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Blueberry comments on How to always have interesting conversations - Less Wrong
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You're correct that if you go up to a random person 200 times and start talking, you will probably not creep out all 200. I was exaggerating, which is why I said "the equivalent of" creeping 200 people out: my point was that everyone needs to make lots of awkward mistakes to learn social skills, and that you need to be willing to do so. Silas stated that this wasn't an acceptable risk, and I amended his figure upward to indicate that you have to be willing to deal with even worse outcomes than he was fearing, even if they're unlikely to occur, and that learning conversational skills can be difficult and involve a lot of rejection.
I'm not going to list all my mistakes, but I have certainly made more than 200 awkward comments to people, experienced more than 200 rejections, made people feel uncomfortable more than 200 times, and so forth (though not in a row, admittedly). It doesn't make you "way off course"; it's the only way to learn.
It looks like we're referring to different things by the term "[equivalent of] creeping people out". I agree you will have to make mistakes and get rejections. But I was referring to a specific context for the "creeping out".
Specifically, the problem at hand was that of how to get good at starting conversations with random strangers. The strategy being recommended was one that dismissed the downside of creeping out random strangers (which is often associated with the venue supervisor -- boss, proprietor, conductor, bouncer, whatever -- telling you to stop or leave).
My comment was that, no, doing things that disruptive and creepy, that often, in that short of a period, is not an acceptable risk, and not what you should suggest anyone should do if that's the risk.
(And RichardKennaway confirmed that enduring that kind of social ostracism is way excessive for the skill being learned, so I'm not alone in this assessment.)
You, in turn, were taking "creeping out" to refer to relatively minor goofs in a context where the consequences are much less severe, where you've already done significant deft social navigation around that group, and where those who see the error have good reason to be much more understanding of the goof. While I agree that rejections, mistakes, etc. are to be expected and are part of life, you were equating very different kinds of rejections, and -- like most sociality advisors here -- assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier.
In any case, those are far different kinds of failures than "becoming the creepy guy at the bookstore" or having people get the bouncer to talk to you because of conversational goofs (which has happened to me, so this isn't idle speculation). You have an inaccurate picture of what you were expecting me to go through, so your advice, though relevant for other social skills, was not applicable here, and comes across as -- like Richard noted -- shrugging off the possibility of breaking bones to learn how to ride a bike, as if it's no big deal.
Am I starting to make sense here?
And who modded this down? I'm sorry the comment I made which Richard elaborated on was too brief to make my point, but why shouldn't I have made that comment? Should I not have confirmed that Richard was correctly representing my objection?
I don't care about the loss of karma here, but I want to know why someone deems it "a type of comment I want less of". I get that if I were merely agreeing, it was a waste of space, but since I was the one making the original comment, my agreement and confirmation is informative to the discussion.
I'm not dismissing it. I'm saying that may be the price that you have to pay in order to develop these skills. If you're not willing to pay it, I think it would be very difficult to learn (though there are ways of reducing the risk: CronoDAS suggests looking for eye contact first, which might help).
If you know what these disruptive creepy things are, just don't do them. If you don't know what they are (and how to identify them on the fly), you need to learn, and that may involve making big mistakes. How else will you learn? If you don't think it's an acceptable risk, fine, but I think developing the skills is worth the risk. If you routinely, inadvertently, creep people out during social interactions, you have two options: avoid people forever and become a hermit, or practice talking to people and learn how to fix the problem, and it's better to practice on strangers you never have to see again.
I don't think I am assuming away the problem, and I think I do understand what you mean. It may be tougher for you than for most people, for a variety of reasons. In order to get past this barrier and develop social skills, I am recommending the specific strategy of going to different places (bookstores, coffeeshops, bars, parks, the grocery store) and starting up friendly conversations with lots of people. You can do this right now. I understand that you may get kicked out of these venues. I understand that everyone may think you're creepy. I understand that this type of rejection is painful. Do it anyway. If you get kicked out of one place, try another. How else are you going to get past this barrier?
