In RPGs, when I have my core team, I really like trying to level up all my characters evenly. If I gain a new character at a lower level, but she has a skillset or affinity that complements the rest of my team, I'll invest in leveling her up a bit so she can move around the map with a little less worry about enemy attacks. And if I have a character that's at a super high level to begin with, I avoid putting them into combat with weaker enemies, because they'll just hog experience points that will benefit my low- and mid-level fighters more.
Of course you also have to not get your characters killed. So social leveling means giving people challenges hard enough to make them stronger, but not so hard that they're traumatized. One more metaphor: when you're working out, you want all your muscles to be about equally strong; and you want to push them enough to make them stronger, but not enough to damage them.
Taking a step back, even if we perfectly understand the skills that each individual needs for a social organism to be healthy, we're still talking about really hard skills. I mean, I've aced college-level math classes, I've written a novel, I've fixed up a house, I'm more than 50 years old, and I still have no clear sense of where the line is between a social rubber ball and a social brick. In some future utopia, either kids are going to need years of formal training in this stuff, or the culture needs to still run smoothly if our skills are second-rate.
People are more playful when status matters less and meaner when it matters more.
My friend recently wrote a play about male body issues and, after a reading of it, the men got into a discussion about how when guys are one-on-one, we can be vulnerable. When guys are in a group -- at least, American guys my age -- there's an invisible social pressure to assert dominance, which is usually done through being verbally mean. Ragging on each other. In the best guy groups, the meanness is matched with playfulness. You might say something superficially mean, but there's affection underneath. Once you leave your group, though, or the dynamic changes because of a new member or woman, there's less guarantee of playfulness.
I think the playfulness comes from trust, but there's also a way in which trust is built through tests of superficial meanness. If the superficial meanness gets answered with real meanness, then there's no trust and just more meanness. But if the superficial meanness gets answered with more superficial meanness -- that is, if you signal that you can handle rough play -- then you get more rough play. And the playfulness leads, sometimes, to real moments of vulnerability with each other.
Loosely related, a blog post about psychological health in the software industry, Habits of High-Functioning Teams.
]]>N,N-dimethyltryptamine-occasioned entity encounter experiences have many similarities to non-drug entity encounter experiences such as those described in religious, alien abduction, and near-death contexts. Aspects of the experience and its interpretation produced profound and enduring ontological changes in worldview.
The comment thread on that article in the Psychonaut subreddit, with some interesting stuff about possession by spirits.
And a nice thread about tripping with pets. The animals are not tripping, although I do remember a post by a guy whose dog accidentally ate some LSD, and seemed to become permanently smarter.
We have homo sapiens, the people who know, which somehow became homo sapiens sapiens, the people who know they know. Maybe someday we'll reach homo sapiens sans sapiens, the people who know they don't know.
And some music. This week I've become obsessed with two songs from the 2019 album Signal by Automatic, a Los Angeles band with no guitars, only drums, bass, and keyboard. The songs are Humanoid and Strange Conversations.
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