I think it's accurate in that the words are generally used in a sense of declaring people to be at the extreme ends of the spectrum, when probably under 1% of the population is really that far in either direction. Words like "shy" and "gregarious" are in my opinion more useful as the way they are used seems to describe a moderate tendency more than an absolute or extreme case.
Maybe OP doesn't agree, but they described themselves as an Introvert and then described enjoying an activity that a person meeting the strict definition of an Introvert would not enjoy.
Maybe, but have you ever met any actual people who would meet those definitions?
I don't think I've ever met or known anyone who I know to be extroverted by that definition. Though to be fair, maybe it would be hard to know because by definition such a person would be very difficult to get to know well enough to know that they're actually doing that. But then who are the people who actually know for sure that someone they know is behaving like that?
I like theory-crafting as much as the next possibly vaguely autistic Mottizan, but I've also gotten somewhat self-conscious about the tendency to build imaginary castles that aren't demonstrated to correspond to actual people or real-world situations.
I'm not sure if we've talked about this lately, but do we have any thoughts on what should be done with the Russia-Ukraine war at this point? Seems like as good a time as any to consider grand strategy, with Trump soon to take office in the US.
It's a little surprising that it's still going. It seems pretty clear to me at this point that Russia / Putin has no intention of stopping anytime soon. The sanctions regime that has been put in place seems to have caused them to return to self-sufficiency as much as it has hurt them. I'm doubtful that further attempts to sanction them harder will have any greater effect. The Ukrainians seem to have had impressive determination, especially during the first few months, but they don't seem to have the practical ability to eject the Russian troops, even with extremely generous donations of Western arms. I'm doubtful that's possible at all without large-scale Western intervention. There's also the possibility of allowing them to make more deep strikes into Russia with longer-ranged weapons, but I'm doubtful that anything along those lines can hit hard enough to either seriously disrupt their logistics or their will to fight, at least not without, or maybe even with, so many high-end western arms that it's basically obvious it's the US striking them directly, with all of the potential consequences that could entail.
From the perspective of an American, it's felt for a while like maybe it's time to wind down this conflict, or at least our involvement in it, as far as providing arms and assistance. Are we really accomplishing anything but getting more Ukrainians killed to little effect? And okay yeah, Russia is not our friend, but it's probably only to the United States' benefit to push them so far.
Does anyone have any different opinions? Does anyone see any realistic potential of forcing Russia back without a large-scale escalation that I'm doubtful Americans will accept? The European powers may be more determined to push Russia back, but do they have much practical ability without the US?
I know that that particular behavior (willingness to start conversations with very weakly connected people or total strangers) is very abnormal and most would consider it extroversion. However, most other people I know seem to be much further towards "extroversion" in other ways than I am, yet seem to me to be strangely unwilling to do that.
For example, most other people I know tend to have what I call more words than me. They seem to have much greater capability to extend conversations indefinitely, to just keep on talking and talking and talking. I was never very good at this. Usually any conversations I start tend to peter out fairly quickly unless the other person is actively interested in maintaining it and puts in effort towards that.
I also desire to spend substantial amounts of time basically quiet and alone, doing something like reading or watching movies and videos on the internet. Some other people I know seem to be much more active, constantly up and about doing things.
So then am I introverted or extroverted? How about all those other people I know with different combinations of traits? Beats me. That's why I find the whole thing not very useful, to the point of saying it basically doesn't exist, and might even be actively harmful in some cases. I think that what people normally think of as those traits are actually a cluster of dozens of personality characteristics that aren't necessarily related to each other at all, and several of them are closer to being skills that can be learned or moods and emotions that someone may feel more of or less of at any particular time for any number of reasons than fundamental traits that cannot be changed.
I cannot really know or claim to speak for what any particular person thinks and feels. But I do think that quite a few people who are self-proclaimed Introverts are actually just psyching themselves out. Perhaps when they were young, they did not yet know how to conduct themselves in social settings or had false beliefs about what other people were thinking of them. Perhaps they were convinced of an ideology that they were Introverts, that this was not a temporary feeling or mood or lack of a skill that can be learned, but instead made it part of their identity and chose to revel in it. What if it's not actually a fundamental unalterable trait? What if such a person decided to believe instead that they could learn how to socialize and how to at least sometimes get themselves into a mood to take pleasure from it? I say this not to condescend to you or any other particular person, but because it's exactly what I did myself.
