Deliberate Socializing And The Information Ecosystem

A recent realization: you have to deliberately seek out friends and strangers to talk to, ideally offline, and ideally in deep conversation. The more people you interact with and exchange ideas with, the better; the more varied the topics, the better. The ideal cadence is at least one deep conversation with a friend or a stranger every week.

The reason I think so is this: by meeting and talking with all kinds of different people, you gain a more multidimensional and timely understanding of your immediate environment and of society at large. You develop sharper insight into who is doing what, what you should be doing, what you should not be doing, and what trade-offs you need to make. You become more sensitive and responsive to changes around you. Other people’s perspectives collide with yours and produce new sparks. Sometimes, slowing down and engaging more with others is far more important than speeding up and blindly focusing on yourself. This isn’t to say “don’t focus on yourself” — it’s saying that through extensive contact with the outside world you figure out what to focus on, what not to focus on, how to choose, how to judge, how to make trade-offs. That kind of context can only be obtained through sustained exchange with other people. Most of it is highly time-sensitive and pluralistic, while AI’s world knowledge is both limited in capability and lagging in timeliness; even search engines are bounded. Without enough timely, plural context, a startup misreads or misjudges market demand and gets eliminated; a researcher chooses a wrong direction and develops the wrong research taste; an individual makes life choices that are blind and conformist, with no sense of what they actually want; and a person’s value system becomes vulnerable to the one-sided echo chambers of an information cocoon.

Moreover, when you have deep conversations, exchanges, or collaborations with many, many different people, you discover all kinds of inadequacies and blind spots in yourself: in how you communicate, in how you manage teams, in your views on certain things, in how you handle situations. Cognition comes from practice. This is also a continuous process of self-reflection and growth.

For example, when introducing my work to others, I came to realize that I had been over-relying on documents and source code as my mode of presentation, when what people actually appreciate more is a clean, concise slide deck and a well-paced explanation. Many top operators do exactly that. It took a lot of practice and dialogue, plus feedback from others, before I noticed and reflected on this. Or another example: only when I actually met people of certain specific profiles and talked with them did I come to understand what their lives are like, what kind of life I want, what I actually want. These insights are felt firsthand through conversation — they are other people’s lived experience. My own lived environment is finite; other people’s lived experiences are practically infinite.

In a sense, other people’s thoughts are their context, and if I can know more people’s contexts, I can see this world more clearly, predict it more accurately, and make better choices.

I was deeply saddened to see the news that Mr. Zhang Xuefeng passed away. I noticed comments on social media saying he passed because his information channels were too closed off — no one warned him in time, and he didn’t proactively talk to others about this kind of information. I think if Mr. Zhang had had people around him with whom he could have exchanged more about physical health, or if he himself had proactively talked to others about his health, he wouldn’t have continued doing high-intensity running while already aware of a history of palpitations. May Mr. Zhang rest in peace.

Without enough real-world samples, decision-making is just blind guessing. Shift socializing from a “resource mindset” to an “ecosystem mindset” — not in order to swap business cards, but in order to construct an information ecosystem that lets you continuously perceive the real texture of the world.

I haven’t been deliberate about pursuing wider and deeper exchanges and collaborations in the past. There is genuinely a lot of interesting tech and a lot of interesting points in this space. I hope to correct this going forward.