Tag: friends

The Circles of Friendship

The innermost layer of 1.5 is the most intimate; clearly that has to do with your romantic relationships. The next layer of 5 is your shoulders-to-cry-on friendships. They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart. The 15 layer includes the previous 5, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. The next layer up, at 50, is your big-weekend-barbecue people. And the 150 layer is your weddings and funerals group who would come to your once-in-a-lifetime event. The layers come about primarily because the time we have for social interaction is not infinite. You have to decide how to invest that time, bearing in mind that the strength of relationships is directly correlated with how much time and effort we give them.


While I quibble with the names and sizes of these circles, it still seems directionally correct.

UAV L1 Autonomy Safety

EASA has a roadmap for autonomous flight with 3 levels of autonomy:


They, in collaboration with my friends at Daedalean, just released their approach how to certify the safety of the whole L1 system, a first for a ML system in aviation, as far as I know. This ought to help the nascent UAV market with overcoming regulatory barriers. You can get a sense for the state of the art with the EHang 216 drone in this autonomous test flight with the CEO on board.

Real vs deal friends

These are what some social scientists call “expedient friendships”—with people we might call “deal friends”—and they are probably the most common type most of us have. The average adult has 16 people they would classify as friends. Of these, 3 are “friends for life,” and 5 are people they really like. The other 8 are not people they would hang out with 1-on-1. We can logically infer that these friendships are not an end in themselves but are instrumental to some other goal, such as furthering one’s career or easing a social dynamic. Expedient friendships might be a pleasant—and certainly useful—part of life, but they don’t usually bring lasting joy and comfort. If you find that your social life is leaving you feeling a little empty and unfulfilled, it might just be that you have too many deal friends, and not enough real friends.

How to Make Friends

My wife and I have started a practice we call The Friendship Meal. What happens is something like this: we take a person or a couple and invite them to come have dinner with us. It’s almost always a disorienting thing to begin with — we don’t know them, they don’t know us, and everyone’s pretty shy. And sometimes the meals stay there: shyness and lack of connection, we eat and go separate ways. But sometimes that special spark happens, and, all-of-a-sudden, the conversations last for hours. And that makes the risk worth it!

Friend portfolio

I see a new revenue stream for Facebook here — some kind of automated friend-portfolio management app that optimizes your mix of friends and alerts you whenever a buddy spends too much time in a bad neighborhood or starts hanging out with low-lifes. Maybe Facebook could even set up an exchange for trading friend-portfolio derivatives. You could have everything from Aaa-rated friend portfolios (stable marriages, high-net-worth zip codes, regular statin intake) to speculative junk-rated friend portfolios (druggies, socialists, poets).