Driving a car was initially pretty scary. But I learned to do it and got comfortable with it eventually. I certainly wasn't always any good at any sort of socialization. I'm far from perfect or any kind of expert at it even now, but I have managed to get somewhat better and more comfortable with it, at least sometimes.
I suspect that the whole Introvert/Extrovert thing basically doesn't exist. It seems to me that pretty much everyone wants to be social and around other people sometimes and quiet and alone at other times. There's some variation on exactly how much of each and at what intensity any person wants, but virtually nobody is at the extremes suggested by the Introvert/Extrovert framing.
There does seem to be more variation in desire to plan and organize events. Relatively few people seem to have the desire or inclination to create a plan, even a really simple and vague one like, let's all meet at a bar at roughly some particular time, and invite a bunch of people to it. But at least those relative few seem to be really into it, so it's good to have them around. Many others seem to be happy to show up to an event that somebody else organized, but have little interest in organizing things themselves.
Have we brought up yet the possible effect on Republicans of the lack of movement of the black vote by any reasonable means? If the conclusion is that blacks will vote Dem by >90% pretty much no matter what they do, possibly up to making them practically immune from prosecution and given unlimited money, then it naturally follows that their votes should be suppressed somehow rather than attempting to earn them.
I've got a Windows 10 desktop, a custom build. I'm still pretty happy with that. Microsoft hasn't done anything I find too obnoxious yet. My setup is apparently not compatible with Windows 11, which I'm not that enthusiastic about anyways. I legitimately have no idea what I'm going to do if Microsoft ever does truly EOL Windows 10. I'd probably have to buy mostly new hardware to get Win 11 compatibility, which I'm not very enthusiastic about, or try another full switchover to Linux, which I'm also not enthusiastic about.
I also have a moderately high-end Chromebook for a personal laptop. I'm quite happy with that right now. IMO, the Manifest V3 being terrible thing is mostly ridiculous ultra-nerd rage. I installed uBlock Origin Lite, and it's just fine. You have to enable "complete" filtering mode on a few sites for it to work properly, but that's no hassle. It has a few less features than "full", but I never used those anyways. My impression is that V3 is more about a legitimate desire to lock down more tightly what extensions can do, which is probably necessary considering how many extensions have gone abusive, rather than an evil plot by the big ad giant to shut down really good ad-blocking. Same thing as the old plain C extension interface IMO. Everyone wailed and moaned about how terrible it was when I think Chrome first went over to prioritizing Javascript-based extensions. But eventually everyone came around to the viewpoint that the C extensions system was a security and compatibility nightmare that could never be fixed, and it's not really a good idea to give extensions that much power anyways.
Anyways, enough of a rant on that. I've never seen issues like you're describing on my Chromebook. Might be because it's a higher-end model, I think like $600 or $700 or so. I do like my nice high-res screens. I don't know if the somewhat higher price kills your motivation entirely, but I think the low-end hardware might be more of what's behind your issues than the OS. You might get the same sort of issues at that price point no matter what OS you use. It's still cheaper than Apple hardware, and more capable too - mine has a touchscreen and a 360-rotation hinge so it can become like a big tablet. More storage space available makes the Linux environment work better too.
I do have an Apple laptop for work. It's okay I guess. Apple seems to want to lock you into their world a little too hard for my tastes though. It's mostly avoidable on MacOS devices, but I don't really see enough of an upside to pay the premium for their hardware.
Naturally along those lines, I'm not much into iOS devices, so I use Android phones, which I'm also mostly happy with. Well, I'd like to have better Adblock experience for mobile, but nothing much else does any better, and I never liked using the web on mobile that much anyways. I've played with the custom ROM stuff off and on, but I gave it up as IMO they're all too janky and unreliable. It's more important to me that my phone be as close to 100% reliable as possible rather than have the latest and greatest of everything and best features etc.
