2026-05-10
Isolation, and curiosity about people
Disclaimer
- Sleepy as fuck. Waiting for my third back-to-back flight, haven't slept since yesterday (2026-05-09) morning
Main
- Isolation will help me test whether a) talking to people is hurting me or b) my projections and stuff in my head are hurting me, even if people aren't around
- Curiosity about people
- A clear lesson I've gotten from the russia trip is that my curiosity in talking to Indians is completely dead. And I am not sure why that is? Like, I very quickly jump to surface-level impressions like "when the chips are down these people will eat each other." And sure, it is true many people don't trust each other, so what? There is still incredibly vast amounts of variation among people, just not along the few narrow dimensions that I am curious about.
- Honestly this whole issue of curiosity about people versus not, is a very long standing issue for me since atleast 2022.
- I realised I could lowkey fake curiosity with people back in college, and sometimes that actually does lead to connections and actual new info that makes me curious. Fake-it-until-you-make-it. I should probably review my notes from then.
- And then while travelling I realised I could do this with people across cultures and across socioeconomic classes, it was actually a little bit nuts. I should review more of my notes from back then too.
- But now that I'm working on ASI risk, my curiosity has gone back to being dead, my empathy for people has clearly reduced, I again feel like "fuck these people."
- I am confused what separates me from everyone else.
- In my head, all that separates me is a bunch of knowledge and experiences, and you can get 80% of the way there from youtube alone.
- I can take a class 10 student and bring them up to my current educational level (including various world models not taught in conventional education) in a very small amount of time, if they were determined to learn.
- As for experiences, yes some aspects of travel experience or work experience are hard to replicate. But again, you can get 80% of the value of travel by say, video calls with people of other countries online, there just needs to be a good shared context (TO DO - look into this maybe?). You can get work experience too in like 6-12 months, it's not like I have some huge amount of work experience either.
- A major thing that separates me is just willingness to be extremely independent, emotionally, and not give a singular fuck what people around me want out of me. This is something that is rare about me, if I compare myself to many others I have met from many other cultures.
- I wish I could replicate myself. I would be less lonely in a world of my clones.
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