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Taure comments on How to always have interesting conversations - Less Wrong
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I think that one of your main problems may be that you're thinking of conversation as something it isn't. There is no procedure for success. Genuine conversation is procedure-less (or at least practically so. I guess with sufficient processing power and knowledge of all the hundreds of variables you could replicate it, but I think such a feat would be beyond the abilities of the conscious mind).
I used to be extremely introverted. I found talking to people I didn't know very awkward. Even moderate acquaintances were tricky. Then I went to university and made some new friends. Went out. And then just decided to talk to people. Alcohol helped. A lot. Now I am what many would call extroverted, though I still feel, in many ways, like an introvert pretending to be an extrovert.
I don't think there is really such a thing as introverted and extroverted people at all. People are encouraged to think of these things as part of their "essential character" (TM) - or even their biology. And in some medical cases, this is obviously true (such as in autism).
But for most people, it's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of will. People think about worst case scenarios. They think about (as you mention somewhere else in these comments) weirding out a load of people. And maybe you would. But the key, I think, is then to disregard your fear and just talk anyway.
The idea of an extroverted social animal who feels no fear is a false ideal, I think. Everyone will have jokes that fail, everyone has conversations that, the moment they start, you know that this person is really not for you at all. What the "extrovert" does that is different is simply to keep talking anyway.
I obviously don't know about your life, so cannot say anything truly accurate about it. However, from what I see in your posts, I would say than your problem is not ineloquence, but fear of failure.
To be pithy: "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again."
And like I say above, try not to think of it as a procedure or algorithm. Perhaps try what I did: don't try to be an extrovert, but rather think of it as pretending to be one.
You can't create a procedure that maps out every branch in a conversation tree, no. But I think you are underestimating the ritualization and standardization of social activity. There really are patterns in how people do things. There are considerable norms, rules, and constraints. People who are intuitively social (whether they became that way earlier or later in life) may have trouble articulating these patterns.
Within these constraints, there are infinite ways to behave, and you can be as spontaneous as you want. Intuitively social people experience social interaction to be natural and spontaneous because their intuitions keep them within those constraints.
Conversation is "procedureless" in the same sense that musical improvisation is "procedureless." You can't map out the rules for improvisation in advance. But there are some chords that work well (or badly) after others that you can know in advance. You can know whether you are in a major or minor key, and if you have the concept of major/minor mode and key, then it will funnel your spontaneity in a direction that will create a harmonious result.
In contrast, a socially unskilled person is like someone improvising with concepts such as "mode" and "key." Their results are practically guaranteed to violate the constraints of what we consider to be good music. This of what happens when an untrained person plinks away at a piano.
While both conversation and musical improvisation are procedureless, there are procedures for learning those things. Musicians practice scales and etudes. Applying the same kind of process to learning social interaction is looked on as strange, because of the false expectation that people should be able to learn it naturally (even if the reason they haven't is because they were locked out of social interaction for years due to bullying and exclusion that was no fault of their own).
Actually, introversation is a component of temperament that does seem to have a biological basis.
I agree that for most people with low social skills probably aren't biologically determined to be quite so bad at socializing. Even though people have different levels of potential due to biology, most people probably don't come anywhere near meeting their potential. But the problem isn't really their will; it's their social development and the associations that they have developed with social interaction.
Someone's present-day social skills are due to an interaction of biological and environmental factors. Temperament on its own generally doesn't determine social skills; instead, their temperament influences social experiences, which determine what level of social skills are learned. In the case of people with low social skills and different temperaments (e.g. introversion), these people generally got that way because their temperament made them "get off on the wrong foot" with their peers socially, often resulting in bullying, exclusion, or abuse. In another peer environment, even an introverted individual could develop social skills just fine.
Actually, there are pretty large individual differences in susceptibility to anxiety. People with lower "anxiety threshold" (i.e. it takes less to make them anxious) really do have things harder. I managed to conquer anxiety at the level of social phobia, but to do I had to recognize certain challenges (and advantages) that my temperament gave me, and learned to cope with them.
This works for some people once they have certain prerequisites for learning from their attempts at socializing. The trick is to get them to those prerequisites.
Certainly there are patterns in social interaction.
However, I think that if you go into social interaction aware of these patterns and meaning to act on them, then this very awareness will in fact ruin your social interaction, because one of the rules of genuine social interaction is that it's free flowing and natural-feeling. If you treat it like a formula, you'll break it.
What evidence do you have for your theory?
Which bit of it?
The second paragraph.
I assume you mean of my reply to HughRistik.
No statistical data, if that's what you want.
