eigenrobot Profile picture
Oct 22, 2019 17 tweets 3 min read Read on X
eigenrobots theory and practice of complimenting people!!!!

a thread, inspired by a lovely metacompliment
part one: how to give compliment's

1. notice something you like in someone else

2. tell them you like it
this is perhaps harder than you might think. both steps require Art
noticing something you like in someone else may be harder for some people than others.

my suspicion is that complimenting may be difficult for misanthropists, for example, if they are not inclined to notice beauty in their fellow man; or for those who react with fear to social
fortunately this is a skill that may be consciously trained

for example

make a list of ten people in your life

go down that list and for each think of something about them that is laudatory

it doesnt need to be a big thing--often subtleties are better than prominent traits
eventually, you can learn to see Good in others reflexively

beyond embiggening ones Charm, this is an important trait to develop for living a happy life

(naturally it should be tempered with Prudence but the impulse ought to be there)
suppose you have noticed something you like about someone. How do you tell them?

"I like it that you X" is a good start! And it will quite generally be well-received. You don't need to go past this.
being really masterful in delivery is harder. here is the pith of it.

people live in their own stories. a deeply-felt compliment will be one that lets them tell a better story about themselves.
to do this thoroughly--and I'm not sure it can be done entirely consciously--one must have some intuition about another's story; show their intuition; and guide the complimentee to the new story

this is a necessarily intimate exercise
(delivering a mortal insult is a left-hand path mirror of this but is almost always despicable and if done without Charity and Grace corrodes the insulter more than the insulted)
Some pitfalls.

Do not lie when you deliver a compliment. This is harder than an honest compliment, for one thing, as it is difficult to tell a story around a kernel of falsehood. It also may deceive the complimented and deprive them of a chance to live a better, truer story.
Relatedly, don't give empty compliment. It's important to _perceive_ something good and true, and share that story. Grasping at unheartfelt tropes will ring hollow and never stick, and over time people will notice and devalue such statements.
Flattery is fine as long as it is _true_ but you must have a very deft delivery or you will read as fulsome and the recipient will be flustered or put off. Flatter rarely and well and honestly.
Closing thoughts.

People need to be seen and need to be loved (there may not be a difference).

Giving someone a compliment shows that you perceive them, perhaps better than they do themselves.

Compliments ennoble the giver and recipient alike.

Be excellent to each other. ❤️
appending this lovely real life example

ps dont forget to send thank you cards after Christmas
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More from @eigenrobot

Aug 26
fyi trump ppl

the reason that nerds are unhappy about trump firing federal reserve people isnt because they particularly like those specific people

issue is that it makes the fed look beholden to the executive and this is a very bad outcome for economic stability
the fed hasnt covered itself in glory lately for sure but the counterfactual where its progressively and openly politicized is pretty much just a world of hyperinflation and impoverishment because thats a side effect of how unstable governments use politicized central banks
i think a steelman for "end the fed" is that we've left this absurdly powerful yet nigh defenseless institution sitting in plain sight like a loaded gun during a period of immensely high trust and as that period comes to a close someone is gonna make a first grab at the pistol
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Aug 24
ok finally discovered a kind of lore i want to know about in a non clickbait way:

what one-shotted you?

eg for me it was 90s movies about how having a career and a house in the burbs is the worst thing that can ever happen to someone

i didn't realize i'd been Had until my 30s
everyone will give boomers and millennials shit about the social justice and narcissism, and rightly so. but the motherfuckers who tricked me into nearly ruining my life are genx
for those of you not familiar getting one shotted is getting wrecked on first contact with something. classic deployment attached Image
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Aug 22
"everyone is the same and nations are fake" is the core dogma of the mid-late 20C liberalism that grew out of the war era. in the years since it's become a mostly-unstated and broadly-unassailable assumption of imperial policy

regrettably it is also disastrously incorrect Image
the history of this idea is worth studying. you can see the modern notion start to emerge in the progressive era and out of socialist thought, and gain some traction with (eg) the league of nations

ideologues might say that league failed bc it wasn't REAL world government
among socialism-inclined intellectuals, which is to say nearly all intellectuals until molotov-ribbentrop broke some out of their reveries, ww1 was understood to be a failure _caused by_ national identity Image
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Aug 22
the leftist compulsion to degrade national identity in democratic countries will be the undoing of their welfare state plank, because it turns out when you remove the nation people just default to narrower identities and don't care to pay for the outgroup's well-being
you can get support for fargroups in time limited cases. there's a long history of (eg) american assistance for people on the other side of the world in disaster recovery

but duration breeds resentment, and organized charity is very hard to maintain with this sentiment
when you're talking about an outgroup for whom that resentment is ingrained and continuously salient, forget it

"multiculturalism" kills welfare states in the long run

amusingly this was one reason some of the more libertarian neoliberals supported open borders Image
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Aug 18
i was disappointed that liberals did nothing in the face of the awokening. but that can at least be explained as cowardess

what's worse is that the awokening is over, they're not taking the fact that the awokening occurred as a serious problem to be guarded against going forward
one is left with the impression that either they are fine with everything that happened or they learned absolutely nothing from the experience. both of these possibilities seem disqualifying

what is the point of liberals who can't be bothered to care for liberty, one wonders
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Aug 17
turns out she died of a heart attack and had leukemia, which yes generally causes malnutrition

the information environment is just completely fucked, but its embarrassing how hard media specifically throat hamas every day Image
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ive definitely become more racist against journalists since this conflict which i hadn't even realized was possible

nyt running "israel blows up hospital with missile killing hundreds" after a hamas rocket misfired and burned up in a parking lot broke me
anyway you know this isnt coming from some kind of place of semitic partiality because i happen to favor nuking nyc
Read 4 tweets

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