Comment by niam
20 hours ago
If the limit of someone's behavior winds up making everyone happier-off, I don't understand why I ought to care. In that sense, calling it "manipulative" seems either inappropriate or not very useful.
At least with something like adultery, there's a pretty obvious ill consequence of someone finding out what's going on behind the scenes. But if I looked behind the curtains of someone like OP and found out that the reason they're so charming is because they thought about people a bunch: I couldn't be burdened to care.
> If the limit of someone's behavior winds up making everyone happier-off, I don't understand why I ought to care.
I guess I don’t believe this behavior actually leaves the targets better off.
Doing a lot of experiments where you feign connections and openness with other people is going to leave a lot of the targets feeling unhappy when they realize they were tricked into opening up to someone who was just using them as a target for their experiments.
Take, for example, the section of the post where he talks about getting someone to open up into “cathartic sobbing” but displays zero interest in the person’s problems, only wonder about how he managed to trigger that through yet another technique.
My takeaway was distinctly different about the net effects of these social connection experiments. It was fine in the context of waiting tables where everyone knows the interaction is temporary and transactional, but the parts where it expanded into mind-reading people’s weaknesses and insecurities and then leveraging that into “connections” that he later laments not actually wanting.
The assumption is that it’s feigned. Frankly you do not develop these skills to this degree if you are inauthentic.
Even the “zen openness” bit is mimicry of people whose vibe they liked, and they were surprised by the results.