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personality

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Music

When I was in the college dorms from 2003 to 2007, students could freely exchange music between their libraries: I’ve ended up with over 20,000 songs this way, over 2 straight months of music. Running low on hard drive space, I recently took a closer look at my music library. I’ve listened to 7,033 of those songs. The most number of plays on a single track is 3572—that is the pink noise loop from SimplyNoise I used to block ambient noise when I was in school and studying in noisy public spaces. Anyhow, in college I grabbed entire discographies from artists just because I thought I should like them. The Who. Bob Dylan. 146 Bob Marley tracks.

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Conversational Pathology

Here’s a problem I have: I fear disagreement. Just in the past month, I finally realized how desperately I try to center all my conversations around agreement. Think back to any conversation I’ve had with you — I was subconsciously aiming at agreement. Then, there are times when I consciously aim at agreement: I’ll make a semi-strong statement, and the person with whom I’m speaking will disagree. Inevitably, I’ll do a series of linguistic backflips and contortions to align our just-stated viewpoints.

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Facebook

“Facebook [brings out] our weakest traits as humans. We love to think of ourselves as something we want to be. We trade our true feelings to be included. We want to be popular. We want our taste in music and art to be [valued]. We crave for external success.”
kunjaan

MeFi: Ask & Guess

This is part of a extremely popular, insightful MetaFilter comment by a wise fellow about two different kinds of people:

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

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Oatmeal

I believe that oatmeal consumption and an interesting personality are not mutually exclusive. Good news for my oatmeal habit.

Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Myers-Briggs Personality Test - Not exhaustive or complete, but still good. Tailored to programmers, it is still useful for the general population.

How to Go From Introvert to Extrovert

How to Go From Introvert to Extrovert - “Often I find myself attending social events where I’m the youngest person in the room, but that feels very comfortable and normal for me. Don’t be afraid to stretch beyond the most obvious peer group and hang out with people from different ages, neighborhoods, cultures, countries, etc. You might find the variety to be a lot of fun.”