“Practice makes perfect” has a rather different emphasis from Roko’s suggestion of “running social interactions in software”, which is what I was addressing.
Fair enough, if you’re talking only about the initial stage where you’re running things purely “in software,” before any skill buildup.
But to answer your point, I agree that improvements in social skills from practice can be dramatic, but probably not for everyone, just like not everyone can learn how to program computers. It would be interesting to see some empirical data on how much improvement can be expected, and what the distribution of outcomes is, so people can make more informed choices about how much effort to put into practicing social skills.
From what I’ve observed in practice, people with normal (and especially above average) intelligence and without extraordinary problems (like e.g. a severe speech disorder) who start at a low social skill level can see significant improvements with fairly modest efforts. In this regard, the situation is much better than with technical or math skills, where you have to acquire a fairly high level of mastery to be able to put them to any productive use at all.
I don’t deny that some people with extremely bad social skills are sincerely content with their lives. However, my impression is that a very considerable percentage would be happy to change it but believe that it’s impossible, or at least far more difficult than it is. Many such people, especially the more intelligent ones, would greatly benefit from exposure to explicit analyses of human social behaviors (both mating and otherwise) that unfortunately fall under the hypocritical norms against honest and explicit discussion that I mentioned in my above comment. So they remain falsely convinced that there is something deeply mysterious, inconceivable, and illogical about what they’re lacking.
I’m also curious what the “simple heuristics” that you mention are.
Well, which ones are the most effective for a particular person will depend on his concrete problems. But often bad social skills are to a significant degree—though never completely—due to behaviors that can be recognized and avoided using fairly simple rules. An example would be, say, someone who consistently overestimates how much people are interested in what he has to say and ends up being a bore. If he starts being more conservative in estimating his collocutors’ interest before starting his diatribes, it can be a tremendous first step.
This is admittedly a pretty bland and narrow example; unfortunately, pieces of advice that would be more generally applicable tend to be very un-PC to discuss due to the above mentioned hypocritical norms.
Wei_Dai:
Fair enough, if you’re talking only about the initial stage where you’re running things purely “in software,” before any skill buildup.
From what I’ve observed in practice, people with normal (and especially above average) intelligence and without extraordinary problems (like e.g. a severe speech disorder) who start at a low social skill level can see significant improvements with fairly modest efforts. In this regard, the situation is much better than with technical or math skills, where you have to acquire a fairly high level of mastery to be able to put them to any productive use at all.
I don’t deny that some people with extremely bad social skills are sincerely content with their lives. However, my impression is that a very considerable percentage would be happy to change it but believe that it’s impossible, or at least far more difficult than it is. Many such people, especially the more intelligent ones, would greatly benefit from exposure to explicit analyses of human social behaviors (both mating and otherwise) that unfortunately fall under the hypocritical norms against honest and explicit discussion that I mentioned in my above comment. So they remain falsely convinced that there is something deeply mysterious, inconceivable, and illogical about what they’re lacking.
Well, which ones are the most effective for a particular person will depend on his concrete problems. But often bad social skills are to a significant degree—though never completely—due to behaviors that can be recognized and avoided using fairly simple rules. An example would be, say, someone who consistently overestimates how much people are interested in what he has to say and ends up being a bore. If he starts being more conservative in estimating his collocutors’ interest before starting his diatribes, it can be a tremendous first step.
This is admittedly a pretty bland and narrow example; unfortunately, pieces of advice that would be more generally applicable tend to be very un-PC to discuss due to the above mentioned hypocritical norms.