I did try Linux on the desktop for a while. I gave that up also, as I found it too finicky and prone to random breakdowns and malfunctions on updates. Yeah, I can fix the problems, eventually, but I'd rather my personal computer Just Work than be a puzzle to solve every few months. I think that was around 10 or 15 years ago though, so it's possible it's better now. I wouldn't bet on it though. Try it out if you want, but be prepared for that kind of pain on a regular basis. Both Windows and ChromeOS have great Linux environments that IMO give you the best of both worlds.
So far it appears he was only grazed, and nobody else around was hit, which is a really bizarre outcome. A clean miss or a solid hit is far more likely. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I guess more information will come out in the next few hours, but it feels pretty scissor-y already.
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. Nothing else new or particularly interesting so far.
Also reading Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef as more light entertainment. It's pretty heavily red-team coded fiction. As is typical with his books, I enjoy the plot generally, though I find the specific collapse / apocalypse scenarios described to be highly implausible.
I did not say that you had a lack of willingness to take responsibility for your own medical decisions. I said that you were taking upon yourself the ability to make medical decisions for everyone else.
I personally don't have or want the ability to make medical decisions for everyone else. The "everyone else", being the American People, have more or less voluntarily given the Federal Government that power through the existing democratic process.
I haven't really expressed much in the way of opinions about how things ought to be in this thread. I'm mostly just talking about how the system currently works and why it works that way, and what issues any potential changes to the system would need to address. That shouldn't be confused with actually advocating for the system to work in a specific way.
What are you talking about? This seems irrelevant.
Your other comment about the Glock lawsuit issue is kind of funny by itself, but also IMO serves to illustrate how the current state of the system is the product of how a bunch of things tie together.
For example, in the current system, all potential new drugs, even if created by some tiny team of independent scientists or university lab, are taken up by pharmaceutical giants to take to the market. They have the financial backing to take these drugs through the lengthy and risky clinical trial process, absorb the losses from ones that fail, and also weather any lawsuits filed by people unhappy with the drugs. They're mostly happy with the Government-run trial process partly because, if they get sued, they can say at trial that their drug went through those Government-monitored trials and was approved for sale by the Government.
Quite a few of the Covid vaxx-skeptical were concerned that the PREP Act rules made everyone associated with manufacturing, distributing, and administering the vaccines immune from lawsuits. They do have a point... but how could you possibly release a new vaccine that fast, or even faster yet, without that legal immunity? How would you convince the pharma companies to go ahead and release without that, when part of the reason why they exist and are structured as they are is to manage that risk? Or would you go for much broader legal immunity? Like it or not, lawsuits are a great way to throw sand in the gears of a new drug release.
That's one reason why I'm skeptical about your vague ideas to apparently cut more restrictions and go even faster yet. Which is why I'm asking in order to try and nail things down more specifically:
Let's start with just the basics. In a pandemic...
I'm not actually asking about an ideal system for handling pandemics. I don't think that's possible. We've got 20/20 hindsight for Covid now, of course, but if you were making a system for all pandemics, you'd have to handle Covid, plus Aids, plus Ebola, plus everything else that's come down the pike, plus whatever the next pandemic may be, which none of us can predict.
What I'm actually asking is your ideal system for how to go from what some scientists think is a promising new drug to something that the average person can buy or be prescribed to treat some disease or condition. How do you think that should work exactly during normal times, and how should it be changed during a "pandemic", whatever we might define that as?
I skipped over the "HCT/RCT debate" question because I honestly have no clue what that is. A few google searches didn't provide much insight. What is this debate?
I had a feeling that sentence would come back to bite me, especially since I actually wrote a movie review of '71 on the old sub about 3 years ago. I've also seen Derry Girls (feels a bit forced IMO, but okay), and read Bandit Country. Sounds like a lot of other potentially interesting things to read too, and thanks for the anecdote.
The parallels with our current culture war are part of what makes it interesting. They did seem to also have the "politicization of everything" effect - ordinary citizens who aren't particularly political for either side having to worry about the politics of the people and businesses they interact with to do mundane day-to-day things.
I get the same non-24-hour cycle thing, for a long time it seemed like my body wanted to live on a 25-ish hour cycle. This mostly manifested in being unable to fall asleep when I wanted to, despite being woken up by an alarm at a consistent time. It seems to be mostly cured since I started taking Melatonin about 2-3 hours before the time I wanted to go to sleep. Now I mostly sleep pretty well at around 6-7 hours a night. I don't believe the Walker take that everyone must have 8 hours a night no matter what and you're doing something bad if you don't.
