Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn’t feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In particular, chess against a human doesn’t feel much different from chess against a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts, which makes me feel awful.) Poker seems much closer to me, and I’m indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for now).
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions, even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the interactions is playing the game—that’s what I meant by structured interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data about others’ behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking losing a status contest—it’s quite rude to initiate a status conflict during the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average social setting.
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends none of whom I’m particularly romantically interested in also involves social interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad idea, unless 1) you’re mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don’t you just pay prostitutes?), and 3) you’re living in a city so big that there’s a negligible chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6 inhabitants). Unless you’re very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th percentile for women) and/or something, I think it’s unlikely that someone who wouldn’t enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly out of my ass, though I guess they’re in the right ballpark.)
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn’t feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In particular, chess against a human doesn’t feel much different from chess against a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts, which makes me feel awful.) Poker seems much closer to me, and I’m indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for now).
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions, even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the interactions is playing the game—that’s what I meant by structured interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data about others’ behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking losing a status contest—it’s quite rude to initiate a status conflict during the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average social setting.
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends none of whom I’m particularly romantically interested in also involves social interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
If you have more advanced social skills than my advice is aimed at, feel free to ignore it. Sorry for misjudging your concerns.
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad idea, unless 1) you’re mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don’t you just pay prostitutes?), and 3) you’re living in a city so big that there’s a negligible chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6 inhabitants). Unless you’re very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th percentile for women) and/or something, I think it’s unlikely that someone who wouldn’t enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly out of my ass, though I guess they’re in the right ballpark.)