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SilasBarta comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong
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It seems this post bundled together the CPU vs. GPU theory regarding the AS vs. NT mindset, with a set of techniques on how to improve social skills. The techniques however - and in a sense this is a credit to the poster - are useful to anyone who wants to improve their social skills, regardless of whether the cause of their lack of skill is:
1) High IQ
2) Introversion
3) Social Inexperience
4) AS
5) <Suggestions>
A combination of several of these factors might be the cause of social awkwardness. It's possible to place too much importance on looking for a root cause. The immediate cause is simply a lack of understanding of social interaction - the techniques will help anyone develop that understanding.
Some NTs are somewhat unconscious of the game, but that doesn't mean they don't understand it. I'd argue the most useful definition of "understanding" is that one's brain contains the knowledge - whether one is conscious of it or not - that enables one to successfully perform the relevant task. Any other definition, is quite literally, academic. Furthermore, I'd argue that those best at the game actually become conscious of what is unconscious for most people, such as the degree to which status plays a role in social interaction. This helps them gain an edge over others, such as better predicting the ramifications of gossip, or the ability to construct a joke. A joke that works well socially, often consists of the more socially aware person bringing to the surface an aspect of someone else's self-serving behavior that was previously just under the social group's conscious radar. It would be impossible to construct such jokes without a conscious understanding of the game.
If you want to learn social skills, hang out with people who have them. And it's not enough to just hang out - you have to enjoy it and participate. And to be frank, often the easiest way to do that is with alcohol. And don't assume you're so different to other people - why do you think they're drinking?
I think the distinction can be helpfully represented in terms of my levels of understanding.
NTs understand social interaction at Level 1, the level at which one is capable of outputting the right (winning) results, even if that is due to an inscrutable black-box model contained inside oneself (which is the case here).
But there are higher levels to reach than that, and it is not an academic distinction. To advance to Level 2, you must not only produce the right results, but also be able to "plug in" your understanding of the social interaction domain to various other domains, and make inferences between them. And most NTs cannot do this: they get the results "for free", even (and perhaps especially) if they cannot derive these results as implications of other domains (or vice versa).
Roko's point, in turn, can be rephrased as saying that HFASes try to build up a Level 2 understanding directly, checking for cross-domain consistency before they adopt any rules; and that this is because their hardware doesn't feed them the correct black-box output, as happens in NTs. Further, inferences that HFASes make come from applying a more general-purpose "reasoning engine" to social interaction; to NTs, the inferences just look dumb, even if they can't explain why.
Someone with sufficiently advanced understanding will be able to connect the NT black-box model to useful models for everything else, explaining the basis for NT conventions. This can grow from an NT mind or a HFAS one, but they will take different paths.
In any case, there's a higher level of understanding to reach, even if a specific threshold suffices for some purpose.