intellectual friendship

I want to care about an intellectual topic and have friends and colleagues with whom I can enjoy discussing that topic.

I used to have intellectual friendships. In college, we'd all learn the same things together and talk about them. In grad school, people mostly genuinely cared about the work they were doing -- Dylan's work in AI safety or Paul's work in security were self-motivated reflections of their personal interests and opinions. And of course ExBoyfriend and SuccessfulFriend were intellectual friends in many ways.

Having intellectual friendships is part of having an intellectual identity. People are social creatures. I especially want to be less alone, to build my life around relationships and talking with people. It's possible to have an intellectual identity based solely on personal habits and on internet friends, but ultimately to get anything done in the world (academically, in industry, or even in the public conversation) you need the skills and confidence that come from honing your ideas through real-world discussion with smart people. And you need social motivation to learn things and develop insights. I don't read philosophy or CS any more, because there's no social context in which knowing those things would be helpful.

Now, I have a circle of gay friends who are smart but our conversations are very much non-intellectual. I've gradually fallen out of CS intellectual social circles because I'm 'not smart enough' to participate. I used to feel like I could hang out with fellow grad students as essentially peers. Now it feels like somehow I 'fell out' of those circles; the conversations take place on a level that doesn't make sense to me. I haven't kept up intellectually and often don't have anything to say, so hanging out in those circles isn't fun and generally makes me feel stupid and inadequate.

So there's a catch-22. I say I want intellectual friendships. But if you gave me the opportunity to interact with smart people, I wouldn't take it because I'm scared I'm not smart enough. I never talked to visiting researchers in grad school. I don't talk to people at conferences. I don't talk to smart people at Google. So what do I mean when I say I want intellectual friendships?

I had more intellectual friendships in college and in early grad school, when:

• the standards were lower, and
• we were learning about more fundamental ideas.
• I always found the fundamental ideas the most satisfying; in some sense I've never developed past that stage since the various refinements of fundamental ideas that form today's research communities mostly don't 'click' for me; they don't feel like they carve the world at the joints. But learning and discussing fundamentals just for the sake of learning them feels less worthwhile now than it did ten years ago. There's less space ahead of me for those ideas to grow into something valuable (fundamentals are useless for adults). I shouldn't listen to that thought, though---I still have a lot of life left, and if the life I have is that I get a great understanding of foundational concepts in science and math but never contribute anything deep, that's not the best but not the worst.
• I think what holds me back from intellectual friendships is shame. I'm ashamed to engage with people because I'm ashamed of how stupid and uninformed I am. I'm ashamed that I went to grad school but didn't learn how to do good CS research. And a lot of the reason for that is that I had no social skills. Which itself is built on shame---I feel ashamed about not knowing how to interact, so I don't interact, which creates more shame, and leads to a cycle of learned helplessness.
• One approach would be to acknowledge failure, conceptualize it as not shameful, and then engage with people on honest grounds. I'd present myself humbly, not as an expert. I'd ask people who work in an area about their thoughts and insights, and try to learn from them. I'd stop trying to 'fake' the confidence of an academic who knows better than most of the field.
• AND YET - I don't think I can honestly do that. I think it'd come off as acting, as fake, and worse --- it'd feel fake. I can't ask questions convincingly and intelligently if I'm not genuinely curious about the answers. And fundamentally, I do think I know things that the rest of the field doesn't, even if I have a hard time articulating them. I often find that in the moment, in a personal conversation, I have nothing smart to say, but that if I back up and think and write for a bit I can come up with something unorthodox and insightful -- so the person I am in conversation is stupider than my full self, and I feel shame in presenting as that person. The fullness of 'being myself' would be to learn to articulate the things I believe and am interested in, and to build community with people who share my beliefs.
• Articulating could mean starting a blog, and then connecting with readers. It could mean finding a relevant job and connecting with co-workers. It could mean making personal connections through friends and taking time to learn or build something with them.