I have a self-image of having badly sub-par social skills, and have a fair amount of evidence to back up that image. On the other hand, I note that I currently have 95% positive karma. If I lacked the capability to avoid alienating people, I would expect much more negative karma.
I am unsure whether I need to update my self-model.
I’d say “social skills” is not a homogenous set, but a combination of various skills, some of them more or less used in different contexts; depending on with whom you communicate (LW members? educated person? friend? average person? child? teenager? adult?) and how you communicate (in person? in writing? one to one? in a group? at a goal-oriented task? at a social event?).
Maybe you should update more about some of these contexts than about others. Split the “social skills” into individual skills, and evaluate each one separately. Recall specific situations where you have recently succeeded or failed.
What it takes to alienate a typical LWer may differ from what it takes to alienate a typical member of the population at large.
Upvotes and downvotes on LW may be less about (non-)alienation than acceptance and rejection in the “normal” world.
Your behaviour on a non-real-time internet forum dedicated to rationality may be drastically different from your behaviour in “real life”.
Social skills are not just about what topics you choose to discuss and what words you use, but also about things like tone of voice, physical appearance, etc., that are completely invisible in the LW context.
It is (for all I know) entirely possible that your social skills are far better than you think they are, or for that matter far worse. (In particular, my making the above observations is not intended as any kind of suggestion that your social skills are in fact bad.) But I don’t think having a good LW karma balance is any evidence either way.
I recently played a little game with some friends where we each came up with three positive adjectives to characterize each of the other members of the group. Nearly everyone in the group used some synonym for the word “likable” or “charming” for me. I do not see myself this way—I do not think my social skills are “sub-par” but I think they are maybe … “par.” Apparently I am just totally wrong about this.
Maybe be open to the possibility that you are also wrong about this? I don’t know if you have friends who you could directly ask a question like this?
Edited to add: it was a remarkable exercise in that the chosen words tended to be so coherent. In two different cases people chose identical words to describe the same person. In zero cases were anyone’s assessments in wild disagreement with anyone else’s. Apparently “pick 3 adjectives” is a robust characterization technique.
I have a self-image of having badly sub-par social skills, and have a fair amount of evidence to back up that image.
Like what? BTW, have you heard of the impostor syndrome?
On the other hand, I note that I currently have 95% positive karma. If I lacked the capability to avoid alienating people, I would expect much more negative karma.
Alienating people may be easier in meatspace than in writing, depending on lots of things.
Perhaps people on Less Wrong are less attuned to the nuances of social norms, and rather upvote/downvote based only on the content of the post in question?
The ideal of upvoting/downvoting based only on value is one that has appeal to many of the sort of people who hang around here. We are all still human, but I would not be surprised to be told that many or most Less Wrongers are atypical in this way. (Pay less attention to social contexts, and more to content.)
Let’s not pat ourselves on the back too much. Voters here absolutely respond to social cues (albeit unusual ones from the perspective of the wider culture) and to local status; the vote record on a post is not a totally dispassionate estimate of its quality.
That said, pure social awkwardness might limit a post’s potential upvotes, but it usually isn’t enough to get a post downvoted: that takes obvious bias, factual error, egregiously bad English, a perception of bad faith, or—exceptionally—attracting the ire of a serial downvoter. The truly clueless may risk pattern-matching to “bad faith”, but that’s fairly rare; the rest are more or less orthogonal to social skills.
That was never my intention. I actually initially meant to stress this more, but I cut it as it didn’t really fit.
The most important note that it is not necessarily a good thing to ignore social cues. They exist for good reasons. Discourse flows a lot better when it is polite and well presented. Those who ignore that do so at their own peril.
Some do, however. Including us, to some exten. You cannot deny that the population of Less Wrongers is weighted heavily towards the type of people that might be known as nerds, who dismiss the social glue, and prefer more bluntness in their discourse than is usual. Again, this is not necessarily good: See Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate.
In some ways it is good, though: It encourages the virtues of truth-seeking and of not responding to tone, and in general is an attitude that is conductive to the types of things discussed around here. (This is why Less Wrong is neuroatypical in specifically this direction.)
