Eh, soak your head, and stop quoting whole posts. I started this thread because of all the rather wonderful varieties of weirdness among people I know–but from a practical perspective, listing individual weirdnesses in a thread would be something between gossip and gawking, so I couldn’t do it, could I? I was left with the things that I’ve found to be broadly true.
Justin Credible, trust me, you’re really good at something. I’m not saying it’s marketable. Just that there’s something. Like (okay, now I’m dipping into stories about individuals) my friend who seems to know every single role that every single actor has ever played; or my friend who is a Boggle Goddess and once actually took a phone call in the middle of a three-minute round and still had more unique words than the rest of us put together. Or my very favorite friend, who is devastatingly quick on the uptake and who plays with words in a way that puts me, a Ph.D. in semantics, to shame. Or my old roommate, who was really not a very bright person at all, not interesting or witty or well-read and whose main topic of conversation was her cats… but who could take apart broken telephones and alarm clocks and things like that, and put them back together so they worked perfectly.
As someone who was on drugs (Paxil, specifically), I can tell you the drugs help it so you can see the real person, rather than the person who’s too scared to open her mouth or too depressed to interact with anyone.
Eh. The idea that a person on prescriptive drugs doesn’t have their “real” personality is ludicrous, anyway. If that’s the personality I interact with, then that’s who they are to me. The fact that they can sometimes be different is irrelevant.
And I’d by far prefer to interact with someone on prescriptive drugs that make them more socially capable, than with someone on recreational drugs – which tend to make them less socially capable.
I’ll offer LiveOnAPlane’s Rule of Inverse Intelligence:
The intelligence of a member of a given population is inversely proportional to the number of people who are members of that population.
Really, that is original research from yours truly.
For an example of how it works, take a highly-trained individula who got to his/her position in life by using a whole lot of brain, guts and determination…say, an engineer or maybe a physician. They are smart cookies, OK?
Situation #1–You and he, one on one. The given individual comes across as learned and pretty intelligent. Great. But, we’re dealing with a population of one.
Situation #2–Same individual, travelilng on an airplane. Member of a population of a few million. Now, said individual can not comprehend the diff between a.m. and p.m. and furthermore believes that the extreme weather conditions that caused the cancellation of his/her flight is 100% the fault of the poor gate agent.
And etc.
So, yeah, people are weird beyond imagining sometimes. But it basicall depends on the size of the population that they are a member of.
(generally. I can think of a few examples that were damn strange all ont heir own…)
I can’t agree with you there, all drugs are mood elevators of some sort. Just because one person gets theirs at the drug store and another gets theirs at the drug house doesn’t mean that they aren’t both a means to the same end, especially if you include alcohol as a recreational drug.
Actually I think you are pointing out the difference between intelligent and smart. In situation #1 you are discussing intelligence in a particular field. In situation #2 the same individual is exposing that they are not very smart. As in no common sense.
You might get a kick out of what my friends used to call Campbell’s law (named after my buddy that coined it) The masses are asses
Personally, I find it weird that someone would go through eHarmony!
And I am not an idiot-savant.
And there are 22 letters in the above sentence, but the most common letter “e” is not included. I like puppies. Look - there is something shiny in the corner!
There are no “perfectly normal ones”. Scratch the surface and you’ll find the wierdness. The ones clinging the most firmly to their normalness are sometimes the most deeply insane. They spend their lives trying to prove thier normalness because they’re deathly afraid of being NOT “normal” (whatever the hell that really means).
Like those Republican Legislators who push morals laws so hard. They keep catching these guys in morally compromising positions.
It’s “I don’t want to be the way I am inside. I’m afraid of being this way. Other people might not like me if they knew I was this. I am Ashamed. I am Afraid. I feel Guilty. So I have to live my life working hard not to be This Way, and one of the best ways to show that I’m not This Way is to publicly work against This Way.”
One of my hypothesese about Mental Illness is that a lot of it is based on the gulf between What Is and What We Want It To Be. Between what we think we need to be, or what others want us to be, and what we really are. Between the objective reality of the situation, and what we tell ourselves it is. Between Belief and Reality. It is that gulf that bends and deforms us, trying to bridge the gap and make things whole. Eventually, we can break, because we cannot reconcile the differences, we cannot integrate the contradictions.