Alcohol has weird and complex effects on my sleep cycle depending on exactly when and how much I drink.
I have been doing mostly-Keto for weight reasons, which I started a number of years after I started using Melatonin. I hadn't heard of the sibling's claim that it also affects the non-24-hour sleep cycle thing, but it seems plausible.
It sounds like it could be used to disprove any internal assessments.
It certainly could! But Sharp Knives and all that.
I think it's trivially obvious that many people believe false things about themselves, some of which are helpful and some harmful. If I think a belief I have about myself may be preventing me from doing things that would be good for my life, I think it's worth spending some effort to test if that belief is really true or not. If it does turn out to be true, then I've suffered some minor discomfort or something for the sake of proving to myself that it actually is true. If it turns out not to be true, then it's like I've unlocked a new power or something.
The same with ideologies to follow and things to identify as. One of the things I like about the Rationalist sphere of thinking is it provides the tools and thought patterns to recognize when what I'm thinking about following is an ideology rather than a fact. Ideologies were mostly created to make whoever created them famous or to connect a group of people together, not for my objective benefit. I am perfectly free to decide that an ideology is not to my benefit and reject it.
That's not how anybody in the world has ever behaved with nuclear weapons.
How do you know Israel made "back-channel threats" about nuclear strikes? If they actually had, why wouldn't Iran immediately go running to Russia for protection? If they went public with evidence of such a thing, international support for Israel's war effort would likely evaporate, including from the US. Nuclear powers as a rule basically never do that because it could easily set off a chain of events exactly like that.
Historically, rival states which both have nuclear weapons become extremely cautious about provoking each other. See India and Pakistan. In every such case, both nations become terrified of doing anything that could conceivably escalate to a nuclear exchange. No set of nations has ever dared see mutual possession of nuclear weapons as an excuse to attack each other harder.
What ads are you talking about? I just got a new Kindle, and I don't see any ads at all. Just go to Library on the front page, it stays there, and you only see your actual books and their contents. If you go to the Home page, you see some recommendations, which I suppose you could consider ads, but it doesn't ever seem to switch over to that from Library by itself.
Of course, there is the option to save a few bucks on the purchase price in exchange for seeing ads. I hate ads as much as anyone, but I don't have a lot of sympathy if somebody takes the $20 cheaper option for ads and then complains about the ads.
Reading JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. It's a much shorter book, I'm halfway through already.
I'm not sure if there was much in the way of ghostwriting or assistance on this, but if it's not much, then it's remarkably good writing for a sitting politician.
It reminds me a little of Sowell's Black Rednecks, White Liberals, which put forth the idea that quite a few of the dysfunctions affecting black culture were actually copied from the white hillbilly culture.
I'm not really seeing the AI side. Human cops are perfectly capable of being competent and decisive and appropriately escalating to violence when needed too. If they aren't, it's mostly due to their orders, their training, and the other factors that play into their incentives. Those were all created by politicians and can be removed by them too.
If we ever have AI robot cops, why wouldn't they be programmed by the exact same people who gave the existing police those orders? Why wouldn't they behave the exact same way, only even harder? All the current companies involved in LLMs have already done this in all of their public models. AI robots (presuming they ever actually exist) would probably capable of behaving exactly as they are ordered to an even greater extent than human cops. They might well be programmed to machine-gun a white professional with no criminal record for looking at them funny while completely ignoring a severely mentally ill black career criminal actively stabbing people.
Started reading And The Band Played On, about the handling of the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s. Seems interesting so far, and I have at least some expectation of it going against some of the things I believed.
To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex. I am skeptical that any reluctance of authority figures to take it seriously due to the nature of the victims was a bigger factor than either of those. Considering that even now, ~45 years later, we still don't have a great handle on medical treatment, it's hard to see doing more sooner helping much. The only thing they could have semi-realistically done differently was to crack down much harder on those high-risk behaviors, which probably would have been pretty ugly and would have further outraged the affected community. So yeah, AIDS sucks and hindsight is 20/20, but give us a realistic alternative that the people involved could actually have done if you want to really convince me that we screwed it up.
