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Improving my social skills is going to be my number one priority for a while. I don't see this subject discussed too much on LW, which is strange because it's one of the biggest correlates with happiness and I think we could benefit a lot from a rational discussion in this area. So I was wondering if anyone has any ideas, musings, relevant links, recommendations, etc. that could be useful for this. Stuff that breaks from the traditional narrative of "just be nicer and more confident" is particularly appreciated. (Unless maybe that is all it takes.)
Optional background regarding my personal situation: I am a 19 yo male (as of tomorrow) who is going to enter college in the fall. I'm not atrociously socially inadept, e.g. I can carry on conversations, can be very bold and confident in short bursts sometimes, I have some friends, I've had girlfriends in the past. However, I also find it very hard to make close friends that I can hang out with one on one, I sometimes find myself feeling like I'm taking a very submissive role socially, and I feel nervous or "in my head" a lot in social interactions, among other things. Not to be melodramatic, but I find myself wishing a decent amount that I had more friends and was more popular.
Discussion on lesswrong on that subject would most likely not be rational. Various forms of idealism result in mind killed advice giving which most decidedly is not optimized for the benefit of the recipient.
Get out of your house, go where the people are and interact with them. Do this for 4 hours per day for a year (on top of whatever other incidental interactions your other activities entail). If "number one priority" was not hyperbole that level of exertion is easily justifiable and nearly certain to produce dramatic results. (Obviously supplementing this with a little theory and tweaking the environment chosen and tactics used are potential optimisations. But the active practice part is the key.)
I agree that when social skills are usually discussed, various forms of idealism tend to result in mind killed advice. The standard set of advice in particular seems to mostly ignore the fact that a) status exists, i.e. it is very possible to be liked and not respected, and sometimes the latter overpowers the former and b) some people genuinely have large personality flaws that make them unpleasant to be around.
I was hoping LessWrong would be able to avoid this idealism, as they do in most other areas, which is why I posted here. Do you think that LessWrong would be worse than average in this regard? Why? And do you think there is anywhere I could have a rational discussion about this stuff?
Like I said in another post in this thread, I don't think it's at all a given that if you socialize enough, you will eventually develop good social skills, and I think that reading a bit of stuff on the subject in the last month helped me about as much as all the social experiences I've had in the last year.
But something about the idea of making it a priority to spend x amount of time a day specifically seeking out social interactions makes sense and is appealing to me. I don't know if four hours a day is the right amount - I will have to experiment, but I can very much see myself implementing something like this.
One problem with widely recommending this is that it seems to me like many, if not most people are not at all in a position to reliably be able to follow this advice. But I imagine someone with low to moderate social skills on a college campus probably can.
Sure, but it should be ~30 minutes of reading a day and ~4 hours of interaction a day. Practice is what leads to skill development, and unpleasantly enough, only hard practice (i.e. focusing on the parts you're bad at, not the parts you're good at) really counts.
Practice Practice Practice Practice Practice. You have to go out of your way to hang out with people to get any good at being fun to hang out with. WARNING: This does not mean you have to spend time at loud parties or bars or clubs. While they pretend to be areas for socializing, they're not really. It's one thing if you enjoy dancing or drinking, but places that are less loud and crowded are a lot better for conversation.
I've done this and it didn't really work. Maybe it worked a little, but not at a very fast rate. To be honest, I think reading a small amount of social skills stuff and thinking about how to solve the problem a little helped much more than all the "practice" I've done in the last year or so.
Obviously you can't take this to the extreme and expect that you can instantly go from Michael Cera to Casanova just by sitting alone reading stuff and watching videos in your room, but I don't think the statement "If you spend enough time in social interactions, you will inevitably develop good social skills" is at all true either.
I kind of despise the former and love the latter. :\
Did you try dancing lessons?
I hated dancing before I learned it, but I love it now. I am very bad at "learning by copying others", but with good explicit education I became a decent dancer.
(Note: Almost everyone adviced me against explicit learning, because they said it wouldn't be "natural" or "romantic". I ignored all this advice, and now no one complains about the result. Contrary to predictions, learning the steps explicitly helped me to improvise later. Seems like people just have a strong taboo about applying reductionism to romantic activities like dancing.)
Interesting; no one has ever told me that dancing lessons are a bad idea. I think we live in very different cultures. (Other things you have said in the past have also given me his impression.)
No, no, no, this was a bad explanation on my part. No one told me that dancing lessons are bad idea per se... only that my specific learning style is.
