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Mirzhan_Irkegulov comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
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I'm baffled. People say that nerds have bad social skills, but nerds create nerd communities and don't show any social ineptness. Anime fans create fan clubs, sci-fi and fantasy geeks create sci-fi and fantasy societies, even math nerds get together to solve some math. Granted, there are people who are really bad at social skills, or extremely shy, or have social anxiety, but even among nerd communities they are minority. However, it might be selection bias, real nerds indeed stay at home and don't even go to nerd communities.
I think there are different social skills for different communities, I guess. 2 nerds can talk for hours about Warhammer without any need for conversation starters or tricks to keep conversants interested. But 1 male nerd will not have any idea what to talk about with 1 non-nerd woman.
Even social anxiety is context-dependent. In some contexts I feel extremely uncomfortable and can't even start talking with anybody, in other contexts I'm the most outgoing.
I guess there are communication habits and skills that become part of System 1 in different communities, when the same people are talking to each other in the same community for months. Then once you end up in another community with different internalized habits and social rituals, there's massive dissonance and miscommunication. People clusterize into subcultures with different rituals, quirks, behaviors, memes, get used to each other inside subcultures, but at the expense of being able to understand people from different subcultures.
You can participate in, or even help form, communities and still be socially inept. The stereotype should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt when it comes to individual cases, but it's not pointing to an absolute lack of social interaction so much as a limited social range: your stereotypical nerd has hobbies and friends and can probably talk your ear off about them, but he's lost when it comes to social tasks outside the narrow scope of his community.
Your example about flirting seems to be gesturing in this direction, but I think you're assuming a tradeoff where none exists; socially adept people are just as good at shop or hobby talk as the average nerd, but they also have the skills necessary to bridge communication gaps when they don't have a huge body of shared enthusiasm to fall back on.
I don't know what people usually mean when they say that nerds have poor social skills. But I say that nerd communities function worse than regular communities. It's not just that nerds don't know how to flirt with regular people, but nerds have great difficulty flirting with nerds.
Also nerds would prefer to hang out with normal people. This means that any normal person willing to hang out with nerds instantly gains high status within a nerd community. Also, nerds are perfectly willing to exile the more social inept nerds from their communities for the chance to have a normal person join. Tragically this tends to create a slippery slope that ends with nerds being exiled from their own communities.
All of your assumptions are highly questionable. Let's define nerds and normals as somebody with non-mainstream semi-weird interests (anime, Warhammer figurine painting, tabletop games, sci-fi and fantasy, you name it) and somebody without them. Anime nerds do not want to hang out with normals, who are not into anime, unless these normals have other intersecting interests. Anime nerds would not be enthusiastic about a not fan of anime joining their community, and a not fan of anime won't get any high status.
The only exception I can think of is when nerds try to gain something from normals. For example, a male heterosexual nerd would tolerate a non-nerd woman with a tiny hope to get sex.
Nerds do not hang out with normals not necessarily because normal communities ostracize them, but because for nerds normal communities are boring.
It would be useful for this conversation to taboo the word "nerd" and stick to "nerd1" for "people with poor social skills" and "nerd2" for "people with a scientific, mathematics, or computing background who are into fantasy fiction, role-playing games and the like". (I was temped to say "dork" and "geek" instead.) And perhaps "normal1" for "people with decent social skills" and "normal2" for "people who are into mainstream hobbies such as football and television" (and "normal3" for "people with IQ within about one sigma of the average", etc.).
Look at where the interests come from! Usually they come from being ostracized and low-ranking as a kid. The Game of Life - competing for social status points, mating and so on - is generally the most exciting one plain simply because it is REAL. Those who lose it, being ostracized, dominated, bullied etc. take refugee in fantasy or intellectual interests. It is both an escapism and a way to rebuild the shattered ego, by claiming to be better than those by having more smarter or refined interests.
What? I prefer spending time with people who pretty much care about what I care about, and that's mostly nerds.
Why do you think nerds would rather hang out with normal people?
Yes. I am unaware of the terminology used by young people, but some suggested that "real nerds" today are called "neckbeards" and as far as I can see they resemble what I and two classmates were at 16. We enjoyed each others company but even nerd culture i.e. a gaming shop was a bit too scary.
How to put it... it is not skills and not the classical "interaction drains the energies of introverts" thing. It is more like we could only enjoy the company of people we really knew well, they were from the same high school class. It was a little like a huge distrust for strangers.
"Normal" people choose their interests, in part, based on their appeal to other people.
Nerds don't necessarily have bad social skills; they usually just prioritize socialization below other things (which clusters with some other non-normal mental traits). Socialization is a side effect of their interests, rather than their interests being a side effect of their socialization. They socialize fine - provided the other person shares their interests, inwhichcase, the socialization advances their interests. They just don't seek out socialization for itself.
This limits their opportunities for socialization, reducing their opportunity for gaining skills in socialization.
The term nerd seem to be overloaded with a lot of different meaning.