Be prompt, generous, and sincere in your compliments. Ideally, don’t use plain adjectives—use descriptions. (Exceptions here are compliments on articles of clothing—“your boots are AWESOME!” is kosher.) It only feels silly from your end. If you are just trying to make friends, avoid anything that (given your and the potential friend’s genders) would appear laced with sexual interest, unless you can pull it off with genuine innocence and then reliably follow up with genuine innocence instead of changing tacks midway.
Have a “standby” interaction prompt that you can pull out in lulls which isn’t threatening, is generally well received, and provides a hook for further conversation. I usually offer people food. I’m sure there are others that would do—if you’re trying to conduct an informal survey of something, for instance (“Hey, I’m trying to find out different ways people celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, what do you do?), that would probably work too.
Learn to pick apart people’s dialogue for followup questions—you can practice this on fictional dialogue; just take a good-sized sentence and write down five followup tangents. Example:
“I went out to Cape Cod last week with my friend Tess and we found some sea glass.”
Followups:
“Ooh, do you go to Cape Cod a lot?”
“Neat, what else did you do there?”
“Wow! How long did you stay on the cape?”
“Cool—what are you going to do with the sea glass?”
“Hm, I don’t think I know Tess—tell me about her?”
Note that these all prompt the potential friend to talk, rather than providing an excuse for you to do so (any of the above would be preferable to, for instance, “Hey, I went to Cape Cod once and had the most fantastic lobster...”) Also note that each sentence started with a particle that shows interest. Eliminating these runs a significant risk of making it sound like you’re just interrogating the person. And: it is quite important that you actually want to know the answer to the question you pick. If you can come up with lists of five but don’t give a crap about how any of them would be answered, you’re talking to supernaturally boring people, you’re a misanthrope, or you’re doing the exercise wrong.
Go ahead and be the first to suggest exchanging contact information. On the internet, this means e-mail or better, IM. In person this means a place to meet next, or possibly phone numbers or addresses (or e-mail or IM). It’s scary to most everybody else, too, so don’t expect them to do it. Leave a line of social retreat if they never want to hear from you again, avoid any requests for contact info customarily laced with sexual tension, but do make it clear that you think they’re neat and you’d like to be their friend. You can even haul out the elementary school line “Wanna be friends?”—if it makes you feel more comfortable with it, go on a brief tangent about how “we lose so much when we leave elementary school and it’s no longer socially acceptable to make friends by walking up to someone on the playground and asking if they want to be...” beat… “Wanna be my friend?”.
Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I’ll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I’d never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket. (It was my florally embroidered denim thing, by far the loudest thing I own). I was trying to make friends, so instead of thanking her and looking away, I fired back with a compliment on her cloak and soon had her talking up a storm about knitting. When she was interested in what I did with my spare time, I didn’t talk about school, even though that was most salient to me at the time—I talked about cooking, gambling that the domestic handicrafts have some overlap in their aficionados. I told her I planned to make pumpkin bread as soon as I had a can of pumpkin. Which it just so happened to turn out that she had in her cupboard, and she lived in my apartment complex. So I went home with her, accepted the can of pumpkin, went home and made bread, and brought one of the loaves over to her place, where I hung out for another couple of hours chatting about textiles, her Hassidic Judaism, and her multiple personalities. (I am no longer friends with her over differences of opinion on a political/ethical matter, but it’s still a great making-friends story.) Social spontaneity is what let me go to a stranger’s place for canned pumpkin and bring her a loaf of bread later.
You know what’s interesting? A lot of the above is oddly reminiscent of some of the sounder pick-up advice.
My experience with mastering the processes of sales and networking convinced me, when I later came across PUA lore, that one thing that is not wrong with the PUA community is the aspiration to distill procedural knowledge that applies to the broad category of social interactions.
If you can come up with lists of five but don’t give a crap about how any of them would be answered, you’re talking to supernaturally boring people, you’re a misanthrope, or you’re doing the exercise wrong.
Wow, this sounds really familiar to me, which probably implies that I’m a misanthrope. Do you have any remedies?
To me, most people just seem to be pretty boring and I want to change that ( don’t like to be a cynical asshole), but every time I start a conversation with a random student from my university I start to feel even more lonely than before. They either just don’t understand what I’m talking about, or are not interested or whatever...sigh.