This is what works best for me: Show me the moves. Now show me those moves again very slowly, beat by beat. Show me separately what feet do; then what hands and head do. Tell me at which moment which leg supports the weight (I don't see it, and it is important). When and how exactly do I signal to my girl what is expected from her. (In some rare situations, to get it, I need to try her movements, too.) I still don't get it, but be patient with me. Let me repeat the first beat, and tell me what was wrong. Again, until it is right. Then the second beat. Etc. Then the whole thing together. Now let's do the same thing again, and again, and again, exactly the same way. Then something "clicks" in my head, and I get the move... and since that moment I can lead, improvise, talk during dance, whatever. -- As a beginner I was blessed with a partner who didn't run away screaming somewhere in the middle of this. Later my learning became faster, partially because I learned to ask the proper questions. And I had a good luck to dancing teacher who was a former engineer, so he was able to comply with my strange demands.
In contrast, this is what seems to me a typical learning process, at the dancing lessons: Teacher shows the steps quickly. Then shows the steps quickly again. And again. At this moment people in the room start getting it, and they do it halfway correctly. And the more they do it, the better they get.
This absolutely does not work for me. I can learn to do things slowly; but I can't learn then quickly, not even approximately. I can progress from "slowly but correctly" to "quickly but correctly", but I can't progress from "incorrectly" to "correctly" at any speed by mere repetition and observation. Most people seem to have this ability to copy each other. I don't. I need to be explained the mechanism, step by step. (And this is not just in dancing. Sorry for touching an irrelevant taboo topic, but the PUA literature did exactly the same thing for me about human relations. Despite all the biases et cetera, that was the only source that told me explicitly what most humans learn by copying and probably never bother to explain in a way comprehensive to me.)
Now, after seeing my learning style, the typical reaction was that I should stop doing that, because my dancing style will be ugly and "robotic", and my partners will feel uncomfotable. Instead I should just do what other people are doing, for a very long time. Wrong in both aspects. First, doing what other people do, just for a longer time, sometimes does not work for me. My head just works differently, or something. Second, after the moment the moves "click" in my head, my dancing becomes okay. If you didn't see me at the beginning, you would not expect I had so much trouble learning that. Actually, I got feedback from new partners that I dance better than average, and that I am very good at leading. I can teach a girl a new dance in 5 minutes and then lead her so that no one expects she is doing this for the first time. -- This is the other side of how my head works: It takes me a lot of time to understand something, but then I can explain it extremely quickly. (Again, this is not just in dancing. I used to teach maths privately, and the results were good. Many people can do math, but can't teach it. Although I didn't have the same kind of problem learning maths, probably because it already is pretty explicit.)
Now, that's about the only possible way to learn to play anything non-trivial on instruments such as the guitar; therefore, these people
believe that all guitar music is ugly and robotic, or
have no idea of how people learn to play, or
are confused and/or talking through their asses (e.g. some part of them deep down is saying ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don't deserve to get the social status I got from it’)
(not necessarily with probabilities within an order of magnitude of each other).
I completely agree with you (which is why I persisted in my learning style). From my experience it seems to me many people are confused like this.
Possible explanation: We learn some things by copying or early in childhood, and we learn some other things explicitly. I guess this makes many people think that skills are divided to "explicitly teachable" and "explicitly unteachable", using some heuristics, such as: "if it is usually learned at school, it is teachable", "if I tried to learn it and failed, it is unteachable", "it is teachable only if I perfectly understand how it works", etc.
It probably adds to confusion that we don't see how other people learned their skills. Similarly to attribution fallacy, if we see someone good at doing X, it is easier to assume that it is a part of their nature, not a learned skill. (And those people may support us in this opinion, for example because it discourages the competition.) Seems to me this is pretty frequent in art. Also, sometimes the idea of "unteachable skill" is a good excuse for not learning and doing something.
Even those people who learned e.g. playing guitar may not propagate the idea automatically to other aspects of their lives.
Sometimes people don't see how they themselves learned something. When you ask them, they confabulate empty phrases like "it's a knack", or "eventually you just get it", or the like. They generally suck at explaining. So, ignore them and move on.
I was assuming that those people had themselves learned to dance at some point, so unless it was a very long time ago and/or they suck at introspection they knew how they did it. If you were talking about people who didn't themselves know how to dance, then replace ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don't deserve to get the social status I got from it’ with ‘I'm jealous those people can dance and I can't, but I can't be bothered to learn it myself, so in order to put them down I'll tell them that their grapes are sour’.
Maybe there are two learning styles -- copying and explicit -- each of them having their set of advantages and disadvantages. (Perhaps an analogy to System 1 and System 2.)
Learning by copying is faster and it does not require cooperation from the person you copy. On the other hand, copying is imperfect, and you cannot copy what you don't see. Learning explicitly is slower and requires a good explanation; which requires a good introspection from the person who explains.
So maybe this is an instance of "the last will be first". -- People who are good at learning by copying, use learning by copying as their favorite learning style. People who are bad at learning by copying can compensate by focusing on explicit learning.