I don't think you do understand. I live in a small town, in which there are few alternatives if I'm kicked out of one of them. And I think it's pretty easy for you to smugly shrug off this social ostracism as "just something we all have to go through" when, um, you didn't have to go through it, and don't understand why anyone would have to go through it.
This is not to say I'm looking for excuses to do nothing -- everything I've said in this thread is quite well-grounded.
- Nor to say that I haven't made serious efforts -- I've gotten involved in groups, which has gotten me experience, albeit not with random people.
- Nor to say that I lack opportunities to practice conversations -- just that I don't have an immense hoard of people to draw interaction experience from.
- Nor to say that I'm completely clueless -- just that the random approach thing doesn't come easily, and is a critical pre-requisite for the other advice.
- Nor to say that no one can provide helpful advice -- but some certainly can't.
It's inevitable that I'll have to use advice that doesn't assume away the problem, for one thing.
When someone starts saying there are only two options, that throws up a red flag for me. There are rarely just two options. A third option would be to listen to people who went through the mental transition I want to go through, or have studied this topic carefully, such as (to various degrees) CronoDAS, Roko, and HughRistik.
I'm proud of you for having most of these social skills naturally, and that for you, improvement mainly consists of going from great to supergreat. Really, I am. But maybe your perspective isn't the appropriate one here?
(Edited to tone down.)
For another it requires directing resources into solving the problem rather than justifying why your circumstances give you claim to victim status.
Didn't I read this same conversation a year ago? Or was that someone else with the same script?
In the past year or two:
I've joined a large organization that wouldn't otherwise interest me, gotten involved in several of its subgroups and events, and practices conversation in those contexts. I've taken Juggler's course and his subordinate's. I've brought a date to company event to increase my apparent attractiveness. I've gone to four weddings. I've gone out with two women from the above group.
I've read books and web resources about sociality. I've been complimented on my ability to make group newcomers feel welcome. I've gotten to the point where I can comfortably say hi strangers. I've gone to two costume parties and talked with many of the people there. I've consulted with real meatspace people in the above group about my sociality problems and what to do. I've joined up with a political group, organized some of its events, and briefly led it.
I disagree that that's a fair characterization of me.
That's a lot of social development! Nice. All that being the case I am somewhat surprised that you are still having problems with perceptions of scarcity.
Then do not read it as one. I intended it to be approximately as applicable as the sister:
Yeah, that would make things rough. If it's at all feasible, I would look into moving to a large city, but of course moving can be very difficult, especially if you're in a school program (I think you said you were in grad school).
Oh, I definitely went through, and still go through, a lot of ostracism and rejection. I did, and do, have to go through it. I don't think I'm at "great" by any means. And I don't have these skills naturally. First of all, I don't think anyone has them naturally, which was my point. Have you spent much time around kids or teenagers? Very few of them have any social skills at all; they're still making mistakes. But if you mean that you think I learned social skills quickly without trouble or pain, no, they're not easy for me either. I may not be able to provide helpful advice, because I don't know all the details of your brain and your experiences, but it's definitely not something I take for granted.
You're right, of course talking to people who know a lot about improving social skills will help. My point was that, if you inadvertently creep people out when you talk to them, then you have to risk it for right now as you go about conversations in your life, or else avoid people in general. In fact, I think that a large part of social and conversational skills is just not worrying or being afraid of people reacting negatively.
No, you're referring to relatively minor goofs in a context where the social consequences are much less severe, where you've already done significant deft social navigation around that group, and where those who see the error have good reason to be much more understanding of the goof. While I agree that rejections, mistakes, etc. are to be expected and are part of life, you are equating very different kinds of rejections, and -- like most sociality advisors here -- assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier.
Those are far different kinds of failures than "becoming the creepy guy at the bookstore" or having people get the bouncer to talk to you because of conversational goofs (which has happened to me, so this isn't idle speculation).