I believe to have pretty decent social skills ( trained them in high school) but now most of my conservations are still depressing.
They either just don’t understand what I’m talking about, or are not interested or whatever...sigh.
Implies you’re picking topics. Get them to pick a topic, and they’ll be interested and they’ll understand what is being talked about. If they pick a boring topic, go a little meta and do a perspective-taking exercise: what might it be like to be interested in this? What about it would fascinate you? If you were writing about a fictional character with this interest, what would you write? Or, interpret the topic through a lens/via an analogy that makes it more relevant to you (but don’t change the subject to the one you had in mind when you do this; that’s not the point).
Also, seek out people who share interests/intellectual levels with you in the first place. Random people can be cool, but you seem to have poor luck with them, and filtration is worthwhile.
If they pick a boring topic, go a little meta and do a perspective-taking exercise: what might it be like to be interested in this? What about it would fascinate you?
Wow, this seems kinda hard. I think I know what you mean, but topics like soccer( or sports in general), celebrities or TV-shows ( with some exceptions ) seem to be “immune” to this exercise;)
seek out people who share interests/intellectual levels with you in the first place
I think this is the main problem. There are not many people out there in the real world who share my interests.
Probably it’s more efficient to start socializing on sites like LessWrong, although it feels somehow weird.
If they pick a boring topic, go a little meta and do a perspective-taking exercise: what might it be like to be interested in this? What about it would fascinate you?
Wow, this seems kinda hard. I think I know what you mean, but topics like soccer( or sports in general), celebrities or TV-shows ( with some exceptions ) seem to be “immune” to this exercise;)
Is the person interested in sports as a substitute for war? As a presentation of the capacities of the human body? As a tribal bonding activity with eir friends? Does the person like celebrities because ey can gossip about them with impunity? Because there is more information about them than there would ever reasonably be about other people ey didn’t know? Because ey respects or admires their talents at whatever they are celebrities for? Does the person like TV because of the storylines? Because of the visual effects? Because of the illusion that they are present with those celebrities that they find so interesting?
(I don’t recommend asking these questions directly, but keep these curiosities in mind and ask questions that get at them obliquely: “How long have you supported Team X?” “Do you think it’s more fun to hear about actors, or people who are just plain famous?” “What’s your favorite thing about the show?”)
I don’t think any topics that humans are genuinely interested in are immune to the exercise. If you’re immune to the exercise, by all means get your daily dose of socialization from places like here.
Is the person interested in sports as a substitute for war? As a presentation of the capacities of the human body? As a tribal bonding activity with eir friends? Does the person like celebrities because ey can gossip about them with impunity? Because there is more information about them than there would ever reasonably be about other people ey didn’t know? Because ey respects or admires their talents at whatever they are celebrities for? Does the person like TV because of the storylines? Because of the visual effects? Because of the illusion that they are present with those celebrities that they find so interesting?
But, I don’t care!
I will try my luck on Lesswrong, I guess;)
Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I’ll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I’d never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket.
WARNING. If you’re male and you attempt to talk to a woman on public transportation, you may very well end up making her extremely uncomfortable. This xkcd comic triggered a major backlash.
If you do not have practice using social spontaneity to good effect it is ideal to try it in situations where the other party may both physically and socially escape, just as a general rule. On public transportation is not a physically escapable place to be.
Yes, what I used to do was yell greetings at random people on campus. Sometimes questionable propositions. Plenty of room for escape, especially when I’m sitting and they’re walking. I met several good friends that way.
ETA: “questionable propositions” here being things like “P=NP” or “multiple realizability is true”
Wait, seriously? Back when I was single I used to chat up girls on trains every chance I got. Never went anywhere, but never saw any signs of discomfort either.
I’m… extremely biased… but I can’t imagine getting the icky vibes from you that cause discomfort, even in a non-escapable space. You simply don’t come off as remotely scary.
It’s true. MBlume is the sort of person who could run up to someone while wearing a Nazi uniform, covered in blood, with swords in both hands, shouting about an imminent nuclear blast, all without coming off as threatening.