Under these assumptions, the "copying" people have a fast start, because many activities are simple and can be learned by copying. Then when it comes to more complex activities, they usually continue copying, get some mediocre results, and stop there. And even there, they probably get those mediocre results faster than an "explicit" person. -- They really believe that learning by copying is superior, because this is what worked for them. Learning explicitly is just a strange ritual done at school; and I suspect that even there they try to copy the teachers.
On the other hand, "explicit" people learn slowly and are completely dependent on good learning materials. Sometimes the good materials are available, and allow them to reach mastery in complex things. The whole school system is designed for this. Sometimes the materials are unavailable or misleading (e.g. because the topic is mindkilling), and they are lost. These are the "book smart" people. -- They believe in explicit learning, because this is what worked for them.
These are just extreme descriptions, I guess most people use learning by copying in some areas and explicit learning in other areas. They may have an explanation about which style is better in which situation. There are things that give advantage to one of those styles in a given area: how big inferential distances are there, how visible is the information, how good are available teaching materials. But better teaching materials can be made even in areas where learning by copying has the natural advantage. -- It's just than in a given area, when most people are satisfied with what they learn by copying, developing techniques for explicit learning may seem unnecessary and "wrong". This can be more complicated if saying that the copying does not work for you means advertising your low status, so the defense of explicit techniques itself becomes a low-status thing to do, and insisting that those techniques are completely unnecessary becomes a signal of good copying skills and high status.
Sorry for only commenting on the irrelevant taboo topic you touched on, but this is interesting to me. I have been reading some PUA stuff lately and it seems to me that the whole point is that it is not describing something that ordinary humans learn naturally, but instead prescribing something extraordinary that you can do to set yourself apart from the crowd in order to attract the hottest girl in the club that every other guy in there is hitting on. And even then it only works via the law of averages, and requires one to override one's natural intense aversion to rejection in order to pursue a more rational strategy adapted for a modern world in which you can talk to someone once and never see them again.
Am I wrong about this?
These days PUA refers to so many things that I need to be more specific. The sources that helped me were "The Mystery Method" by Mystery, "How To Become An Alpha Male" by Carlos Xuma, "Married Man Sex Life" by Athol Kay. I would also recommend "The Blueprint Decoded" by RSD.
Yes, there are many sources that only tell you "do this, do that, and if it does not work, just do it again". I guess this is what most customers want: "Don't bother me with explanations, just give me a quick fix!" This is how most people approach everything. Well, if there is a demand for something, the market will provide a product. And these days it is a huge business. Ten years ago, it was more like geeks experimenting and sharing their results and opinions... a bit similar to Quantified Self today, just less scientific, and sometimes more narrowly focused.
Overcoming aversion to rejection, doing many approaches to convert given rates of success into greater absolute numbers, doing something extraordinary to stand out of the crowd... those are the fixes. Applied incorrectly they could be even harmful. (Receiving a lot of rejection can make you more resistant, but can also break you. Standing out of the crowd is costly signalling, you need to pay the costs. Doing many approaches may cost you socially.) But there is a theory behind that, and maybe it is not clearly explained, maybe it is not emphasised enough, or maybe it is already obvious to many people, and only a relevation for the most clueless guys like me. (Actually, maybe the explanations are not in the books, but in the related blogs. I don't remember the exact sources of information. I am only sure that "Married Man Sex Life" contains the theory explicitly.) And I guess for a LW reader familiar with status and reductionism, another part is already known.
Here are a few useful ideas; the essence I got from the books and blogs, but the result may be a compilation of various sources, with a bit of LW lingo --
Humans are biological creatures. Attraction is a causal mechanism, not an unexplainable mystery. That does not mean there are no individual preferences. But the shared preferences are also important, and hugely underestimated.
Sometimes the society gives you wrong explanations, for various reasons: People fail at introspection. People optimize their answers for status, not for truth. The inferential distances between socially savvy and socially clueless is too big, so even a honest and good advice gets misunderstood and misapplied. To some degree, sexual mate selection is a zero-sum game, so there is an incentive to spread bad advice. The social advice is optimized for the needs of society (e.g. preserving the social order), which may be misaligned with your needs (e.g. getting from the bottom of the pecking order to the top). -- Of course, if we go more meta, the PUAs also have incentive (status, money) to give you bad advice. Caveat emptor; just don't make this a fully general counterargument.
Reproduction strategies of males and females are different. Some things are universally attractive (health, intelligence), but some things are sex-specific, or at least have different weight for each sex. (Yeah, the mandatory disclaimer: Not all people are heterosexual, even the heterosexual people are not all the same, etc. Just don't miss the forest because some trees are outside of it.) The specifically male preferences are widely known (all those half-naked ladies on the covers of magazines didn't get there by accident). The specifically female preferences are somewhat less known. Why? Consider the incentives: Women prefer to keep this mysterious, because mysterious means higher status. (This is why any attempt to explain the mystery feels like a status attack.) Men who understand them have no incentive to teach it to their competitors. And the men who want to learn, must first get a huge status hit by admitting that they need to learn. (Even worse, the status hit is guaranteed, but the good advice in return is not, and most likely one will not get good advice.) This changed with the internet subculture of low-status males, where admitting to strangers to be low-status does not cost one socially, and thus the usually taboo topics may be freely explored. (With the commercialization of PUA, the status games are back again.)
