I think it’s the “faking it” part I and many other people find objectionable.
This is where you and several other people here make a critical mistake. You view various aspects of human mating behavior exclusively in terms of signaling objective traits, and then you add a moral dimension to it by trying to judge whether these objective traits supposedly being signaled are true or fake.
In reality, however, human social behavior—and especially mating behavior—is about much more complex higher-order signaling strategies, which are a product of a long and complicated evolutionary interplay of strategies for signaling, counter-signaling, fake signaling, and fake signaling detection—as well as the complex game-theoretic questions of what can ultimately be inferred from one’s signaled intentions. Nobody has disentangled this whole complicated mess into a complete and coherent theory yet, though some basic principles have been established pretty conclusively, both by the academic evolutionary psychology and by people generalizing informally from practical experiences. However, the key point is that in a species practicing higher-order signaling strategies, signaling ability itself becomes an adaptive trait. You’re not supposed to just signal objective traits directly; you also have to demonstrate your skill in navigating through the complex signaling games. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback cycle, where at the end of the day, your signaling skills matter in their own right, just like your other abilities for navigating through the world matter—and most things being signaled are in fact meta-signals about these traits.
Therefore, where you see “faking it” and “head games” and whatnot, in reality it’s just humans practicing their regular social behaviors. You’ll miss the point spectacularly if you analyze these behaviors in terms of simple announcements of objective traits and plain intentions and direct negotiations based on these announcements, where anything beyond that is deceitful faking. Learning how to play the signaling games better is no more deceitful than, say, practicing basic social norms of politeness instead of just honestly blurting out your opinions of other people to their faces.
I agree with you, and pjeby, who made similar points: the complexity of actual social games is higher than they appear on the surface, and much signaling is about signaling ability itself. But these insights also imply that the value of “running social interactions in software” is limited. Our general purpose cognitive machinery is unlikely to be able to reproduce the throughput and latency characteristics of a dedicated social coprocessor, and can really only handle relatively simple games, or situations where you have a lot of time to think. In other words, trying to play mating games with an NT “in software” is kind of like trying to play basketball “in software”.
Your argument is fallacious because it rests on overstretching the software/hardware analogy. Human brain contains highly reconfigurable hardware, and if some particular computations are practiced enough, the brain will eventually start synthesizing specialized circuits for them, thus dramatically boosting their speed and accuracy. Or to say it the traditional way, practice makes perfect.
Whether it’s throwing darts, programming computers, speaking a foreign language, or various social interactions, if you’re lacking any experience, your first attempts will be very clumsy, as your general cognitive circuits struggle ineptly to do the necessary computations. After enough practice, though, specialized hardware gradually takes over and things start going much more smoothly; you just do what it takes without much conscious thinking. You may never match someone with greater natural talent or who has much more accumulated practice initially, but the improvements can certainly be dramatic. (And even before that, you might be surprised how well some simple heuristics work.)
“Practice makes perfect” has a rather different emphasis from Roko’s suggestion of “running social interactions in software”, which is what I was addressing.
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.
I’m also curious what the “simple heuristics” that you mention are.
“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.
This is where you and several other people here make a critical mistake. You view various aspects of human mating behavior exclusively in terms of signaling objective traits, and then you add a moral dimension to it by trying to judge whether these objective traits supposedly being signaled are true or fake.
In reality, however, human social behavior—and especially mating behavior—is about much more complex higher-order signaling strategies, which are a product of a long and complicated evolutionary interplay of strategies for signaling, counter-signaling, fake signaling, and fake signaling detection—as well as the complex game-theoretic questions of what can ultimately be inferred from one’s signaled intentions. Nobody has disentangled this whole complicated mess into a complete and coherent theory yet, though some basic principles have been established pretty conclusively, both by the academic evolutionary psychology and by people generalizing informally from practical experiences. However, the key point is that in a species practicing higher-order signaling strategies, signaling ability itself becomes an adaptive trait. You’re not supposed to just signal objective traits directly; you also have to demonstrate your skill in navigating through the complex signaling games. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback cycle, where at the end of the day, your signaling skills matter in their own right, just like your other abilities for navigating through the world matter—and most things being signaled are in fact meta-signals about these traits.
Therefore, where you see “faking it” and “head games” and whatnot, in reality it’s just humans practicing their regular social behaviors. You’ll miss the point spectacularly if you analyze these behaviors in terms of simple announcements of objective traits and plain intentions and direct negotiations based on these announcements, where anything beyond that is deceitful faking. Learning how to play the signaling games better is no more deceitful than, say, practicing basic social norms of politeness instead of just honestly blurting out your opinions of other people to their faces.
I agree with you, and pjeby, who made similar points: the complexity of actual social games is higher than they appear on the surface, and much signaling is about signaling ability itself. But these insights also imply that the value of “running social interactions in software” is limited. Our general purpose cognitive machinery is unlikely to be able to reproduce the throughput and latency characteristics of a dedicated social coprocessor, and can really only handle relatively simple games, or situations where you have a lot of time to think. In other words, trying to play mating games with an NT “in software” is kind of like trying to play basketball “in software”.
Your argument is fallacious because it rests on overstretching the software/hardware analogy. Human brain contains highly reconfigurable hardware, and if some particular computations are practiced enough, the brain will eventually start synthesizing specialized circuits for them, thus dramatically boosting their speed and accuracy. Or to say it the traditional way, practice makes perfect.
Whether it’s throwing darts, programming computers, speaking a foreign language, or various social interactions, if you’re lacking any experience, your first attempts will be very clumsy, as your general cognitive circuits struggle ineptly to do the necessary computations. After enough practice, though, specialized hardware gradually takes over and things start going much more smoothly; you just do what it takes without much conscious thinking. You may never match someone with greater natural talent or who has much more accumulated practice initially, but the improvements can certainly be dramatic. (And even before that, you might be surprised how well some simple heuristics work.)
“Practice makes perfect” has a rather different emphasis from Roko’s suggestion of “running social interactions in software”, which is what I was addressing.
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.
I’m also curious what the “simple heuristics” that you mention are.
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.