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

May 19
one thing many anti-marriage men dont understand about marriage is that yes you are giving one woman vast power over your life.

but you are also reducing to ~0 the amount of power that most non-kin women have over you

with a good woman, this is an exceptional trade
"im a beautiful woman" if you are not my wife i cannot be made to care about that
it's like this

the five canonical substitutes for charm are
* wealth
* fame
* power
* physical beauty, and
* sexual availability

for straight men interacting with women, marriage nullifies the fourth lever and actually inverts the value of the last
Read 4 tweets
May 18
AI is not currently good enough to cause me to lose my job but i expect ive got maybe a year to figure out how to move up several abstraction layers some of which may not even exist yet

this is going to get weird because idk how people starting careers will even begin
my intuition is that having a model of how a function--data, engineering, product, whatever--functions is important to capably automating that function

people who have been operating in those functions for years seem as though they'd have an overwhelming advantage in this
but of course to the extent agents hollow out these functions and displace human labor its hard to imagine firm structures remaining as they exist, designed for human operations

so this probably gets me another year or two max, if i'm working in tech proper
Read 6 tweets
Mar 27
this was an insane moment in american politics and i want to revisit it

a hospital in gaza was reported by the entire american press corps as having been destroyed by an israeli airstrike with 500 killed

i was on stimulants monitoring the situation in realtime Image
the biden administration, which i assume had access to people who know at least as much about missiles as i do, equivocated about whether or not they believed the israeli explanation that the strike was a failed hamas rocket
in the wee hours of the morning local time, i and others started to notice that there was no actual video of the damage or the "500 killed"

curious
Read 6 tweets
Mar 10
its fairly crazy to be in a country at war where domestic media are running propaganda operations for the other side

obviously they can print what they like and i sure didnt enjoy the rah-rah of the early GWOT either but nevertheless. sheesh Image
the piece itself, notably, is not just houston chronicle tier writing — its AI generated

the journalists report that economic pain is "multiplying exponentially"

heads up @Phil_Mattingly @ZcohenCNN some asshole slapped your byline on this Image
@Phil_Mattingly @ZcohenCNN ". . . sooner than we can remove the capabilities we want to move"

which is it? moving or removing?

"the latter has the capability the deploy"

its gotten so bad CNN had to lay off their copyeditors and i guess they didnt bother replacing THOSE with LLMs Image
Read 9 tweets
Jan 17
a major lesson of the awokening for me was that a significant number of people on the left hate me and would prefer i not exist and a majority of the country is willing to go along with policies operating toward that end

this was probably an infohazard
i call it an infohazard because there's really not anything i can do with this information but it leaves me anxious about the future, and experiencing to varying degrees contempt or outright hatred toward people about whom i had previously felt positively
when i look at the political landscape i see two factions wholly unworthy of the inheritance bequeathed to us by our ancestors

the important difference between them is that one is directed by people who would prefer i be erased
Read 4 tweets

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