The real solution is to recognize our desires and beliefs for what they are. Illusions. To surrender to the reality of the situation, no matter how afraid we are of what others think, or of what we might think ourselves.
I always hated the Buddhist idea that the World was an Illusion, because it clearly is not. Then one day I had an epiphany and realized that “the World” really is an illusion, because “The World” is only a concept and a belief in our heads. We decide that The World is a certain way and create beliefs, expectations and so forth based on that concept, which are often wrong. And yet we continue to cling to this Illusion of “The World”, believing it real, and deform ourselves trying to fit into it’s false molds.
I don’t think I am. I think I’ve changed, for the better. I’m now able to understand that a person with a fatal flaw can still be loveable; that just because a person believes differently than I doesn’t make them evil; etc. etc.
I was including alcohol, but thinking more of use to the point of “drunk”, rather than use as a social lubricant. If used in the latter way, booze is okey-dokey.
One I’ve noticed: people hold others to higher standards than themselves. E.g. I once dated a woman who told me never to lie to her. “Um, sure.” She said her ex- had lied to her and she hated it. “Got it.”
As time went by I realized how many times she’d lied to me. Nice.
I think if you want something in a person, you need to be able to deliver same yourself. I think a lot of people don’t understand that or hold themselves to it.
There are exceptions: you might not be artistic but value it in others. But if it’s something like honesty, you need to be willing to give as good as you get.
Well, I disagree that one can’t learn about people from books. It just takes a lot of book-reading of different kinds of books.
For myself, one thing I’ve learned from my psychology classes is that the vast majority of people fall prey to the fundamental attribution error. When dealing with others, people will attribute actions to internal states and fail to take the situation into account.
The experiment I recall from class dealt with subjects rating responders to a Communist text as identifying with Communist thought. Two groups were asked to comment on a Communist text. One group was forced to respond positively to the text, and another was given freedom of response. For those that responded positively by force or by choice, subjects rated both groups of people as having no significant difference in their level of true Communist sympathy.
To make up my own example, one goes out in the daytime and sees a heavily drunk person walking the streets. The first reaction for many would be to think “wow that person is an alcoholic.” This statement doesn’t give any room for context. Maybe the person just lost a loved one or got fired from work and is drunk to help cope. Maybe the person really is alcoholic, but that’s not the point. You don’t really know unless you know the person and the context.
I’ve never heard that one and I’d ask for a cite.
Of course, I also have to think of something else, which is kindasorta off-topic, but not especially so.
Several years ago a younger woman I’d worked with for a while met one of her friends at work to go to lunch. When they came back and the friend left, my co-worker started to go on about how fun and wonderful her friend was and what a good person she was and how much of a shame it was that she couldn’t find a man.
Now what I had seen was a 50-ish woman with badly dyed hair, odd clothing, a little overweight, and with really really bad Tammy Faye style makeup. “Thick and loud enough to scare small children” bad.
All I could think was that she was the female version of the overweight nerdy guy with the bad haircut, the bad clothing and the personal style that frightens women. In other words, it ain’t just un-date-able men out there. There are plenty of women who fall into the same trap. The difference is that a good woman can clean a man up and get him to change his style. Women won’t take that from men. (And here you women think YOU have self-image probems!)
Most men don’t get many responses to their emails because of the ratio and because men are more likely to make initial contact. Therefore many women who are at least okay looking and don’t have too many restrictions will get a fair amount of emails. Therefore a decent looking man with a decent profile has a lot of competition.
*For one, I have tried RSVP and match.com, and have found that i appeared that most of the users on those sites dont exits. I support this by showing that there seems to be many girls on the site, but when you send them emails, you don’t get a reply.
I can only think one of 3 things -
either they don’t exist, and are just “made up” profiles put there to make the site look bigger than it is.
they are scam users - users that have signed up for the sole purpose of scamming poor guys that are at their most vulnerable/lonely stage in their life.
sure, i found a couple of real women, but they all turned out to be either fruitcakes, or girls with unresolved issues with their ex’es.*
Australian blog: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/744310.html
All that said, trying to google it seems to indicate that the numbers are probably more balanced than I would have guessed. One site was 60/40 and another 40/60. How to get all that data together (to avoid counting people multiple times)—I don’t know if such stats are out there. Maybe I’m reading anecdotes from guys trying to make themselves feel better about why they weren’t chosen.