Social dynamics and friendliness

I've been blogging about a discussion on curi blog about the task of welcoming people to FI. Here's my latest post in the series. 

I've been reviewing this discussion a lot (lots of rereading). I keep noticing new things, so many that when I wrote about them I end up forgetting to talk about all of the things. So here's one of the things:

Anonymous wrote:

2) I understand more now about the distinction between objective reality and social reality. I think you (curi) want FI to be a place where people focus on objective reality and not on social reality. Welcoming and friendliness and trying to help people feel comfortable are social reality things, so I think you don’t want them to happen at FI, or if you do want them to happen, your vision of what they’d be like is different from mine. This seems like a complicated topic. (I’m not super sure about anything I said in this paragraph.)

This treats all friendliness as social dynamics. I don't agree with that. Here's Elliot talking about friendliness as an intellectual trait.

Elliot wrote on FI email list:

So you want to learn philosophy? Here are four key traits that help: 

1. integrity 

2. friendliness (including answering questions, trying suggestions, and being curious about stuff people bring up even if you don’t immediately see the point) 

3. smarts, logic, knowledge 

4. effort, patience, perseverance (for this trait, you should have a lot of time and/or money to support your effort. it’s not a purely intellectual trait about work ethic, it’s also about your life circumstances to enable the intellectual trait.) 

I’ve ordered them by a *very rough* estimate of their importance. 

All of these are learnable skills. They’re all things you can get better at. But you gotta start somewhere and work with what you have now. 

To make much progress with philosophy, it really helps if you’re really good at at least *one* of the traits. It gives you – and people you discuss with – something to work with, a tool to use. 

I note that the friendliness that Elliot describes is equivalent to friendliness to IDEAS. And I don't think that can be said about social-dynamics-friendliness.