I have a self-image of having badly sub-par social skills, and have a fair amount of evidence to back up that image. On the other hand, I note that I currently have 95% positive karma. If I lacked the capability to avoid alienating people, I would expect much more negative karma.
I am unsure whether I need to update my self-model.
I’d say “social skills” is not a homogenous set, but a combination of various skills, some of them more or less used in different contexts; depending on with whom you communicate (LW members? educated person? friend? average person? child? teenager? adult?) and how you communicate (in person? in writing? one to one? in a group? at a goal-oriented task? at a social event?).
Maybe you should update more about some of these contexts than about others. Split the “social skills” into individual skills, and evaluate each one separately. Recall specific situations where you have recently succeeded or failed.
What it takes to alienate a typical LWer may differ from what it takes to alienate a typical member of the population at large.
Upvotes and downvotes on LW may be less about (non-)alienation than acceptance and rejection in the “normal” world.
Your behaviour on a non-real-time internet forum dedicated to rationality may be drastically different from your behaviour in “real life”.
Social skills are not just about what topics you choose to discuss and what words you use, but also about things like tone of voice, physical appearance, etc., that are completely invisible in the LW context.
It is (for all I know) entirely possible that your social skills are far better than you think they are, or for that matter far worse. (In particular, my making the above observations is not intended as any kind of suggestion that your social skills are in fact bad.) But I don’t think having a good LW karma balance is any evidence either way.
What do you consider to be “evidence”?
I recently played a little game with some friends where we each came up with three positive adjectives to characterize each of the other members of the group. Nearly everyone in the group used some synonym for the word “likable” or “charming” for me. I do not see myself this way—I do not think my social skills are “sub-par” but I think they are maybe … “par.” Apparently I am just totally wrong about this.
Maybe be open to the possibility that you are also wrong about this? I don’t know if you have friends who you could directly ask a question like this?
Did each member of the group get to see or hear the others’ adjectives before choosing their own?
No, it was all mutually blind.
Edited to add: it was a remarkable exercise in that the chosen words tended to be so coherent. In two different cases people chose identical words to describe the same person. In zero cases were anyone’s assessments in wild disagreement with anyone else’s. Apparently “pick 3 adjectives” is a robust characterization technique.
Like what? BTW, have you heard of the impostor syndrome?
Alienating people may be easier in meatspace than in writing, depending on lots of things.
Perhaps people on Less Wrong are less attuned to the nuances of social norms, and rather upvote/downvote based only on the content of the post in question?
The ideal of upvoting/downvoting based only on value is one that has appeal to many of the sort of people who hang around here. We are all still human, but I would not be surprised to be told that many or most Less Wrongers are atypical in this way. (Pay less attention to social contexts, and more to content.)
Let’s not pat ourselves on the back too much. Voters here absolutely respond to social cues (albeit unusual ones from the perspective of the wider culture) and to local status; the vote record on a post is not a totally dispassionate estimate of its quality.
That said, pure social awkwardness might limit a post’s potential upvotes, but it usually isn’t enough to get a post downvoted: that takes obvious bias, factual error, egregiously bad English, a perception of bad faith, or—exceptionally—attracting the ire of a serial downvoter. The truly clueless may risk pattern-matching to “bad faith”, but that’s fairly rare; the rest are more or less orthogonal to social skills.
That was never my intention. I actually initially meant to stress this more, but I cut it as it didn’t really fit.
The most important note that it is not necessarily a good thing to ignore social cues. They exist for good reasons. Discourse flows a lot better when it is polite and well presented. Those who ignore that do so at their own peril.
Some do, however. Including us, to some exten. You cannot deny that the population of Less Wrongers is weighted heavily towards the type of people that might be known as nerds, who dismiss the social glue, and prefer more bluntness in their discourse than is usual. Again, this is not necessarily good: See Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate.
In some ways it is good, though: It encourages the virtues of truth-seeking and of not responding to tone, and in general is an attitude that is conductive to the types of things discussed around here. (This is why Less Wrong is neuroatypical in specifically this direction.)