= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MixedNuts comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (769)
What kind of help? If you don't speak a language, you can buy a grammar, or ask native speakers to think up some examples and build rules from them. Whereas if you ask people "How do I know if someone is bored?" they don't give you actual tips, or even "There's no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case" and a few examples. They just say "Oh, I can never tell either" when they obviously can, or "Well, they just look and act bored...".
Impro acting, maybe, or have someone point things out like "don't you see how impatient he looks?", etc. - the kind of things parents may do with their kids. Or read a book on etiquette, or hire some kind of body language coach, I'm sure it exists. Or of course a pick-up artist book.
By the way, "There's no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case" is something I often had to say when teaching French to Chinese students; or rather often it was "there may be a rule underneath all those cases, but I have no idea what it is!". Often finding the rule for your native language requires significant effort; and some rules you come up may not accurately describe the way the language actually works.
Body language coaching doesn't just exist, it's an industry. It is typically associated with public speaking, salesmanship, etc, and there are a lot of places (and books, and online resources, etc) to get training. In fact, one of the linked blogs in the OP, "Paging Dr. NerdLove", is completely dedicated to helping men who are bad at inter-personal communication with women (i.e. socially awkward) get better at it, which includes quite a lot of body language training.
It's reasonably well known that body language comprises a significant portion of interpersonal communications, so just like you'd expect with other languages there are quite a lot of resources for learning the language, if you take some time to look for them.
And of course, like any language, the resources are of varying quality and usefulness. But the general idea of "you get what you pay for" holds.
You do that when you're a complete beginner, or to polish off your grammar to avoid coming off as uneducated esp. in writing, but the way you actually learn a language well enough to have a conversation without too many misunderstandings by either party is by listening to it (and, when you get a chance, speaking it) a lot. And many of the things you'll learn this way are things that few grammars will explicitly state and few native speakers will admit. No amount of theoretical study will train your ear to understand speech in real time. You cannot rely on System 2 alone to speak a natural language, as per Moravec's paradox.
The analogy would be that you learn body language by paying attention to what people who already know it. More generally, ISTM that paying attention to stuff around you (and also paying attention to what you are doing, for that matter) is an oft-neglected skill. (Dear myself-a-few-years-ago, are you listening?)