MBlume is the sort of person who could run up to someone while wearing a Nazi uniform, covered in blood, with swords in both hands, shouting about an imminent nuclear blast, all without coming off as threatening.
I’m… extremely biased… but I can definitely imagine getting the icky vibes from you, Steven, that cause discomfort, especially in a non-escapable space. You simply come across as really creepy.
Fortunately, this is one problem that I’ve had that I’ve almost completely managed to solve. (And in at least one case, outside observers agreed that it wasn’t my fault.)
I would guess that oliverbeatson is suggesting that other things being equal, a man with facial hair (at least of a certain type) will come across as more of a creepy stalker than one without. I have picked this idea up from friends as well.
If the facial hair idea is true, it makes MBlume’s non-threatingness (discussed elsewhere in the thread) all the more noteworthy given his facial hair handicap. Although maybe if MBlume combined the Nazi uniform with facial hair in the form of a Hitler mustache, he would appear threatening.
I’ll tentatively suggest that creepiness isn’t so much a matter of grooming (good, bad, non-standard, specific details) as an appearance of clinginess. It’s an impression that the creepy man wants to get too close too fast and won’t go away.
As I understand it, the “major backlash” was only from a few radical feminist sites, often coming from people who had their own issues such as PTSD, and is emphatically not representative of the way most people see the world. I’d advise someone dealing with social anxiety to practice talking to people in all sorts of situations and specifically not worry whether or not you make people uncomfortable.
A lot of social anxiety is just worrying that you might make someone uncomfortable, so I think this warning is actually harmful and counterproductive. The last thing someone struggling with talking to people needs is something else to worry about. In fact, one possible technique is to try to make people uncomfortable, just so you realize it’s not a big deal, and don’t build it up in your head as horrible.
My favourite spontaneous-friendship story: I was walking through the university centre and heard a voice singing a song that I had sung before with church choir. I tracked down the source to a girl waiting in line for the ATM, and told her enthusiastically that I really liked the song she was singing. (It wasn’t faked enthusiasm. Music is one of my biggest interests right now). We ended up talking for 45 minutes about music and religion, exchanging emails, and seeing each other a fair bit over the next year.
Yes. She didn’t keep her own kitchen altogether kosher anyway; her roommate wasn’t Jewish at all and didn’t make any particular effort to pretend to be when selecting meals.
Some tidbits:
Be prompt, generous, and sincere in your compliments. Ideally, don’t use plain adjectives—use descriptions. (Exceptions here are compliments on articles of clothing—“your boots are AWESOME!” is kosher.) It only feels silly from your end. If you are just trying to make friends, avoid anything that (given your and the potential friend’s genders) would appear laced with sexual interest, unless you can pull it off with genuine innocence and then reliably follow up with genuine innocence instead of changing tacks midway.
Have a “standby” interaction prompt that you can pull out in lulls which isn’t threatening, is generally well received, and provides a hook for further conversation. I usually offer people food. I’m sure there are others that would do—if you’re trying to conduct an informal survey of something, for instance (“Hey, I’m trying to find out different ways people celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, what do you do?), that would probably work too.
Learn to pick apart people’s dialogue for followup questions—you can practice this on fictional dialogue; just take a good-sized sentence and write down five followup tangents. Example:
“I went out to Cape Cod last week with my friend Tess and we found some sea glass.”
Followups:
“Ooh, do you go to Cape Cod a lot?”
“Neat, what else did you do there?”
“Wow! How long did you stay on the cape?”
“Cool—what are you going to do with the sea glass?”
“Hm, I don’t think I know Tess—tell me about her?”
Note that these all prompt the potential friend to talk, rather than providing an excuse for you to do so (any of the above would be preferable to, for instance, “Hey, I went to Cape Cod once and had the most fantastic lobster...”) Also note that each sentence started with a particle that shows interest. Eliminating these runs a significant risk of making it sound like you’re just interrogating the person. And: it is quite important that you actually want to know the answer to the question you pick. If you can come up with lists of five but don’t give a crap about how any of them would be answered, you’re talking to supernaturally boring people, you’re a misanthrope, or you’re doing the exercise wrong.