This is a very interesting and ominous development. I strongly doubt Durov will actually serve serious jail time. The interesting questions then are:
Exactly what concessions will France / the EU / whoever wring out of Durov and Telegram in exchange for his release?
What should we take from the fact that this level of lawfare has not yet been used (at least not visibly) against any of the other social networks or messaging platforms? Are they all cooperating sufficiently, despite claimed E2EE protections on some things? Do they have some other sort of leverage or protection? Or maybe the powers that be are just afraid of possible backlash, so they're going after Telegram first to see what they can get away with, and if it goes well, further action on other platforms may follow.
I saw Trace's post at the time, but I didn't have the time or energy to go through the whole thing at the time. I did today though. The poo-flinging here was a bit unexpected though. I don't really keep up with the interpersonal drama in that much detail. For anyone else curious:
A Motte discussion of it at the time.
Whole thing seems kind of meh to me, to be honest. Yeah it's not a good look for Trace or the BaR Podcast to carry out hoaxes like that. But LOTT didn't really suffer any harm from it. Trace has done some great work otherwise, but I'm not under any illusions that he's a partisan for my side of the culture war, so I'm not like morally offended that that time, he did something mildly bad to my side. It's kind of a bad look for him to do that and, as far as I can tell, refuse to apologize or anything, but I don't feel the need to follow him around and bash him about it in every other thread. And I get that it's annoying to have that happen, but he didn't need to get so mad about it. I haven't seen him acknowledging anywhere that it was kind of a jerk move. If he wants to take his ball and go home because of that and other such things, well sorry to see a mostly good poster go, but okay I guess.
Not at all, in fact it's fantastically rare. I think it's just another example of the thing where only ridiculous and outrageous stories of misbehavior get written, upvoted, and shared. The vast majority of them work perfectly fine basically all the time, but nobody tells stories about that.
I live in a decently nice condo building with a board that does maintenance, upkeep, and upgrade of common areas. They all seem perfectly reasonable and competent, and nothing dramatic has ever happened as far as I know. They're all up for re-election every year, but board meeting attendance is fairly low and virtually nobody ever runs to challenge any of the existing officeholders. They seem more barely able to muster enough man-hours to take care of all the things that they ought to than to have a ton of extra time to hassle people over random stupid stuff.
It's been my experience in real life that nobody I've ever met in person had this sort of thing happen to them. Basically everybody in real life will look at you like you're crazy if you express an opinion that it's likely enough to happen to take precautions against. I think that's a much more reliable measure about how much of a risk something actually is than how often you see stories about things on the internet or in the news.
Finished Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef. It was a fun read IMO, but surprisingly weak on story structure. His other 2 Dan Kilmer books go along with the standard 3-act story structure, where there's a "main" story and all of the subsidiary action is revealed later on to play a part in shaping how the "main" action plays out. This book was more like a bunch of stuff just happens as his improvised band of merry sailors travels the world, and it's all interesting, but doesn't really connect together into a broader plot. It also seems to attempt to push a little harder into the background of exactly how the whole world fell apart in this alternate timeline, which just doesn't really make any sense to me. Seems like he's sticking with the trucks, trains, boats, etc just stopped coming, nobody's even going to try to explain why or account for the fact that this just doesn't ever happen in the real world, and even if the US goes completely crazy for some reason, why would China, Russia etc do so too? Oh well, no sense over-analyzing things I guess.
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles.
I'd say I'm certainly open to hearing ideas and possibilities, but I'd like to hear something more specific than just we should go faster or we should skip trials. Which trials are we skipping, how are we dealing with the effects of skipping those trials? In my view, I've been trying this whole conversation to get out of you exactly what specifically you want to do, ideally something more generally applicable than, we did this specific bad thing during Covid, let's not do that. I mean, yeah, that's technically true, but how do you generalize that beyond, we should put better people in charge?
The mind boggles a bit trying to come up with general principles for addressing pandemics that would apply well to both of, let's say, Covid and Aids. If you can come up with some that don't just reduce down to putting better people in charge, by all means, let me know.
