<story><title>Talking to strangers can make us smarter?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221026-why-talking-to-strangers-can-make-us-happier</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>I loved the understated humour of:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;quot;Some social scientists believe teaching kids that literally
   everyone in the world they hadn&amp;#x27;t met is dangerous may have been
   actively harmful.&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Harms take many guises. Mutual distrust drives people to mediate and
avoid others through technology as a psychological shield.&lt;p&gt;That breeds bad technology which divides and dehumanises, and feeds the
loop.&lt;p&gt;Here on HN some people have argued for using cashless and automatic
systems, not because they are &amp;quot;more efficient&amp;quot; but as a way to avoid
smalltalk with a cashier or waiter. Having a map&amp;#x2F;GPS smartphone is
handy, but it stops casual interaction for directions or local advice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>polio</author><text>I enjoy thinking of trust as a social technology. We&amp;#x27;ve seen how ridiculous a trustless transaction system would look with Bitcoin having to validate things to a ridiculous extent. Similarly, a society that distrusts wastes a lot of time and energy doing things by themselves, which is inefficient in the best case and leads down harmful and delusional avenues in the worst. We should be engineering our cities and communities with the intention of creating surface area for trust to emerge (e.g. public transit where we can just coexist in the same space), rather than mandating that trust ought to occur, since that isn&amp;#x27;t how brains work. Give strangers the opportunity to see that others are not so bad. We all prosper, economically and spiritually.</text></comment>
<story><title>Talking to strangers can make us smarter?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221026-why-talking-to-strangers-can-make-us-happier</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>I loved the understated humour of:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;quot;Some social scientists believe teaching kids that literally
   everyone in the world they hadn&amp;#x27;t met is dangerous may have been
   actively harmful.&amp;quot;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Harms take many guises. Mutual distrust drives people to mediate and
avoid others through technology as a psychological shield.&lt;p&gt;That breeds bad technology which divides and dehumanises, and feeds the
loop.&lt;p&gt;Here on HN some people have argued for using cashless and automatic
systems, not because they are &amp;quot;more efficient&amp;quot; but as a way to avoid
smalltalk with a cashier or waiter. Having a map&amp;#x2F;GPS smartphone is
handy, but it stops casual interaction for directions or local advice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nixpulvis</author><text>Yes!&lt;p&gt;I think people are so afraid to be wrong or give bad advice since it&amp;#x27;s all to easy to be disproven (you said the street was X but it&amp;#x27;s actually Y, never-mind the fact that X runs parallel to Y and is just one block away) that they would rather remain silent. We used to learn better by being OK to be slightly wrong, then taking no offense when offered a gentle correction.</text></comment>