Sure. The biggest one is that when someone has poor social skills, we treat that as a thing to tolerate rather than as a thing to fix. E.g. someone shows up to a meetup and doesn’t really get how conversation flow works, when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to listen, how to tell the difference between someone being interested in what ze has to say and someone just being polite. We’re welcoming, at least outwardly, and encourage that person to keep showing up, so ze does. And the people who are both disinclined to be ranted to and who have the social skills to avoid the person learn to do so, but we don’t seem to make any effort to help the person become less annoying. So ze continues to inflict zirself on newcomers who haven’t learned better, and they walk away with the impression that that’s what our community is.
Which is sad, because we spend plenty of time encouraging self-improvement in thinking skills. If we siphoned some effort from “notice you’re confused” to “notice your audience”, we should be able to encourage self-improvement in social skills as well. But since we don’t treat it like something fixable, it doesn’t get fixed.
Any quick examples before the long-form essay?
Sure. The biggest one is that when someone has poor social skills, we treat that as a thing to tolerate rather than as a thing to fix. E.g. someone shows up to a meetup and doesn’t really get how conversation flow works, when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to listen, how to tell the difference between someone being interested in what ze has to say and someone just being polite. We’re welcoming, at least outwardly, and encourage that person to keep showing up, so ze does. And the people who are both disinclined to be ranted to and who have the social skills to avoid the person learn to do so, but we don’t seem to make any effort to help the person become less annoying. So ze continues to inflict zirself on newcomers who haven’t learned better, and they walk away with the impression that that’s what our community is.
Which is sad, because we spend plenty of time encouraging self-improvement in thinking skills. If we siphoned some effort from “notice you’re confused” to “notice your audience”, we should be able to encourage self-improvement in social skills as well. But since we don’t treat it like something fixable, it doesn’t get fixed.