1) Many geeks have (or at least had at some part of their lives) low social skills. Which makes them generally more forgiving to lack of social skills in other people, because there is a silent voice in their heads telling them “if having low social skills is enough reason to send someone away, then you should be sent away too”; or at least a fear that if there is a treshold of required social skills and it starts rising, at some point it could rise too high for them too, so it is better to oppose it while the treshold is low. From inside, tolerating people with low social skills feels like a virtue, like not being a bully.
Overdoing this can lead to suboptimal results. Presence of people with low social skills can drive other people away, or at least prevent new people from joining. Also there is something like the opposite of the “evaporative cooling”—if most human groups send people with low social skills away, and only some groups accept them, then those tolerant groups will have improportionally huge amounts of such people; they will collect the outcasts from other groups. In extreme situations it can lead to accepting people who later do something really bad (like hurt other group members)… at which moment every outsider will wonder: “How could you just not see all these obvious red flags?” Well, if you train yourself to ignore them, and become proud of your ability to do so...
2) Our kind is known for its failures to cooperate. To reject someone from the group, people have to cooperate at rejecting. Otherwise it is just you having a personal conflict with the person, and it’s probably you who will leave the group.
Generally, trying to reject someone will be pattern-matched by too many people to their own experience of being rejected or bullied at the high school. And the lack of social skills will not be helpful in trying to communicate this problem.
Overdoing this can lead to suboptimal results. Presence of people with low social skills can drive other people away, or at least prevent new people from joining.
Seems to me there are two important factors:
1) Many geeks have (or at least had at some part of their lives) low social skills. Which makes them generally more forgiving to lack of social skills in other people, because there is a silent voice in their heads telling them “if having low social skills is enough reason to send someone away, then you should be sent away too”; or at least a fear that if there is a treshold of required social skills and it starts rising, at some point it could rise too high for them too, so it is better to oppose it while the treshold is low. From inside, tolerating people with low social skills feels like a virtue, like not being a bully.
Overdoing this can lead to suboptimal results. Presence of people with low social skills can drive other people away, or at least prevent new people from joining. Also there is something like the opposite of the “evaporative cooling”—if most human groups send people with low social skills away, and only some groups accept them, then those tolerant groups will have improportionally huge amounts of such people; they will collect the outcasts from other groups. In extreme situations it can lead to accepting people who later do something really bad (like hurt other group members)… at which moment every outsider will wonder: “How could you just not see all these obvious red flags?” Well, if you train yourself to ignore them, and become proud of your ability to do so...
2) Our kind is known for its failures to cooperate. To reject someone from the group, people have to cooperate at rejecting. Otherwise it is just you having a personal conflict with the person, and it’s probably you who will leave the group.
Generally, trying to reject someone will be pattern-matched by too many people to their own experience of being rejected or bullied at the high school. And the lack of social skills will not be helpful in trying to communicate this problem.
Interesting. Though, I read the comment as suggesting a taboo against rejecting a romantic/sexual advance not against excluding someone from a group.
Oh, you are right! Seems like my thoughts switched to a different topic while composing the comment in my head. :D
The Cat Piss Man problem.
That’s GSF#1.