To clarify: Have you been approched by a venue supervisor because of a conversational goof with a stranger or new acquaintance? If not, you're not going through the risks I'm referring to or speaking to the situation I'm in.
I'm not asking that the entire situation be pleasant; I'm asking that I can reasonably expect the failures not to cascade so that I can really go through a large enough number of interactions while actually learning. When you're ready to stop misinterpreting me otherwise, I will revise my opinion on the merit of your suggestions.
(And a suggestion for you: if you want to drop out and save some face, make a remark like, "Gosh, you're unpleasant. Now I know why you have so much trouble. You deserve it, and I hope you do everyone a service by staying away from them." I try to help people, even if they haven't been as kind in the past.)
Frequently. And I've been ostracized and kicked out of groups before as well. I considered those minor mistakes, and just moved on to the next venue. When this happened, of course it hurt. A lot. But I tried to be a good conversationalist, and gave it my best effort, and it didn't work out, so I learned what I could. People are weird sometimes.
I have had similar problems to yours (though, as I said, I don't know your exact situation), and I'm trying to tell you exactly what I have done and am doing to solve them. (It's worth noting that almost everyone has gone through the "huge failures" you're talking about; it's just that most people went through them as young children or teenagers, when they had an excuse for not knowing, and we just happened to learn slower.)
I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Are you worried about building a negative reputation in your small town? Are you worried about being banned from every single location there? This sounds more like anxiety than a realistic concern (though as I said, I don't know your situation), and I suspect it's this very anxiety that's the problem.
Were the past situations where you've been kicked out of venues or whatever in a different town, or in your current small town? Did these mistakes follow you afterwards? I think Jim Random H.'s comment that small towns are toxic is accurate: they're not toxic for everyone, but for people with social difficulties, they can be horrible places because your mistakes follow you everywhere. Leave as soon as you can.
I wouldn't do something like that. I'm trying to help, and I'm interested and curious in your situation. But I'm curious if on some level you actually want people here to give up and say "yes, you're beyond help, you're way worse than me."
Okay, is everyone's knowledge of social skills really so brittle that their models break down for small towns? (And I mean on the order of 200k, shifting with the college year, not e.g. 10k. But still, most social places don't even have many people there at any given time.) Is it really impossible to develop social skills except in large cities?
I'm ashamed to admit that Juggler told me something similar a few years ago, that what he teaches doesn't work except in large metro areas (his site said nothing whatsoever about this being a prerequisite for his program, and yes he refunded).
Moving to another city is a non-trivial task, not because I'm in school, but because I don't have the connections or exposure that make job-hopping easy.
By the way, when exactly did you have rumors spread about you being threatening? I guess I may not have appreciated the relevance of your experience.
200k is one order of magnitude larger than what I was thinking when you said "small town". The relevant criteria is how far you can narrow down the set of activities and demographics you interact with and still have an effectively unlimited supply of strangers. My experiences are all plus or minus an order of magnitude from that, so I don't really know if 200k is sufficient.
As for rumors about being threatening - if you're referring to the conversation here on LW where I posted a nasty ill-considered reply to a deleted comment and ended up deleting it, then I apologize for that. If you're referring to something that happened in person, then I think you'll find people have surprisingly short memories for that sort of thing.
Wow. It was two orders of magnitude off what I was thinking! I grew up 20 minutes from the nearest town, which was ~4k so I had a different expectations of what would be limiting.
No, I wasn't. As I should have said at the time, you're not the first person to publicly accuse me of a serious crime I didn't commit, due to conflict with me. You're just the most remorseful.
In the case I have in mind, it was at least two years.
200k isn't a small town! You're fine. Can you please answer these questions:
(I removed the small town references.) If you have these concerns in a college town of 200,000 people, I stand by what I said about anxiety being the problem even more.
Juggler comes from, and developed skills in, a college town of about 100,000 people, so I'm surprised.