Go ahead and be the first to suggest exchanging contact information. On the internet, this means e-mail or better, IM. In person this means a place to meet next, or possibly phone numbers or addresses (or e-mail or IM). It’s scary to most everybody else, too, so don’t expect them to do it. Leave a line of social retreat if they never want to hear from you again, avoid any requests for contact info customarily laced with sexual tension, but do make it clear that you think they’re neat and you’d like to be their friend. You can even haul out the elementary school line “Wanna be friends?”—if it makes you feel more comfortable with it, go on a brief tangent about how “we lose so much when we leave elementary school and it’s no longer socially acceptable to make friends by walking up to someone on the playground and asking if they want to be...” beat… “Wanna be my friend?”.
Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I’ll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I’d never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket. (It was my florally embroidered denim thing, by far the loudest thing I own). I was trying to make friends, so instead of thanking her and looking away, I fired back with a compliment on her cloak and soon had her talking up a storm about knitting. When she was interested in what I did with my spare time, I didn’t talk about school, even though that was most salient to me at the time—I talked about cooking, gambling that the domestic handicrafts have some overlap in their aficionados. I told her I planned to make pumpkin bread as soon as I had a can of pumpkin. Which it just so happened to turn out that she had in her cupboard, and she lived in my apartment complex. So I went home with her, accepted the can of pumpkin, went home and made bread, and brought one of the loaves over to her place, where I hung out for another couple of hours chatting about textiles, her Hassidic Judaism, and her multiple personalities. (I am no longer friends with her over differences of opinion on a political/ethical matter, but it’s still a great making-friends story.) Social spontaneity is what let me go to a stranger’s place for canned pumpkin and bring her a loaf of bread later.
You know what’s interesting? A lot of the above is oddly reminiscent of some of the sounder pick-up advice.
My experience with mastering the processes of sales and networking convinced me, when I later came across PUA lore, that one thing that is not wrong with the PUA community is the aspiration to distill procedural knowledge that applies to the broad category of social interactions.
(With a notable exception of the first paragraph, which can be approximately reversed.)
Excellent comment!
Wow, this sounds really familiar to me, which probably implies that I’m a misanthrope. Do you have any remedies? To me, most people just seem to be pretty boring and I want to change that ( don’t like to be a cynical asshole), but every time I start a conversation with a random student from my university I start to feel even more lonely than before. They either just don’t understand what I’m talking about, or are not interested or whatever...sigh.
I believe to have pretty decent social skills ( trained them in high school) but now most of my conservations are still depressing.
Implies you’re picking topics. Get them to pick a topic, and they’ll be interested and they’ll understand what is being talked about. If they pick a boring topic, go a little meta and do a perspective-taking exercise: what might it be like to be interested in this? What about it would fascinate you? If you were writing about a fictional character with this interest, what would you write? Or, interpret the topic through a lens/via an analogy that makes it more relevant to you (but don’t change the subject to the one you had in mind when you do this; that’s not the point).
Also, seek out people who share interests/intellectual levels with you in the first place. Random people can be cool, but you seem to have poor luck with them, and filtration is worthwhile.
Thank you for your advice!
Wow, this seems kinda hard. I think I know what you mean, but topics like soccer( or sports in general), celebrities or TV-shows ( with some exceptions ) seem to be “immune” to this exercise;)
I think this is the main problem. There are not many people out there in the real world who share my interests. Probably it’s more efficient to start socializing on sites like LessWrong, although it feels somehow weird.
Is the person interested in sports as a substitute for war? As a presentation of the capacities of the human body? As a tribal bonding activity with eir friends? Does the person like celebrities because ey can gossip about them with impunity? Because there is more information about them than there would ever reasonably be about other people ey didn’t know? Because ey respects or admires their talents at whatever they are celebrities for? Does the person like TV because of the storylines? Because of the visual effects? Because of the illusion that they are present with those celebrities that they find so interesting?
(I don’t recommend asking these questions directly, but keep these curiosities in mind and ask questions that get at them obliquely: “How long have you supported Team X?” “Do you think it’s more fun to hear about actors, or people who are just plain famous?” “What’s your favorite thing about the show?”)
I don’t think any topics that humans are genuinely interested in are immune to the exercise. If you’re immune to the exercise, by all means get your daily dose of socialization from places like here.
