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Error comments on LW Women Entries- LW Meetups - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (131)
I'm not sure that's the right measure. Having poor social skills can't be excused, if it needs excusing, just by choosing a reference set in which that skill level is around the median. I say this as someone who probably is around median...for LW. Frequently, that is not good enough.
(I want to link to a LW post to the effect of "being smart isn't good enough" but can't find it)
As I previously mentioned in another thread the history of geek/nerd culture over the past several decade can be summed up by the following dynamic:
Frankly, I don't appreciate yourself and the woman in the OP contributing to the dynamic.
I haven't noticed such a dynamic, but it sounds plausible and it's been ten years or so since I last joined a more-or-less-public community, so I have no evidence against it. Nonetheless I don't see how I could be interpreted as contributing to the effect, unless you thought I was suggesting that one should kick people out for below-par social skills instead of trying to get them to improve. There is a point at which willful social stupidity is so severe as to be worth ejecting someone, but the OP's example was nowhere close to it.
So I'm not sure how you reached your conclusion. My model of your model of me apparently has a gap in it. Help me fix it?
If such a dynamic were indeed occurring, would you in fact notice it? What makes this process so insidious is that the low social skill people who are affected are the very people least able to notice what's going on.
The way the dynamic works (I suspect) is that the X% of people with worse social skills are continuously kicked of the island until we get to the point that the next X% has enough social intuition or realize it's not in their interest to consent to kicking out the current X%.
Consider the following statement from you're comment above:
You didn't specify what level of social skill is good enough except that more then half of LW apparently don't posses it.
Okay, fair point. Given that I don't or can't notice it intuitively, what signs would I look for to determine if it is in fact occurring, so as to distinguish it from the dragon in the garage?
I didn't mean "good enough" as in "good enough to merit inclusion in the group". I meant it as in "good enough to not make an ass of oneself by accident." [ETA: But if you thought I meant the former then your previous comment suddenly makes sense to me.]
How do I tell if I'm good at, say, Go? I can be better than 50% of my reference group -- hell, better than 90% -- but that doesn't mean I'm good at it, because the other members of my reference group may just suck. That's the objection I had to Larks upthread; person X's social performance may or may not be okay, but "not bad for LW" is a poor way of trying to determine that, especially if one accepts that most LW-ers suck at it.
I admit my only evidence for the idea that LWers in general have poor social skills is their self-reports of their social skills. I've never met anyone here in person.
Ok, taboo "make an ass of oneself".
Yes, and one may very well decide that one's go game is good enough and that further improving it is not worth one's time compared to doing other things.
Fair, but difficult. After some thought I'm going to replace it with "accidentally make an inaccurate highly-negative impression." That seems to distinguish failure modes that are innocent but embarrassing from those that might actually merit exclusion.
Funny you should put it that way -- I made more or less exactly that call with regard to social skills long ago. It was lurking here that changed my mind.
It really is possible to get better at social skills. I didn't come up with "How did you hear about the group?", I found out about it because people asked me that question and I found it welcoming.
Nerd culture takes an unfortunate amount of pride in being standoffish, dickish, and awkward.
Actually, there could be a problem in the sense that you don't want to drive away potential members through bad manners, and you also want to introduce good manners in a way that doesn't drive away people who are capable of learning them reasonably easily.
Yes, but there is a limit to how much it can be improved. And to as Paul Graham points out here improving it to near it's potential maximum would come at the expense of other things, like rationality.
I would be a little bit surprised if a randomly chosen person in the reference class of the man in the OP had already picked so much of the low-hanging fruit that trying to get more wouldn't be worth it.
EDIT: In order to not appear one-sided, I'll point out that I also include Submitter C herself in that reference class -- reading too much into a joke is as much of a faux pas as making a joke that too much can be read into.
This one?