I’m not sure that’s a good approach to the issue. Don’t label other people with a pesonality type and then try to engage with them based on the label.
I think I would actually recommend this. If other people are deeply mysterious to you, then reading up on personality types and trying to recognize them in the wild is helpful training and theory.
The trouble is twofold:
The theory will be incomplete, and only give you broad understanding.
The theory will be limiting, in that you will be more likely to notice observations that match the theory than observations that do not agree with the theory.
You can ameliorate both troubles by learning multiple theories, and trying to hold them in your head / evaluate people along different ones simultaneously.
(There’s a longer conversation here, about how much learning should be system 1 vs. system 2, and how to tell what level of development you are in a skill, and so on, but that’s probably enough for now.)
You might be able to do a bit better; learn a simple and catchy system like the True Colors personality spectrum (a simplified adaptation of the Myers-Briggs), and work on understanding why it works. (Or if you like, why it “works”.) While you might guess someone’s ‘color’ incorrectly, if you understand why everyone identifies at least a little with every color, you can start to use general, positive statements to identify what people like about themselves. It should be a productive exercise in understanding the average person’s self concept.
You can ameliorate both approaches by learning multiple theories, and trying to hold them in your head / evaluate people along different ones simultaneously.
Success in social interaction is not about holding more things in your head but often about holding less things in your head.
It’s better to do exercises that raise physical presence as the one’s suggested in “The Charisma Myth”.
Success in social interaction is not about holding more things in your head but often about holding less things in your head.
In the sense that you’ll want to be able to model people and their reactions automatically and without needing to spend effort on it or it hogging up all your working memory, true. But if you’re not good at modeling people yet, it may be better to practice it consciously until it becomes automatic.
It’s better to do exercises that raise physical presence as the one’s suggested in “The Charisma Myth”.
But if you’re not good at modeling people yet, it may be better to practice it consciously until it becomes automatic.
Normal people don’t model each other through putting each other in distinct mental categories (personality types) but via mirror neurons.
Being judgemental of other people doesn’t get better by doing it automatically. I don’t get anything when I have an automatic thought that tells me “the person I’m interacting with is a ISTP”
In social interaction “Get out of your head” is good advice for the average nerd. Judging another person as a ISTP rather keeps them in their head.
So, let’s take autistic vs. neurotypical people as an example. As a general (but not iron-clad) rule, autistic people tend to read less social connotations into the meanings of words. As a result, they are often less likely to take offense from things that a neurotypical person might read as insulting. And as a result of that, they’re more likely to prefer the kind of communication that’s more direct and to the point. In contrast, with more neurotypical people, exactly the same kind of communication might come across as cold and blunt.
Knowing this lets me optimize my style of communication to the kind of person I’m talking with, more direct with autistic and more careful with neurotypical.
Now of course there are some autistic people you need to communicate carefully with, and some neurotypical people who prefer direct and blunt communciation. But if I have a higher prior probability on someone preferring direct communication, that lets me make some cautious probes to measure their reaction to that style of communication. Probes which could have a negative expected utility if I put a higher prior probability on the person being easily offended by more direct language.
This doesn’t necessarily happen on a conscious level. Just having the background knowledge of neurotypical and autistic people differing on this dimension, helps me do this on a partially instinctive basis.
I wasn’t explicitly taught this thing about how autistic and neurotypical people differ. It was something that I picked up by experience, from interacting with both kinds of people. But for learning this, it was important to have some kind of a mental handle for hanging the differing experiences on. If I hadn’t known that there was such a concept as an autistic person, I couldn’t have noticed the correlation between autism and the preferred style of communication. Rather my experience would just have been “different people react totally differently to the same kind of words, and it’s totally mysterious to me when to use what kinds of words”.
If you have more mental categories to put different people into, then if anything about them happens to correlate with those categories, it will become possible for you to notice that correlation. Without those categories, it’ll be harder for you to generalize anything you learn about one person to other people you interact with. Maybe you learn that this particular person prefers direct communication and this other person prefers indirect communication, but when the third person shows up, you don’t know what style to use with them. This will slow down the development of your social skills.
Success in social interaction is not about holding more things in your head but often about holding less things in your head.
Sounds like we do need to go into the longer conversation.
I view most of these skills are something like the follows: at level 0, you have no clue what’s going on; at level 1, you have a system 2 model of what’s going on that’s too slow / clumsy to operate successfully in real time; at level 2, you have a system 1 model of what’s going on that’s fast and good enough to operate successfully in real time.
Most people go directly from level 0 to level 2, with some level 1 help. Most language speakers don’t have an abstract grammatical model of their language in their heads, some constructions “just look weird” or don’t come to mind, and they often can’t articulate rules even if they use them correctly.
For example, in English, why is something “harder” instead of “more hard”? Why is it “more difficult” instead of “difficulter”?* (This came to mind because my mother is teaching ESL classes and had been surprised that there was a simple underlying rule, which I could not successfully identify before the question was spoiled, even though for any particular word I could correctly determine whether ‘more’ or ‘er’ was appropriate.)
