First off, you shouldn’t be asking about lukeprog’s opinion but about the opinion of the anonymous woman in his example, or about the distribution of that attitude more generally. Making friends and having fun with people is a statistical game, and the numbers are not on your side if you filter out all but a handful of social saints and atypical psychologies.
Second, improved social skills translate directly into avenues for social fun. If you’re looking for non-social fun, you don’t need more than rudimentary social skills, but it’s rare for people to be completely without a need for social interaction.
As to childhood, I don’t know about you, but my childhood would have been much more pleasant if I’d known to avoid avoidable rudeness and absorb unintended slights aimed at me. I’d also hazard a guess that younger children are wired in some way to have more social plasticity than adults (though note that that doesn’t mean tolerance); late childhood, where social roles become less fluid and more important but social skills are still poorly developed, can be pretty hellish especially for the nerdier folks among us.
has communicated that he is confident and successful with women and knows how to show them a good time.
to be an assertion on lukeprog’s part that “a good time” was dependent on competent social skills. I now see the intention was that the man was communicating confidence, success, and charm.
Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people. I still don’t understand why it takes a saint to allow others to be themselves. There are plenty of criteria to judge people on besides eye contact, voice modulation, posture, and the ability to feign interest. Your mind is only going to register minor transgressions for a few fleeting seconds.
Those who are attempting to deceive should be mistrusted, that seems more axiomatic than guesses as to statistical distributions of personality types. The fear is that social skills include the dark arts. When successful people utilize social skills well enough to fool some but not others, some observers who are not convinced feel revulsion. When a peer is revealed to be feigning interest for personal gain, what should be the consequence? When it is revealed that a statistically significant portion of the population is dishonest, why should a person seek out peers? Only because it is necessary, no matter how distasteful, to bite one’s tongue and smile.
Please realize, I do understand that social skills are important and a tool to success. I practice, I sometimes act poorly, and I try again. While eminently practical, social skills are still arbitrary social convention and an inconvenience for those who are least interested.
“Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people”
No. As someone with Asperger’s, I can say ‘we’ really, really haven’t. There really are only three options—learn to control your body language, tone of voice etc so that you are playing by the rules most people in your society are playing by, accept that most people will dislike you if you’re slightly different and concentrate on being friends with only other ‘different’ people, or be desperately unhappy.
I remember there being a communication rule of thumb: ‘accept sloppy input, but transmit strict output’. It would be nice if all people were more permissive, but in any case having to conform to the output protocol/social norms is desirable.
...I know that in a lot of cases the rules seem unnecessarily complex when you can get people to articulate them at all, and having to learn this isn’t easy. I wish there was an easy way to fix this. I was rather socially awkward as a child, and really only started learning how to handle myself socially after I reached majority. It involved a lot of trial and error, and frustration.
How much of your communication do you want to be about navigating social protocols? How confident are you that you are not stuck in a locally optimized set of social interactions?
Upon reflection, I would say that is an ability to switch fluidly amongst a variety of different interaction protocols, matching your behavior to your audience. It is not immediately clear that an adaptive strategy is worth the computational costs.
Unfortunately, the number of interaction patterns is vast. If one has a novel idea, in order to be effective individually one must be fluent in direct social interaction, online and print display, e-mail and online discussion, narrative and technical writing, and preferably additional talents of personal interest. This is in addition to being fluent in the subject you are expounding. Further complicate this continuously updating probabilities that you are wasting your time on your audience.
The temptation to avoid social interaction often outweighs the perceived benefit. The price of interaction is often very high in terms of lost productivity for failed attempts.
You don’t have to achieve the most optimal fluency. I think that learning basic social interaction is much like learning typing, in that it reduces the amount of time you will spend performing tasks and correcting mistakes related to it by many times the time spent learning over your lifetime. Becoming locally-optimized may very well be good enough for most people.
Avoidance works well some of the time, but when it fails it’s nice to have at least a small amount of ability to fall back on.