But, I don’t care! I will try my luck on Lesswrong, I guess;)
WARNING. If you’re male and you attempt to talk to a woman on public transportation, you may very well end up making her extremely uncomfortable. This xkcd comic triggered a major backlash.
If you do not have practice using social spontaneity to good effect it is ideal to try it in situations where the other party may both physically and socially escape, just as a general rule. On public transportation is not a physically escapable place to be.
Yes, what I used to do was yell greetings at random people on campus. Sometimes questionable propositions. Plenty of room for escape, especially when I’m sitting and they’re walking. I met several good friends that way.
ETA: “questionable propositions” here being things like “P=NP” or “multiple realizability is true”
Which questionable propositions? Some strange things come to mind.
Wait, seriously? Back when I was single I used to chat up girls on trains every chance I got. Never went anywhere, but never saw any signs of discomfort either.
I’m… extremely biased… but I can’t imagine getting the icky vibes from you that cause discomfort, even in a non-escapable space. You simply don’t come off as remotely scary.
It’s true. MBlume is the sort of person who could run up to someone while wearing a Nazi uniform, covered in blood, with swords in both hands, shouting about an imminent nuclear blast, all without coming off as threatening.
It’s true. I’ve seen him do it.
I’m… extremely biased… but I can definitely imagine getting the icky vibes from you, Steven, that cause discomfort, especially in a non-escapable space. You simply come across as really creepy.
[Full disclosure: I am married to Steven.]
I have a horrible tendency to come across as a creepy stalker. :(
If I saw video of you I might be able to offer tips, but I can’t promise they’ll help.
Fortunately, this is one problem that I’ve had that I’ve almost completely managed to solve. (And in at least one case, outside observers agreed that it wasn’t my fault.)
I’m curious… how did you solve it?
Did it involve facial hair? Often does.
I don’t understand this post at all.
I would guess that oliverbeatson is suggesting that other things being equal, a man with facial hair (at least of a certain type) will come across as more of a creepy stalker than one without. I have picked this idea up from friends as well.
If the facial hair idea is true, it makes MBlume’s non-threatingness (discussed elsewhere in the thread) all the more noteworthy given his facial hair handicap. Although maybe if MBlume combined the Nazi uniform with facial hair in the form of a Hitler mustache, he would appear threatening.
I’ll tentatively suggest that creepiness isn’t so much a matter of grooming (good, bad, non-standard, specific details) as an appearance of clinginess. It’s an impression that the creepy man wants to get too close too fast and won’t go away.
This is not the same thing as being frightening.
As I understand it, the “major backlash” was only from a few radical feminist sites, often coming from people who had their own issues such as PTSD, and is emphatically not representative of the way most people see the world. I’d advise someone dealing with social anxiety to practice talking to people in all sorts of situations and specifically not worry whether or not you make people uncomfortable.
A lot of social anxiety is just worrying that you might make someone uncomfortable, so I think this warning is actually harmful and counterproductive. The last thing someone struggling with talking to people needs is something else to worry about. In fact, one possible technique is to try to make people uncomfortable, just so you realize it’s not a big deal, and don’t build it up in your head as horrible.
I don’t mind people talking to me on public transportation, as long as they immediately believe me when I say I’m not interested, and leave me alone.
The way you avoid negative outcomes or ill will in such situations is to only approach people who will appreciate being approached by you.
And how do you determine that? Um, implementation issue. Yeah.
My favourite spontaneous-friendship story: I was walking through the university centre and heard a voice singing a song that I had sung before with church choir. I tracked down the source to a girl waiting in line for the ATM, and told her enthusiastically that I really liked the song she was singing. (It wasn’t faked enthusiasm. Music is one of my biggest interests right now). We ended up talking for 45 minutes about music and religion, exchanging emails, and seeing each other a fair bit over the next year.
Thanks for this. It looks like very useful advice.
The specific examples here were very interesting and helpful to me.
A Hassidic Jew was willing to eat pumpkin bread baked in your kitchen?
Yes. She didn’t keep her own kitchen altogether kosher anyway; her roommate wasn’t Jewish at all and didn’t make any particular effort to pretend to be when selecting meals.