You keep moving the goalposts. I may not have had every negative experience that you've had, but I've also had large social difficulties, as have many other people here trying to help you. You ask for a specific plan that you can do right now, and I'm giving you one (go to lots of public places and start friendly conversations with lots of people). If you have too much anxiety to do this, that's understandable, but let's address that issue then.
I suspect that, if you're a student, college towns' social flexibility is more like considerably larger towns-- the transient student population means that social networks have much less institutional memory than a stable population of the same size.
The answers to the first block are all yes, except for a little uncertainty on the last one.
And 200k rises and falls with the college year. There are very few hangout places with a lot of strangers you can interact with, and even out of those, very few people want to talk, at least to me.
You're giving me something that has downside risk no one else would tolerate, and which is extremely vague (starting a conversation is a complicated process). Also, since I've had lots of conversations with non-strangers with no improvement, its not clear how I would even know what I'm doing wrong.
There may be anxiety issues (I do better after consuming things which suppress this), but I'm not sure you can call it that if failure really would mean wiping out most of my practice grounds, and if I can't effectively "reboot" whenever I want.
Where do you live? Some places have tighter courtesy rules than others (and, of course, rules vary from one place to another, too)-- what Suzette Haden Elgin has written about Ozark courtesy sounds like it would be terrifying if I had to get it right. Grammatical shifts which I can barely notice mean different things. (Sorry, no examples handy to mind.)
Can you video yourself in conversation? It's conceivable that some bad habits will be more visible from the outside?
That sounds really interesting. Do you have a book title or reference or anything, even if you don't have examples?
Ouch.
With difficulties like that, you're probably not going to find any genuinely useful advice on the Internet. It might help if you got some extroverted person to coach you face-to-face. Have you tried that?
(FWIW, I overcame my problems on my own, but my problems were minor compared to yours. I had low-status behaviors that caused people to ignore me, but I could always parse the nonverbal context just fine.)
Is there an improv group where you live?
A Toastmasters'?
No to the first, yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting.
I'm already involved in some groups, untasteful though I find them. The problem is not being in groups per se, but starting conversations with random people.
Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
As you may have gathered from previous interactions with me and others here, I'm generally careful about my phrasing when I do give advice: I normally preface it with "Here is what I recommend" or the like. I wasn't giving you advice yet, but collecting information prior to giving advice.
I asked about Improv because it points out one specific thing I think you're doing wrong: you're often "blocking" as the improv jargon calls it. I would recommend you learn about (and practice) "yes and".
Your answer to my question is "blocking" in a synctactically typical manner: "yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting". "Yes, but" when what you're looking for in conversation is "yes, and". You're telling me in an oblique way ("lost brain cells") that Toastmasters wasn't a satisfactory experience for you, without giving me an opening for further conversation on that topic.
You could have phrased that in a thousand other ways more inviting of further conversation. Example: "Yes, I did try Toastmasters, and I was bored out of my mind; why did you ask, and what were you thinking I should have expected to get out of attending?"
I disagree with your assessment that "the problems is not being in groups per se". You've had many people here tell you that they find interacting with you often unpleasant, even though they are by no means "random people", they are from a social set that you have chosen and that by your own admission you want to get more closely involved with.
And to repeat something I've said previously: people discussing this topic with you here and now may not be very good advice-givers, but then you're not necessarily a very good advice-taker. Eye, mote, beam.
I've upvoted your response to the Go analogy because it's factually true. One thing you're overlooking, though, is that when a Go novice asks a Go master what they should learn about, it's a good idea to try very hard to extract something from the master's advice, no matter how bad the master seems to be at explaining. Otherwise you risk entering a common failure mode related to "blocking":
If you're fed up with one master, go seek another - rather than fruitlessly spend energy blocking the one. But if many masters are telling you the same thing, perhaps it's time to update.
Yikes! I think you're overextrapolating what I was trying to do based on my use or nonuse of various codewords that you've decreed to have certain meanings. I said "yes but" because I wasn't trying to invite conversation as I would in an in-person discussion, so it's no surprise that the remark doesn't leave you options. In an in-person discussion I would do different things.
