Not directly relevant to this post, but following through the what social skills feel like from the inside link:
He responded that she should really be persuaded by what he’d already done – that she should do things his way rather than the other way around because he has better social skills.
I’m not fully aware of the context, but in every one I have experience of this is considered a hideous faux pas. I strongly expect that this fellow has the worse social skills of the two of them.
This is an example of a rule that is pretty consistent across domains: if someone feels the need to state their status, we should infer that is not their real status. Few songs about being #1 are written by the people who are actually #1, any man who must say ‘I am the King’ is no true king, etc. Consider how ridiculous it would sound if in programming someone were to say “This is not a bug and we shouldn’t change it because I am a better programmer.”
This may be true in the particular case mentioned—I think you only get that sort of maladaptive level of transparency from people to whom the paradigm doesn’t feel native and they have to consciously learn it. (Similarly, part of why the case of GiveWell is so valuable is that GiveWell doesn’t lie or bullshit about what it’s doing to the extent that more conventional orgs do—its commitment to transparency is in some tension with its actual strategy, but executed well enough that it tells the truth about some of the adversarial games it’s playing.)
But there’s a transformation of “I have more social skills, so you should do what I say” that does work, where multiple people within a group will coordinate to invalidate bids for clarity as socially unskilled. This tends to work to silence people when it accumulates enough social proof. To go to the king example, a lot of royal pomp is directly about creating common knowledge that one person is the king and everyone else accepts this fact.
The coordination case is not directly comparable to the direct claim of authority. Getting many people to perform the ceremonies and to publicly proclaim that one is king is direct evidence of deep influence over at least those people. Claiming to be king is unnecessary if there is already such evidence, and ineffective if there is not.
Multiple people within a group saying it is not a transformation of the claim, it’s direct evidence for the claim.
Claiming to be king is unnecessary if there is already such evidence, and ineffective if there is not.
Actual kings thought otherwise strongly enough to have others who claimed to be king of their realm killed if at all possible. Repetition of royal pomp within a king’s lifetime implies that claiming to be king is not redundant for an already-acknowledged king either. Often there were annual or even more frequent reaffirmations, plus constant reinforcement via local protocol among whoever was physically near the king.
Sorry, I was making a distinction between a lone individual making a claim (“I’m the king, listen to me” or “I have social skills, listen to me”) vs enough OTHER people making the claim (“he’s the king, listen to him”) to give evidence that it’s already accepted. The first is useless, the second is powerful enough to obviate the first.
Actual kings thought otherwise strongly enough to have others who claimed to be king of their realm killed if at all possible.
My model for this: other claims to being king say nothing about the claimant, but send signals about the current king they need to quash.
1. There was always a population of people who are opposed to the king, or think they could get a better deal from a different one. This makes any other person who claims to be king a Schelling Point for the current king’s enemies, foreign and domestic. Consider Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, where Mary garnered support from domestic Catholics, and also the French.
2. In light of 1, making a public claim to the throne implicitly claims that the current monarch is too weak to hold the throne. I expect this to be a problem because the weaker the monarch seems, the safer gambling on a new one seems, and so more people who are purely opportunistic are willing to throw in their lot with the monarch’s enemies.
Not directly relevant to this post, but following through the what social skills feel like from the inside link:
I’m not fully aware of the context, but in every one I have experience of this is considered a hideous faux pas. I strongly expect that this fellow has the worse social skills of the two of them.
This is an example of a rule that is pretty consistent across domains: if someone feels the need to state their status, we should infer that is not their real status. Few songs about being #1 are written by the people who are actually #1, any man who must say ‘I am the King’ is no true king, etc. Consider how ridiculous it would sound if in programming someone were to say “This is not a bug and we shouldn’t change it because I am a better programmer.”
This may be true in the particular case mentioned—I think you only get that sort of maladaptive level of transparency from people to whom the paradigm doesn’t feel native and they have to consciously learn it. (Similarly, part of why the case of GiveWell is so valuable is that GiveWell doesn’t lie or bullshit about what it’s doing to the extent that more conventional orgs do—its commitment to transparency is in some tension with its actual strategy, but executed well enough that it tells the truth about some of the adversarial games it’s playing.)
But there’s a transformation of “I have more social skills, so you should do what I say” that does work, where multiple people within a group will coordinate to invalidate bids for clarity as socially unskilled. This tends to work to silence people when it accumulates enough social proof. To go to the king example, a lot of royal pomp is directly about creating common knowledge that one person is the king and everyone else accepts this fact.
The coordination case is not directly comparable to the direct claim of authority. Getting many people to perform the ceremonies and to publicly proclaim that one is king is direct evidence of deep influence over at least those people. Claiming to be king is unnecessary if there is already such evidence, and ineffective if there is not.
Multiple people within a group saying it is not a transformation of the claim, it’s direct evidence for the claim.
Actual kings thought otherwise strongly enough to have others who claimed to be king of their realm killed if at all possible. Repetition of royal pomp within a king’s lifetime implies that claiming to be king is not redundant for an already-acknowledged king either. Often there were annual or even more frequent reaffirmations, plus constant reinforcement via local protocol among whoever was physically near the king.
Sorry, I was making a distinction between a lone individual making a claim (“I’m the king, listen to me” or “I have social skills, listen to me”) vs enough OTHER people making the claim (“he’s the king, listen to him”) to give evidence that it’s already accepted. The first is useless, the second is powerful enough to obviate the first.
My model for this: other claims to being king say nothing about the claimant, but send signals about the current king they need to quash.
1. There was always a population of people who are opposed to the king, or think they could get a better deal from a different one. This makes any other person who claims to be king a Schelling Point for the current king’s enemies, foreign and domestic. Consider Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, where Mary garnered support from domestic Catholics, and also the French.
2. In light of 1, making a public claim to the throne implicitly claims that the current monarch is too weak to hold the throne. I expect this to be a problem because the weaker the monarch seems, the safer gambling on a new one seems, and so more people who are purely opportunistic are willing to throw in their lot with the monarch’s enemies.