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SilasBarta comments on How to always have interesting conversations - Less Wrong
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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.
They must have been unaware of these tactics. Many people consider manego annoying, because it's sort of a cop-out.
Whereas I consider the labeling and shaming of the opponent for making valid moves that are difficult to beat is either a total cop-out, an insult to the game or both. If you can't beat someone when you can predict and for most part determine what their moves will be then you seriously suck or the game is a solved problem. Like checkers or tic-tac-toe.
Seriously, if you think you are a better player and you credit your opponent with the slightest hint of strategic competence you should EXPECT them to do what you do until such time as they suspect they are risking falling into a manego-trap.
Sometimes a game has one serious flaw but is nevertheless fun to play, and there is no obvious fix for that one serious flaw. In that situation, it can make sense to shame opponents who exploit the flaw. There is a sense in which this is an "insult" to the game, but both players might still like the game, on balance.
For example, I have found that in Stratego, it rarely makes sense to attack first against a player of roughly equal ability. At a certain point in the mid-game, evenly matched players will usually both find it optimal strategy to move a piece back and forth dozens of times in sort of "chicken" game where the goal is to get the other player to attack first. This is boring, so I don't want to play with you if you're going to do that every game, but potential Stratego partners are rare enough that if you otherwise enjoy playing Stratego with me, I might try to shame you into being more reckless with your attacks.
I would treat shaming (as distinct from banter) in that context as a 'defection'. My response would be to then eliminate whatever suboptimal levels of recklessness that I had previously allowed to creep into my play in a spirit of cooperation or just any intrinsic recklessness that I had not chosen to stifle. Either that or I would disengage from the game entirely. Before doing so I would offer potential cooperative agreements if possible.
Most likely I would not find Stratego particularly appealing. If it is supposed to be about 'strategy' yet relies on people not using good strategies in order to work it is broken. I would much prefer to play a lighter game that at least doesn't pretend to be about strategy.
When playing the card game 500 the standard rules for 'misere' are not well balanced. When playing people who are not rank amateurs I advocate a limit of one misere call per player per 'game (up to 500)'. If the opponent insists on the standard rule then I proceed to play (open) misere whenever the risk/reward ratio is favorable. This tends to result in most games being largely determined by my misere calls, with me winning two thirds of them and 'going out backwards' the other third. Naturally I do so with playful cheer and offer to impose the restrictions at any time.
It can actually be quite fun to play the meta-game of negotiation. Winning the game convincingly even (and especially) under the 'broken' system they insist on but offering to adopt an agreement that will effectively be a handycap for me. Fogging all manipulative shaming attempts and repeating the offer. Engaging in a good natured battle of wills with those too stubborn to admit their folly or, given that admission, to change their mind. Getting the kitty a LOT. Doing the balancing act of keeping the experience fun despite the broken rules and the resulting conflict. Knowing when to stop and switch to a different game or activity entirely (thus practicing the ability to maintain boundaries and accept 'no-deal' as a healthy alternative to 'win-win').
All that is a lot more enjoyable than for me playing a broken game and being largely disinterested.
Sure. I guess instead of "shaming" I meant to say "banter which, if serious, would be considered shaming, but, since merely playful, instead conveys the idea that one's opponent's imaginary alter-ego inside the game is worthy of shame, despite the fact that one's opponent himself is pretty much a cool dude." I didn't pay a lot of attention to word choice; I was mostly just adopting the language of the commenters above me on the thread.
If I ever had to really shame someone to get them to play Stratego interestingly, I agree with you that I should either (a) find another activity, (b) find another friend, or (c) look for a way to escape the alarmingly boring desert island that has hitherto prevented my access to other friends and activities.
I wouldn't recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
Concur!
But then you should, if possible, explicitly patch the game in a way that makes that not a good idea.
I completely agree. I can't think of any fixes for Stratego, though. Can you?
Edit: WTF is with my double posts? I have not been clicking twice or anything that should result in a double submission but every comment I make appears twice. I cannot think of anything I have changed on my browser that would cause this either. Seroiusly strange.
Yup, I agree. If someone pulls manego on me I usually smile and see it as an opportunity to learn something.
But in a more subtle way an evenly matched game does have both opponents doing "exactly the same thing" in the opening. Both follow the same recipe - stake out one corner, possibly the remaining corner, then go for a corner approach to simultaneously sketch side territory. It's just that the half-dozen or so possible corner moves each have a subtly different meaning, and so symmetry is usually broken quite rapidly.
What is the impact of trying manego against a skilled opponent? Would it be correct to say that by simply telling someone the above strategy, you have significantly increased their skill level, even if they still get beaten by good players?
Someone good (low kyu or dan level) will eventually play a symmetry-breaking move such as tengen, and then the novice (who doesn't have a good follow-up because they didn't really understand the moves they were playing) will get clobbered.