I had assumed (correctly) that you believed Toastmasters would help and would recommend it, so I just want to confirm that I had gone to it but found the rituals and leaders painfully stupid (which is what I meant by losing brains cells; I didn't mean I was bored), intending to convey that it would not be helpful. If you were asking to probe for more information than that, you should have said so rather than asking a brief question from which you expect to extract volumes of meaning.
I didn't know I was in the middle of a "conversation skills test" -- you shouldn't do that to people.
I appreciate the improv-based suggestions you've given; that is insightful. I don't think you needed to wait until you were sternly lecturing me to give it, though.
What does that even mean? If I can't identify what I would be doing differently based on learning the advice, or am in a situation that renders the advice dangerous, should I just shut up about it and say "thank you"?
In any case, my criticism has not been of bad advice per se, but rather, advice that assumes away the very problem under discussion -- the "let them eat cake" advice. I think we all remember the first glaring example of this. If I gave advice that assumed away someone's very problem, I would want to know. Wouldn't anyone?
I've had a few do that, and online forums are significantly different from in-person interaction.
I didn't make a comment replying to any Go analogy -- do you mean RichardKennaway?
Yep, this one. My apologies for the misattribution - under the veil of the Anti-Kibitz and given the tenor of the reply ("You can in fact verbally explain Go") I'd assumed you were the author.
Oh, well, in any case, I did try Go for a while, and I do think you can explain it verbally. Before playing any human opponent, I figured out a very simple procedure for beating the computer, though it only works when you play white.
Just copy your opponent's moves, rotated 180 degrees about the center. It won't be until the endgame that your opponent takes the center. Then just play as best you can (it will feel like getting a free move anyway). At the end of the game, you'll have basically the same territories, but you'll be in the lead because of white's handicap (kyu or whatever).
I only briefly started trying this on human opponents, and for whatever reason, even on the major Go server, people would quit after a few moves when they saw me doing this.
I'm probably missing something big, but there you go.
I'm one of the people here who fit this description, but I may have been experiencing different-but-overlapping challenges to yours.
The primary social difficulties I used to have:
I currently experience all these difficulties in lingering amounts, but probably no more than average people. And I am way ahead of others with similar personality traits and cognition to mine.
I engaged in a long period of social experimentation (handled "in software" to use Roko's analogy). During this time, I developed the ability to understand many aspects of social interaction on an intuitive level, exercising social "muscles" I never knew I had (to switch to a completely different analogy).
As Blueberry describes, I had to risk making social blunders to learn. I made a bunch of people uncomfortable at various points in my learning process, such as when I was learning to be more spontaneous instead of turning over comments in my mind for minutes before uttering them, which sometimes involved me blurting out ill-considered things until I developed the right balance between filtering and spontaneity.
Yet I've never had difficulties comparable to getting in trouble with venue supervisors. I can't even remember seriously offending anyone or having anyone unhappy with me.
For some reason, these were never lessons that I had to learn by trial-and-error, and the thread is making me think of some possibilities why:
All of these factors contributed to me having social problems when I was younger, because I was unable to handle bullying and teasing, and I was perceived as a pushover and as rather mousy. Yet I wonder if these factors actually facilitated my efforts to learn social skills later in life.
Thanks to these factors, my own personality made it difficult for me to make significant social blunders and offend people in real life. Even when I was trying to act like a jerk, the result was still pretty nice relative to the average male. I was free to experiment, knowing that if things went wrong, the constraints of my own personality would keep me from causing real offense to people. Furthermore, with only a bit of social practice and observation, I became very sensitive to other people's emotions. The social experimentation allowed me to learn social procedural knowledge very fast, such that I no longer had to view socializing as a form of experimentation at all (though that's another discussion).
I also practiced facial expressions in the mirror a ton, and worked a lot on my voice tonality, to make sure that my subcommunication was really how I wanted to come across.
