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TimS comments on Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health - Less Wrong Discussion
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I will use this very post to illustrate!
You just asked, "give three concrete examples from your life."
My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and "whiny" in front of the pack.
According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have "called me out" - and by failing to respond, I will lose face.
Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy - and will again lose face.
My natural response to this instinct is to attempt to describe these examples in the most self-deprecatory way possible, but I know that any attempt to do so will cause me to seem contemptuously weak - and I will again lose face.
As I continue to process this dilemma, I attempt to work out the actual probabilities that any given decision I make will lead to a given outcome. However, as I do so, something internally pegs my "lose face" utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW, and the error cascades all the way through my multiplications and completely poisons the [utility*probability] sort.
Eventually, I just say "fuck it" and come clean to you that I'm having trouble answering your question due to an error. My instinct tells me that, in so doing, you will turn this around on me and I will again lose face. I start processing how I can explain to you that I'm having trouble answering your question, building different strategies for explanation and weighing their probable utility payoffs, but then the bug pops up again (or another, similar one) and pegs one or two of the outcome utilities to +ERR.OVERFLOW or -ERR.OVERFLOW (or sometimes even ERR.DIV0), and the whole [utility*probability] sort gets poisoned again.
Am I making any sense?
I guess what I'm trying to say is, your question scares me, and I'm not sure if it's a legitimate query for information or an attempt to "trip me up" socially, and THAT RIGHT THERE is the problem itself.
So here's to honesty, or something.
Your response suggests you have received a lot of negative feedback for your social interactions. Be careful not to overgeneralize those negative reactions to others. Especially don't overgeneralize from your interactions with your schoolmates, because the status games in school are not well correlated with achieving anything productive.
More generally, keep in mind that social ability is not a statistic (like Charisma on a RPG character sheet), it is a skill. Like all skills, it improves with practice. MixedNuts' advice to you is good, especially this post.
For whatever reason, being reflexive about social skills is extremely taboo in modern society. That means it is difficult for someone with social skill deficits to find someone what can provide helpful feedback for improvement. By contrast, a football player could listen to her coach for constructive criticism and suggestions on how to practice. But the fact that people don't talk about how to improve social skills does not mean improvement is impossible.
Just to note that attacking someone for lack of social skills can happen in families as well as in high school.
That depends on the company that you keep. The problem is a catch 22. If you don't have much social skills than you probably don't have much friends. You also unwilling to ask them for social skill advice because you are afraid that you might lose status by asking the question.
Giving social skill advice productively is also hard. A person with low self esteem might suffer further when you tell him that he's social skills are crap. Sometimes it's even more helpful to focus on making a person feel loved than to give them suggestions about how to change.
Speaking only for myself, I was not unaware that I had poor social skills. I was unable to locate anyone who was willing and capable of helping me acquire better social skills.
For those in a similar position, I'd recommend Tony Attwood's books on developing social skills - it's targeted at those with Asperger's, but if you really feel lost figuring out what's going on in social situations, the books can provide a foundation to work with.
People don't always necessarily want to make personal changes that would improve their social functioning because making personal changes is very anxiety provoking. Pushing them to change when they aren't ready is counter-productive and unsupportive. But if someone wants to change, there is no conflict between being supportive and giving constructive criticism.
You raise a good point. But one label for a friend who is unwilling (as opposed to unable) to provide basic useful social feedback when asked is: acquaintance-one-spends-a-lot-of-time-with-who-is-not-really-your-friend. Of course, not everyone has given enough thought to social norms to be able make insightful points. But it is an important social insight to learn that worrying about your status with people who don't care about your happiness is not itself happiness creating.
Also, not my downvote - you are right that the issue is difficult to address, even if I disagree with you about how approachable it is.