I am aware of what Human Challenge Trials are. Randomized Controlled trials are what we're already doing. I've got no problem with Human Challenge Trials, sounds like a good idea to me. It's at least a specific and actionable proposal. Liability might be a concern, but that ought to be solvable with waviers or some minor legislation. It's a relatively modest modification of current practice. It would likely result in full market availability somewhat sooner, though probably not dramatically so. The number of people accepted into such a trial would likely be modest. Though I gather you seemed interested in much more dramatic changes? Operation Warp Speed as it was actually executed produced far more dramatic timeline reductions just by bureaucratic optimization. Certainly nothing wrong with going even faster yet, but no need to forget what we actually did accomplish.
Another thing I'd note is that medical technology continues to advance incredibly fast. As far as I know, this was the first time in history we had a vaccine candidate ready for trials within weeks of the target viruses genome being isolated. That's freaking amazing! Can we come up with ways to get it verified and out to the public even faster than we actually did? Probably! But let's not beat ourselves up too bad, this stuff is all pretty new.
It's not a matter of cherry-picking. It's simply stating that things are clearly good or bad.
I think it is. A possible reasonable alternative system is, no Government agency exists to approve medical treatments, instead, several independent organizations (possibly including a Government one) make recommendations based on their own criteria, but individuals are free to take what they want. In such a system, those one or more organizations are already set up, and people are used to making their own decisions and taking responsibility for them. I believe that basically nobody thinks that way now. I don't think you can just overnight in a crisis switch to the regulatory framework of that system and expect people to change their thinking overnight. It is perhaps telling that no country in the world currently works like this.
A lack of willingness to take responsibility for my own medical decisions is not my opinion at all. I am fine with doing this myself, but it is my belief that 95% of American citizens are not prepared to do this. This is based on observations of how they actually behaved during the actual Covid period. Which gets me to what I really want to object to:
This is one of the most common failure modes, perhaps even a typical mind fallacy. Because you think, in your situation, that you wouldn't want to take it, you think that no one would want to take it (or you think they'd have obviously wrong preferences, since they don't match up with your own).
Please refrain from putting words into my mouth or assuming what I think. I already said I would personally be fine with taking responsibility for my own decisions. I think it's the American people, and the people in pretty much every other country too, who are unwilling to do this. You may disagree that they think like this, or dislike it, but don't tell me what I think personally.
If we did allow people to take any treatment without testing, warned them hundreds of times that it was untested and anything could happen, and it turned out to be a disaster with hundreds of thousands of casualties, I would be any amount of money you care to name that they would all scream their heads off at the Government for allowing it to happen, vote them out of office, probably storm the gates of all the Pharmaceutical companies and lynch people, etc. Roughly 10 people would say, oh well, they did warn me it was untested, guess it's on me. If watching how people behaved during Covid didn't convince you of that, then I don't know what to tell you.
We're also talking pretty vaguely here, why don't you spell out exactly how you envision your ideal system working?
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My model is more like, most people have a modest number of close friends (who may or may not be family). Everyone has widely varying levels of skill and inclination when it comes to starting and maintaining conversations with people and moving brief connections towards actual friendships.
Myself, I maintain maybe like a dozen or so pretty close friendships and another few dozen somewhat more distant friends who I know and see semi-regularly but don't actually get together with that often for various reasons. I am usually pretty good at going to a bar or party where I know nobody or only a couple of people and talking to a bunch of people. Most of the time, I forget about whoever I was talking to not too long after. Moving those brief conversations towards actual friendships is considerably harder, at least to me. Maybe some people are better at that part, I don't know. People I consider actual friends tend to come from situations where you tend to be around the same few people regularly without either side explicitly planning to get together with those specific people, like by being regulars at a bar or working together or being members of some kind of club or other regular group activity.
Perhaps that behavior looks to other people at that sort of event like what you've described as an extrovert. But they don't know that I actually only maintain those few dozen closer friendships with people I've known for years. I'm inclined to believe that most people we see acting like that are doing the same thing. So am I Introverted or Extroverted? I don't know, so I don't find the distinction very meaningful. Maybe those other people you see who appear to be doing that are just having a little fun their way and actually do have their own dozen or so really close friends.
So in my book, you're not actually Introverted, just normal.
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