Manego is like guessing the teacher's password by parroting back every single word the teacher speaks. :) What counts as skill in Go is understanding the moves you play (and being able to read out their consequences).
It does impress novice opponents, which I suppose is why you'd see people not want to keep playing you once they caught on that you were doing it.
I wouldn't compare it to guessing the teacher's password, or at least not only compare it to that.
Recall the points made in our discussion of tacit knowledge. Here is a case where a simple verbal instruction, in a significant, measurable way, can increase someone's skill at a game with notoriously inarticulable strategy.
You explain manego to a beginner. (Not tournament beginner, I mean, someone who knows the rules, read a tutorial, only played a few games.) Now, they can almost always beat a computer[1] as white, when before they could not. You made a huge difference, purely through verbal instruction.
I'd say that's pretty impressive.
[1] I use GnuGo as reference for computer Go.
I would say that's more of a problem with GnuGo than an actual increase in skill. Manego is more of a trick play that only works against people who don't know how to deal with it.
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! :-)
Would you care to recommend some "best of breed" books?
I'm not sure I would unreservedly recommend books I find this way, because they aren't all full of things I wholeheartedly endorse. They're usually experiments prompted by a sense of personal inadequacy and some of them are kind of embarrassing, but.... here are some books I found in roughly the way I recommended to Silas and what I think of them now:
When I was having difficulties navigating casual not-really-friendly acquaintances with other women (like in the workplace) where I couldn't just avoid people who gave me bad vibes, I found Catfight to be reasonably helpful. I decided on this over various books about "queen bees" that seemed unscientific and possibly amoral... but I haven't read any of those to justify the impression. This book helped me flesh out some details in a pet theory of mine about the way the "aesthetics of signaling" are a major locus of negotiation in real-world socially-embedded virtue ethics. I liked it a lot for that reason, though the text didn't contain the theory explicitly.
When I was trying to figure out what I should be thinking (when planning for retirement) or saying (when my parents brought up investing), I discovered a classic called The Intelligent Investor which was written by the mentor of Warren Buffet and which helps deflate some of the horrible epistemology around investing. I can't really speak for the utility here, because I've had very few opportunities to apply the knowledge since acquiring it but a nice theoretical example of its content is that it pointed out the difference between inside view and outside view calculations of investment value. Given the distinction, it counsels the use of the outside view with a reference class including market conditions over periods of time longer than a human investing career (though it doesn't use the precise terminology to say this that this community might use for such things).
At one point I was wondering if I should change my sexual ethics and I searched my way to Why Men Love Bitches but reading this mostly this helped me decide that the whole subject area was almost as morally bankrupt as PUA stuff, and even more intellectually bankrupt (relying almost solely on anecdotes rather than the PUA community's "self congratulatory theory plus quick and dirty experimental method"). I had my first date with my husband about two months after reading this and I suspect that part of the reason the relationship has been so rewarding (lots has to do with him being amazing) is that I had much more internal clarity about what I wanted in a relationship and what I was willing to give in order to get it. The book helped bring the clarity, even if it didn't directly apply.
Lately I've been in the planning stages for a startup where I expect to be in a leadership position and I thought I should spend some time seeing if I had any gross character defects I could patch before subjecting future employees to potential misery (or to at least have criteria for recognizing a co-founder to help in the absence of a patch). The best I could find in this area wasn't that great, but it was Smarts: Are We Hardwired For Success?. It turned out to be kinda shallow and sad with poorly designed psych instruments and unsupported cognitive biases about personal immutability all over the place.
"Smarts" mostly just confirmed for me that any subject area people usually come to with selfish motivations (esp in business writing ) will mostly have crap for epistemology. I don't even have a single working hypothesis as to why this is so common in this area, but I have various suspicions that are all generically reinforced every time I find books like this.
The only really valuable thing I got out of "Smarts" was a working theory for "style conflicts" I'd seen between people who are good at (and value) flexible reaction to surprises and people who are good at (and value) up front planning and diligent execution. I've been trying to get better at Aumann updating with people when high-level abstractions are used as justifications when there are tactical differences of opinion. This was one of the first real "hits" I've had in that area (though that wasn't what I bought the book for).
( For what I wanted, I should have bought Leadership and Self Decption, which I didn't find by the "best of breed" strategy, but found next to my bed when I was falling asleep in Benton House after a day hanging out with SIAI's Visiting Fellows. Most of the one-star Amazon reviews of this book appear to be true, but the topic (someone's pet theory about the psychological mechanisms behind self deception in social contexts) was fascinating and helped me find some areas where I probably really was broken and it was simple to detect this and fix it.