But there are situations where it seems better to go through level 1. If you’re teaching someone a second language, for example, they’re much more likely to be able to make use of abstractly stated grammatical rules than children are. If someone has already been a child and yet not developed a ‘normal’ level of social intelligence, then the normal approach is inadequate, and we need to consider alternatives.
When developing those alternatives, it’s worth noting that the right approach for going from level 0 to level 1 (learning more grammatical rules into system 2) is different from the right approach for going from level 1 to level 2 (practicing the grammatical rules into system 1). So yes, someone who is at level 1 would not get much out of holding more things in their head, but someone who is at level 0 would.
(To elaborate even further, I think someone at level 0 probably has some feature of their personality / communication style at a fundamental enough level of their model that they won’t generate hypotheses that contradict it, and thus large parts of human interactions will be fundamentally mysterious to them. The point of reading about personality styles and communication styles and so on is that it generates alternative hypotheses at that level—many ‘nerds’ do not realize that there are people out there who interpret statements as about relationship closeness instead of as about factual accuracy, and pointing that out to them is the fastest way to level up their interaction ability.)
* Single syllable adjectives get an “er” or “est,” multi-syllable adjectives get a “more” or “most,” at least most of the time.
I think the problem is that you ignore the physiological effect of being in your head and how it makes people less likely to want to engage in social interaction with you.
A problem that is about not being in contact with one’s emotions is not helped by having concept with you can use to label the person with whom you are interacting.
The point of reading about personality styles and communication styles and so on is that it generates alternative hypotheses at that level—many ‘nerds’ do not realize that there are people out there who interpret statements as about relationship closeness instead of as about factual accuracy, and pointing that out to them is the fastest way to level up their interaction ability.
I don’t think that it’s useful to people into the bracket of caring about relationship closeness and people who care about factual accuracy. Depending on the context of the conversation the same person will focus on a different layer of the communicatoin.
Schulz von Thun’s model describe the issue well. You don’t need to put people into categories for that.
I think that page oversimplifies the rule for constructing comparative forms. One-syllable adjectives definitely take suffixes and three-syllable adjectives take words, but two syllable adjectives are difficult. I think this page is largely correct. For two syllable adjectives, some terminal syllables (-y, -le) require suffixes and some (-ing, -ed, -ful, -less) require words. The rest are OK either way (quieter, more quiet).
This rule is incomplete. Most two-syllable adjectives ending in “y” can be converted to comparative form with “er”. Some of these may be uncommon, but not all, and my spell checker agrees they are real words, in both British and American English.
Eg. Angrier, heavier, cleverer, friendlier, happier, lazier, tidier, etc.
And even three syllable words can take “er”: bubblier, foolhardier, jitterier, slipperier, many words starting with “un”.
The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane is a book that helped a bunch of people on LW.
I’m not sure that’s a good approach to the issue. Don’t label other people with a pesonality type and then try to engage with them based on the label.
I think I would actually recommend this. If other people are deeply mysterious to you, then reading up on personality types and trying to recognize them in the wild is helpful training and theory.
The trouble is twofold:
The theory will be incomplete, and only give you broad understanding.
The theory will be limiting, in that you will be more likely to notice observations that match the theory than observations that do not agree with the theory.
You can ameliorate both troubles by learning multiple theories, and trying to hold them in your head / evaluate people along different ones simultaneously.
(There’s a longer conversation here, about how much learning should be system 1 vs. system 2, and how to tell what level of development you are in a skill, and so on, but that’s probably enough for now.)
You might be able to do a bit better; learn a simple and catchy system like the True Colors personality spectrum (a simplified adaptation of the Myers-Briggs), and work on understanding why it works. (Or if you like, why it “works”.) While you might guess someone’s ‘color’ incorrectly, if you understand why everyone identifies at least a little with every color, you can start to use general, positive statements to identify what people like about themselves. It should be a productive exercise in understanding the average person’s self concept.
Success in social interaction is not about holding more things in your head but often about holding less things in your head.
It’s better to do exercises that raise physical presence as the one’s suggested in “The Charisma Myth”.
In the sense that you’ll want to be able to model people and their reactions automatically and without needing to spend effort on it or it hogging up all your working memory, true. But if you’re not good at modeling people yet, it may be better to practice it consciously until it becomes automatic.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Normal people don’t model each other through putting each other in distinct mental categories (personality types) but via mirror neurons.
Being judgemental of other people doesn’t get better by doing it automatically. I don’t get anything when I have an automatic thought that tells me “the person I’m interacting with is a ISTP”
In social interaction “Get out of your head” is good advice for the average nerd. Judging another person as a ISTP rather keeps them in their head.
So, let’s take autistic vs. neurotypical people as an example. As a general (but not iron-clad) rule, autistic people tend to read less social connotations into the meanings of words. As a result, they are often less likely to take offense from things that a neurotypical person might read as insulting. And as a result of that, they’re more likely to prefer the kind of communication that’s more direct and to the point. In contrast, with more neurotypical people, exactly the same kind of communication might come across as cold and blunt.