However, I think that in this case it isn't needed. It seems clear that following a conversation by rules and algorithms will be unable to replicate genuine conversation. Very little of a conversation is about what is actually said. You have to read body language, you have to read into what isn't said, you have to use intuition because you read these things unconsciously, not consciously.
I can't be bothered to find it at the moment - or in the foreseeable future - because this topic just doesn't mean hours of time to me, but I do recall studies in which people's ability to register body language consciously was compared to our ability to read it by intuition, sub-consciously. The results were something like this: the conscious mind could only spot 2 or 3 body language signs, whereas the unconscious mind was able to pick up on up to 15.
You seem to be denying the possibility of teaching anyone to be better at conversation by explaining various norms, rules and constraints to them and getting them to practice while consciously attending to this information, at least initially.
I don't think anyone would deny that the ultimate aim of any such instruction would be for the student to internalize the rules to an extent that they were applied largely unconsciously and automatically - most skills make this progression as they are developed. However I've seen plenty of people claim that instruction of this kind can be effective at improving conversational skills for people who are not able to 'just do it' as you seem to advise. Convincing evidence to the contrary would help save people from fruitless expenditure of time, money and effort trying to develop conversational skills if you were able to provide it.
I think the idea of learning conversational social norms and so forth by practice/instruction is a very different issue to consciously using a decision procedure to dictate your conversation.
The instruction you describe is pretty much a description of what most people experience growing up, through a combination of what their parents teach them and experience/trial and error.
This is not the same thing as standing next to someone and going through a mental flow chart, or list of "dos and don'ts" every time it's your turn to say something.
The former is genuinely learning conversation, the latter is trying to fake it.
I'm not sure of this distinction. Why can't a conscious decision procedure be an element of instruction?
Conscious decision procedures are a time-honored teaching tool in domains with similar features to social skills: music, sports, and dance. Look at musical or athletic exercises, and dance routines. Why does applying the same heuristics to learning social skills attract disdain?
I think we agree that beginners who are making most of their choices at a conscious level will often produce clunky results. The cause that I am making is that a lot of cognitive systemizing about social interaction can be a valid and productive learning tool to many people. Clunky results can be better than no results, and pave the way to learning how to socialize without so much conscious processing.
In many domains (e.g. music and dance), there is a time-tested process of consciously breaking down knowledge into component pieces, and teaching them to the student at a conscious level. Over time, the student stops needing to consciously attend to that knowledge, and it becomes encoded in intuitions and muscle-memory. See the four stages of competence:
HughRistik was discussing the possibility of helping people to develop these sorts of skills who for whatever reason failed to acquire them when growing up. Many people claim that explicit instruction can be a valuable tool in developing such skills later in life. If true this is a lot more useful to people suffering from this problem than your 'advice'.
To riff on HughRistik's music analogy, is a guitar player 'trying to fake it' by practicing scales and chords and learning musical theory before they have mastered improvisation?
I must confess, I don't find your advice helpful either.
See HughRistik's great article and in particular this comment about how much of your own knowledge you can be unaware of if you've never been without it.
"Try, try again" is insufficient to improve. You can try forever without improvement if you can't recognize what you were doing right, and what you weren't. This information doesn't spontaneously unfold from your DNA as a result of being in social situations. And (see below), I have indeed tried again and again and again (edit: sentence wasn't completed in original comment).
I've already done exactly what you suggest, going out, and drinking, and benefitting form the lower inhibitions to talking that come with alcohol. I've done this quite a bit, but I've never seen any of the skill carry over to when I'm not intoxicated. Furthermore, I've pretended to be an extrovert, but it really makes no difference from the inside or on the outside: it doesn't automagically allow me to make conversation where I otherwise wouldn't.
Whatever problems I might have, fear of failure is not among them. It is, at most, fear of that failure cascading into very damaging personal consequences. And given my personal experience, these fears are extremely well-grounded. Nevertheless, I quite often go out to socialize and join groups, actively participate in them, and -- suprise surprise -- I do fail to form relationships or improve social skills, and I fail quite often, to the point where it's no longer a big deal.
I hate to be such a nannering nabob of negativity, but most of what I hear really is ignorant of the problems people like me might actually face, because the advice giver can't conceive of being in that state. I appreciate you trying to help, but, despite your claim to have been an introvert, you advice really sounds like you have not actually been in a position that's informative about this issue, as that would allow you to say more specifically what one has to do to cross the barrier.
I can teach people calculus and trigonometry. I can say a lot more than just, "try, don't be afraid of failure, and show some willpower". Why can't you?