For someone with lower Agreeableness and lower interpersonal sensitivity trying to learn social skills, their experimentation might have a higher risk of going wrong in worse ways. If someone can learn social skills with only a small period of time of offending people, that might work, but any extended time in such a learning process is potentially grueling to the person involved (and of course difficult for those he or she is interacting with). If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs, but if you find your shooting eggs out of rockets launchers, something may be wrong.
I would wonder if there are any ways to shorten that the process of learning social skills necessary to have interactions with people, while avoiding offending or alienating them, or getting in trouble with venue supervisors.
It's been my experience that people with high Agreeableness are often under-served by social advice, and they end up getting walked over. Yet I'm starting to wonder if it's also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways. Mainstream culture tells people to be polite and nice, but it doesn't really explain how a low-Agreeableness person can connect with others betters. And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting "high status," being "the prize," and "not giving a crap." These lessons may be useful to high-Agreeableness males with low-status, but badly backfire for low-Agreeabless males with low-status.
I can think more about how people with different personality traits to mine might learn social skills; it won't be completely based on my own experience, but I do have some ideas.
Low agreeableness makes it hard to even hear social advice properly. (It's hard enough for males to accept advice even when agreeable.)
Surprisingly enough each of these three are still important for the low agreeableness/low status males to learn. It is just harder to explain which specific skills it would take to develop these attributes. Apologizing whenever someone else disapproves of you is not actually all that much different to attacking whenever someone else disapproves of you. It signals the same underlying insecurity.
You don't need to control others to get what you want out of an interaction. In fact, letting go of control is a key step. It also paradoxically increases your influence (in non-toxic environments.) Reading Morendil's reply seven times is recommended. That was golden.
I do happen to meet that criteria, but there is more than one challenge that I (and most people to various degrees) had to overcome when starting conversations with random people, some of which required simple behavioral changes while some required fundamental changes in beliefs.
Is changing your beliefs a skill that you have developed? For example, did Juggler's influence change the way you think about social dynamics? Do you have the ability to actively question and update your model of yourself and your environment based on introspection and self awareness? I'm not making a snide insult here. Developing that skill is central to how I overcame those difficulties and, in various guises, what many social skills and personal development gurus will recommend. It does involve asking ourselves questions that we really don't want to hear.
No advice here, but I started thinking what the sort of advice you are looking for would look like, and whether much such advice even exists.
A different skill from social interactions, and probably a simpler one is playing Go. A notable thing about Go is that there isn't much instruction in the form of "if this happens, do that". That doesn't work, as there are too many possible game configurations, and whatever form a successful player's skill actually takes can't really be verbalized. Instead, people are just told to expect to lose a bunch of games at first, during which they are expected to build up the difficult to verbalize pattern matching abilities about what works and what doesn't in different situations. A bit like the advice to have a bunch of social interactions which you expect not to end very successfully.
Of course social interactions also have a much wider space of viable approaches than games of Go, so the analogy of needing to do things the hard way to build non-verbalizable pattern matching skills might not be that tight.
Reg Braithwaite has an article about the problems with a certain type of personality and trying to learn Go, when you just can't seem to go from declarative knowledge to procedural skill when picking up the game. Maybe it's relevant to learning social skills as well.
Are you kidding? There are plenty of books teaching Go, full of verbal instruction, covering the basics (take territory first in the corners, then the edges, then the middle), standard opening patterns (joseki), detailed tactical situations (tesuji), proverbs, middle game, end game, every aspect of the game. Of course, it takes practice to turn that advice into skill, as with any skill, but the advice is there, and it works.
For someone who can learn from it. People do learn from it -- I did, back when I played Go, and the books and Go magazines would not be published if they were not useful.
So what distinguishes those who find it straightforward to learn Go by study and practice, as I did, and those who get into the emotional stew that Braithwaite describes? What distinguishes those who learn to ride a bicycle by practice alone, as I did, from those who need instruction also? What distinguishes those who are willing to have a go in social situations and manage to observe, learn and improve, from those who are not, or do not?