Knowing this lets me optimize my style of communication to the kind of person I’m talking with, more direct with autistic and more careful with neurotypical.
Now of course there are some autistic people you need to communicate carefully with, and some neurotypical people who prefer direct and blunt communciation. But if I have a higher prior probability on someone preferring direct communication, that lets me make some cautious probes to measure their reaction to that style of communication. Probes which could have a negative expected utility if I put a higher prior probability on the person being easily offended by more direct language.
This doesn’t necessarily happen on a conscious level. Just having the background knowledge of neurotypical and autistic people differing on this dimension, helps me do this on a partially instinctive basis.
I wasn’t explicitly taught this thing about how autistic and neurotypical people differ. It was something that I picked up by experience, from interacting with both kinds of people. But for learning this, it was important to have some kind of a mental handle for hanging the differing experiences on. If I hadn’t known that there was such a concept as an autistic person, I couldn’t have noticed the correlation between autism and the preferred style of communication. Rather my experience would just have been “different people react totally differently to the same kind of words, and it’s totally mysterious to me when to use what kinds of words”.
If you have more mental categories to put different people into, then if anything about them happens to correlate with those categories, it will become possible for you to notice that correlation. Without those categories, it’ll be harder for you to generalize anything you learn about one person to other people you interact with. Maybe you learn that this particular person prefers direct communication and this other person prefers indirect communication, but when the third person shows up, you don’t know what style to use with them. This will slow down the development of your social skills.
Sounds like we do need to go into the longer conversation.
I view most of these skills are something like the follows: at level 0, you have no clue what’s going on; at level 1, you have a system 2 model of what’s going on that’s too slow / clumsy to operate successfully in real time; at level 2, you have a system 1 model of what’s going on that’s fast and good enough to operate successfully in real time.
Most people go directly from level 0 to level 2, with some level 1 help. Most language speakers don’t have an abstract grammatical model of their language in their heads, some constructions “just look weird” or don’t come to mind, and they often can’t articulate rules even if they use them correctly.
For example, in English, why is something “harder” instead of “more hard”? Why is it “more difficult” instead of “difficulter”?* (This came to mind because my mother is teaching ESL classes and had been surprised that there was a simple underlying rule, which I could not successfully identify before the question was spoiled, even though for any particular word I could correctly determine whether ‘more’ or ‘er’ was appropriate.)
But there are situations where it seems better to go through level 1. If you’re teaching someone a second language, for example, they’re much more likely to be able to make use of abstractly stated grammatical rules than children are. If someone has already been a child and yet not developed a ‘normal’ level of social intelligence, then the normal approach is inadequate, and we need to consider alternatives.
When developing those alternatives, it’s worth noting that the right approach for going from level 0 to level 1 (learning more grammatical rules into system 2) is different from the right approach for going from level 1 to level 2 (practicing the grammatical rules into system 1). So yes, someone who is at level 1 would not get much out of holding more things in their head, but someone who is at level 0 would.
(To elaborate even further, I think someone at level 0 probably has some feature of their personality / communication style at a fundamental enough level of their model that they won’t generate hypotheses that contradict it, and thus large parts of human interactions will be fundamentally mysterious to them. The point of reading about personality styles and communication styles and so on is that it generates alternative hypotheses at that level—many ‘nerds’ do not realize that there are people out there who interpret statements as about relationship closeness instead of as about factual accuracy, and pointing that out to them is the fastest way to level up their interaction ability.)
* Single syllable adjectives get an “er” or “est,” multi-syllable adjectives get a “more” or “most,” at least most of the time.
I think the problem is that you ignore the physiological effect of being in your head and how it makes people less likely to want to engage in social interaction with you.
A problem that is about not being in contact with one’s emotions is not helped by having concept with you can use to label the person with whom you are interacting.
I don’t think that it’s useful to people into the bracket of caring about relationship closeness and people who care about factual accuracy. Depending on the context of the conversation the same person will focus on a different layer of the communicatoin.
Schulz von Thun’s model describe the issue well. You don’t need to put people into categories for that.
I think that page oversimplifies the rule for constructing comparative forms. One-syllable adjectives definitely take suffixes and three-syllable adjectives take words, but two syllable adjectives are difficult. I think this page is largely correct. For two syllable adjectives, some terminal syllables (-y, -le) require suffixes and some (-ing, -ed, -ful, -less) require words. The rest are OK either way (quieter, more quiet).
This rule is incomplete. Most two-syllable adjectives ending in “y” can be converted to comparative form with “er”. Some of these may be uncommon, but not all, and my spell checker agrees they are real words, in both British and American English.
Eg. Angrier, heavier, cleverer, friendlier, happier, lazier, tidier, etc. And even three syllable words can take “er”: bubblier, foolhardier, jitterier, slipperier, many words starting with “un”.