I'm not sure how that book ended up in that bedroom, but I am grateful for whatever serendipity (or Machiavellian plotting :-P) brought it to my awareness! )
In the course of gearing up for the startup I also tracked down a "brass tacks and details" book on the subject (which is still in my "to read" queue) called The Startup Company Bible For Entrepreneurs. I haven't looked at this book enough to form a substantive opinion.
"Why Men Love Bitches" is a really great book (and it works just as well if you reverse the genders). That's one of the books that helped me learn about people and relationships and figure out what I want as well. I'm sorry to hear you decry the whole PUA/dating/social skills/relationship advice field as bankrupt; I've found these materials and quick-and-dirty experimental method very useful for figuring out what works and feels right for me.
I'm curious, what do you mean about changing your sexual ethics?
Another classic that I found in a similarly serendipitous way is Cialdini's "Influence".
The problem I had with them is that advice in this area generally applies an instrumental view to "other people", without attention to the kinds of people the skills are likely to work on, and whether those people (after the interaction or deep into it) are likely to be better people who are retrospectively happy about their interactions with you.
For most of my life I've been of the opinion that the idea of "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" is a sham excuse that people invent after having been partly responsible for causing an emotional trainwreck that was very painful to most of the people involved. My working hypothesis, then and now, is that it is probably better not to get romantically entangled with someone unless you and your sweetie are both capable offering and granting something approaching research grade informed consent (as opposed to merely judicial grade where its pretty much deemed not to have been obtained only in cases of gross fraud or dramatic mental impairment).
I'm not talking about getting signatures before smooching with someone, but I am talking about (1) thinking about it first, (2) imagining possible consequences for both parties (and possible children who may be created) in the coming weeks, months, and years, and (3) doing one's best to avoid harm to anyone given such thoughtfulness which probably requires some time in private and lengthy conversation.
Cialdini's "Influence" is an interesting example of the social skills literature, because he ostensibly wrote it as a "defense against the dark arts" textbook to help people avoid being manipulated. In practice, it is studied mostly by compliance professionals as one of the most epistemologically sound manuals that exists on the subject of the "dark arts" in general. I don't think it is an accident that sound epistemology and benevolent moral intent went together like this.
Though there is great ethical value in helping people avoid influence techniques, I contend that there is also great ethical value in teaching people how to influence others. I argue that social skills (of which social influence is a subset) are distributed inequitably in society, and that this result is unjust. Some people are dramatically better at social influence (status, etc...) than others knowingly or unknowingly, due to different personality traits and upbringings. There are the haves, and the have-nots in the area of social skills.
The only way for social equality to exist is for people to be in the same bracket of social skills (and social influence ability). We can't make things equal, but we can compress the disparity between the top and the bottom, so the people at the bottom aren't getting stomped on so badly.
Either the haves must give up their social skills, or the have-nots must attain more social skills. The first solution is impossible. With their higher social status, the haves can't be forced to do so, and they will scoff at requests to disarm out of the goodness of their hearts. The cool kids aren't going to change how they do things no matter how much the uncool kids stamp their feet. Furthermore, some of the haves are naturally that way due to their phenotype, and they can't lower their social skills (at least, not without the help of the Handicapper General ).
The solution is for the have-nots to learn to be more socially influential. Yet if you do so, you join the ranks of the haves, though you may be one of their more restrained and reflective members. Unfortunately, if you become one of the haves you will still encounter have-nots. You should avoid stomping on them, but they may end up at a disadvantage relative to you. It isn't your fault that they aren't educated about social influence, and it isn't your individual responsibility to do so.
A society where disparities in social skills have been compressed by pulling people at the bottom upwards would be more equal than what we have today. Reducing this inequality is a good thing. There would be great transparency about social influence. That's part of the reason I write so much about these subjects: I'm trying to do my part to get the knowledge more evenly distributed. Yet there is a strange agreement in society between the haves and the have-nots: they both often look down on have-nots trying to become haves.
I also believe that there should be more discussion of the ethics of social influence. Yet in discussions of the ethics of social influence, I often notice a greater degree of scrutiny on people who are learning social influence, rather than on those who are already doing it. Furthermore, some ethical criticisms of social influence (usually leveled at those learning it) seem overly idealistic. When social influence and status is woven so deeply into the fabric of society, the phrase "don't hate the player; hate the game" can often be a valid defense.
Thanks for sharing your list Jennifer
If you're interested in a few people's theories about self deception (perhaps on a more philosophical level), including an entry by Tom Schelling (though it wasn't about self deception as much), you might like The Multiple Self
Kathy Kolbe's The Conative Connection might be a better view of style conflicts.
A summary
Thanks a lot for the link to CGT and Sprague-Grundy theory. It's a beautiful area of math that I once knew in detail, but somehow managed to forget completely.
My way of saying thanks: take a look at Ford circles.
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.