If I knew that, I could set up as a personal development guru.
BTW, while I find Braithwaite's account weird in relation to go, it pretty much sums up how I used to feel about socialising, so I have some experience of both sides of this. I don't actually socialise any more than I used to, though.
BTW2, it's just occurred to me that there are many books on social skills for people with Asperger's syndrome. I've not read any of them and I can't comment on how useful they are, but I happen to be aware of a publisher that specialises in books on autism and Aspergers, Jessica Kingsley. FWIW.
Yeah, bad wording on my part. There's a lot of instruction, but I understand that a great deal of practice is utterly vital in order to put the instruction into efficient use. The assumption I'm basically after is that if someone would study Go literature fulltime for a year but wouldn't play any games, they would still play their first games very poorly. I'm not sure to what degree this is really the case.
I have a friend (admittedly a very very smart friend) who become interested in Go after studying combinatorial game theory and discovering that the infinitesimal game value "up arrow" actually occurs in Go, and that game theorists had had productive conversations with Go masters on the subject -- the theory actually had applications.
Using nothing but readings in this area and a few games with me, the friend leveled up from "pure but highly read" beginner to about 14kyu (relative to IGS in 2002?) within four or five games.
My impression is that true tacit knowledge exists, and that theory really doesn't help it a lot... but also that it mostly comes up in domains where the brain is going to be relying on muscle memory a lot, like dissecting the nervous system of shrimp or juggling or such. As a separate thing there are deeply theoretical domains where something appears to be tacit knowledge but its really just a matter of observers not understanding need for patient study when dealing with large inferential distances.
Silas, I've never gone from "social difficulties" to "no social difficulties" based on a direct and obvious course of study, but one very general life heuristic I've found to work well for similarly major work is to search for "the best self help book on the subject" whenever I notice a thing about myself that I really want to cultivate or "fix".
Sometimes it takes me a half a day on Amazon to make an educated guess about which book might meet my "best on the subject" criteria. One of the things I look for are reader reviews of books that recommend some other author or book as clearly superior to the book being reviewed - the best of these suggested books "jump subjects" by invoking a distinct set of keywords or different focus which opens up a whole new "vein of thought" on the subject. Discovering veins, finding "best of breed" within each vein, and then comparing the best of breeds is what can take a while.
Another quick thought: I think you might be living in a small town where you expect to stay for years or decades. If this guess is correct, I would take social advice from "city people" with a huge grain of salt. The environment, opportunities, upsides, downsides, and the social expectations based on this different environment can be substantially different. You can't "throw people away" in a small town... even if you don't like someone, you'll have to live in proximity to them for decades. This also might open the possibility of a weird "solution" to your situation: move! :-)
Great article. Thanks so much for linking to it. I interpreted the article to be about dealing with anxiety, though, not about learning skills from declarative knowledge. And yes, it's relevant for social situations as well, especially:
And the courage to socialize incompetently is a huge part of what it means to have social skills.
I think it's an article about not finding a way to deal with anxiety.
Wow. That linked article is killing me softly. I wish he had a general solution to that problem expressable in declarative knowledge--I've never played Go, and certainly don't plan to now, because I know exactly what he's talking about.
There's the root of the problem. You can't develop socially if you're trapped at home. And make no mistake: if you can't reliably get to a city or public transit hub without calling in a favor, then you are very much trapped. A small town that you can't routinely leave is a toxic environment, and you need to escape it by any means necessary. Free housing is not a favor if it's in a location that destroys your life.
Wow, I didn't know small towns were "toxic environments" that were the death knell for social skills. Next time, mention that sooner.
The "that you can't routinely leave" part seems more important than the "small town" part, to me - it's a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.
You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don't have RL opportunities to do so. It's not perfect - the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can't learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it's more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.
Insert "can be a" ... "if it does not provide an acceptable social network" and I'll have to agree.
I don't know, but I put it back up to zero for exactly the reason you gave for considering it useful, and I did so before reading the comment I'm replying to.