Smiling is communication. The information content of a message is inversely proportional to its probability. If you smile at strangers in places or situations where that’s very unusual, you’re communicating pretty strongly, and not necessarily what you intend to communicate.
This is of course correct.
The initial post seems like a geek fallacy: that you can just logically analyze social skills and come up with the optimum way to do social things as a workaround to not understanding social skills the normal way. This pretty much always fails, because analyzing social skills to enough level of detail that you can actually do that is really difficult. Couple with the tendency of “rationalists” to take one idea and follow it as far as they can without sanity-checking it or applying Chesterton’s fence, and you get disaster.
This is of course correct.
The initial post seems like a geek fallacy: that you can just logically analyze social skills and come up with the optimum way to do social things as a workaround to not understanding social skills the normal way. This pretty much always fails, because analyzing social skills to enough level of detail that you can actually do that is really difficult. Couple with the tendency of “rationalists” to take one idea and follow it as far as they can without sanity-checking it or applying Chesterton’s fence, and you get disaster.