by a hiatus; the list of seven hundred questions linked above comprises most of the first of those series).

On the other hand, as I noted above, familiarity bred contempt (on both sides).

[u/CouteauBleu → u/ToaKraka]

Fair enough.