First off, you shouldn’t be asking about lukeprog’s opinion but about the opinion of the anonymous woman in his example, or about the distribution of that attitude more generally. Making friends and having fun with people is a statistical game, and the numbers are not on your side if you filter out all but a handful of social saints and atypical psychologies.
Second, improved social skills translate directly into avenues for social fun. If you’re looking for non-social fun, you don’t need more than rudimentary social skills, but it’s rare for people to be completely without a need for social interaction.
As to childhood, I don’t know about you, but my childhood would have been much more pleasant if I’d known to avoid avoidable rudeness and absorb unintended slights aimed at me. I’d also hazard a guess that younger children are wired in some way to have more social plasticity than adults (though note that that doesn’t mean tolerance); late childhood, where social roles become less fluid and more important but social skills are still poorly developed, can be pretty hellish especially for the nerdier folks among us.
Oh, I mistook
to be an assertion on lukeprog’s part that “a good time” was dependent on competent social skills. I now see the intention was that the man was communicating confidence, success, and charm.
Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people. I still don’t understand why it takes a saint to allow others to be themselves. There are plenty of criteria to judge people on besides eye contact, voice modulation, posture, and the ability to feign interest. Your mind is only going to register minor transgressions for a few fleeting seconds.
Those who are attempting to deceive should be mistrusted, that seems more axiomatic than guesses as to statistical distributions of personality types. The fear is that social skills include the dark arts. When successful people utilize social skills well enough to fool some but not others, some observers who are not convinced feel revulsion. When a peer is revealed to be feigning interest for personal gain, what should be the consequence? When it is revealed that a statistically significant portion of the population is dishonest, why should a person seek out peers? Only because it is necessary, no matter how distasteful, to bite one’s tongue and smile.
Please realize, I do understand that social skills are important and a tool to success. I practice, I sometimes act poorly, and I try again. While eminently practical, social skills are still arbitrary social convention and an inconvenience for those who are least interested.
“Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people”
No. As someone with Asperger’s, I can say ‘we’ really, really haven’t. There really are only three options—learn to control your body language, tone of voice etc so that you are playing by the rules most people in your society are playing by, accept that most people will dislike you if you’re slightly different and concentrate on being friends with only other ‘different’ people, or be desperately unhappy.
I remember there being a communication rule of thumb: ‘accept sloppy input, but transmit strict output’. It would be nice if all people were more permissive, but in any case having to conform to the output protocol/social norms is desirable.
...I know that in a lot of cases the rules seem unnecessarily complex when you can get people to articulate them at all, and having to learn this isn’t easy. I wish there was an easy way to fix this. I was rather socially awkward as a child, and really only started learning how to handle myself socially after I reached majority. It involved a lot of trial and error, and frustration.
Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.”
How much of your communication do you want to be about navigating social protocols? How confident are you that you are not stuck in a locally optimized set of social interactions?
Upon reflection, I would say that is an ability to switch fluidly amongst a variety of different interaction protocols, matching your behavior to your audience. It is not immediately clear that an adaptive strategy is worth the computational costs.
Unfortunately, the number of interaction patterns is vast. If one has a novel idea, in order to be effective individually one must be fluent in direct social interaction, online and print display, e-mail and online discussion, narrative and technical writing, and preferably additional talents of personal interest. This is in addition to being fluent in the subject you are expounding. Further complicate this continuously updating probabilities that you are wasting your time on your audience.
The temptation to avoid social interaction often outweighs the perceived benefit. The price of interaction is often very high in terms of lost productivity for failed attempts.
You don’t have to achieve the most optimal fluency. I think that learning basic social interaction is much like learning typing, in that it reduces the amount of time you will spend performing tasks and correcting mistakes related to it by many times the time spent learning over your lifetime. Becoming locally-optimized may very well be good enough for most people.
Avoidance works well some of the time, but when it fails it’s nice to have at least a small amount of ability to fall back on.