Specifically: to most heterosexual women, high status men are attractive. A lot of advice is about getting higher status, or about faking some signals that high-status men send. (Actually, getting higher status or faking it, is not a dichotomy. Sometimes status is in the eyes of the beholder: if you convince people that you have high status, you have it. Also, faking the high status can make you more confident, and when you learn to be confident, you will get high status naturally.) Wise people will remind you that becoming a high-status male will also help you in other areas of life, unrelated to seduction, so perhaps instead of becoming better at seduction you should frame it as becoming better at life. -- Add some specific tricks and fixes here, and you have a typical PUA material.
Problem is that the typical PUA material is optimized for short-term relationships. For someone starting from "no relationships" position, that is a huge improvement. But to get a long-term relationship, another lesson has to be learned. Some male traits are attractive for short-term relationships, some male traits are attractive for long-term relationship. The official story says they are the same, which is wrong (but socially useful). Reversing this stupidity, a typical PUA in a valley of bad rationality says they are opposites to each other, which is also wrong. In reality, they are approximately orthogonal. For short-term relationship you need "alpha" traits: to be strong, successful, healthy; in other words, to show you have good genes. For long-term relationships you need "beta" traits: to be kind, reasonable, faithful; in other words, to show you would be a good father. These are not the same, and these are not opposites -- when you fully understand this, everything else is just a commentary. Statistically, young women will put more emphasis on "alpha" traits (which is why PUAs focus on that), but as they get older, they realize the importance of "beta" traits. Men are socially pressed to develop "beta" traits, because that is the part society needs; but having only "beta" traits without "alpha" traits does not make a man attractive.
This is the root of most misunderstandings: When a man asks: "How to become attractive?" he often means that he starts from zero and cannot get even a short-term relationship; which means he needs to work on his "alpha" traits. However, a women hearing this question will typically interpret it as: "How can an already attractive man become even more attractive?", she imagines a typical attractive bad boy, and recommends adding some "beta" traits to that. This is why this kind of communication predictably fails, and then it leads to endless flamewars about whether women really want or don't want "nice guys". The answer is: Women want attractive men to develop "beta" traits; but there is a silent assumption that those men already have "alpha" traits. Women don't want men with zero "alpha" traits, regardless of how much "beta" traits they have.
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A more accurate way of putting that is that the man is the first to break plausible deniability. If you also take into account non-verbal, indirect signals (where if the recipient isn't interested they can just pretend to not notice and nothing bad happens), most of the times the very first move is the woman's, both according to this report about Britain and in my experience in both Italy and Ireland: I can't say I can recall ever getting a positive reaction from approaching a woman who wasn't already smiling at me. Now, a guy who has good social skills but poor introspection may only approach women who are smiling at them but not be consciously aware that he's preselecting women that way; likewise, a socially savvy but not introspectively savvy woman may not be consciously aware that she's smiling at the guy she likes; as a result, it feels to them like it's the man who's initiating the interaction, which I guess is the main cause of that confusion.
To be fair, I have filtered the reasonable parts of PUA. There is also a lot of crap. And most of the focus is on the short-term relationship -- the ending part is based solely on "Married Man Sex Life". (I guess that reflects the needs of a typical customer -- and perhaps even a typical PUA guru. Also, the society does give rather decent advice on "beta" traits; the "alpha" is the missing part, so teaching it is more popular and profitable.)
Yeah, this is difficult to explain (so outside view suggests I am prone to rationalization here). I agree with the examples you gave. And yet... the society gives contradictory and incomplete information on this. Consider saying: "If you have an expensive foreign car, you are more likely to get pretty girls." Say it at one place, and you will get: "Duh, news at 11." Say it at another place, and you will get: "You sexist! How dare you! Not all women are like that. Bringing an expensive car would never impress me."
So we have two separate magisteria here. In one universe, you only get girls by being bold and rich. In other universe, you only get girls by being polite and patient. Both messages are given by the society, none of them is literally a secret. Yet they seem contradictory, and how to successfully put them together, that is kind of a secret. Because people living in one universe typically deny the existence of the other universe.
Perhaps the information is all out there, in pieces, but you need some level of social skills to put it all correctly together. Judging by the popularity of PUAs, many people lack this skill. I certainly did.
I guess the nerds would appreciate a more precise advice; which parts of jocks' behavior are necessary for the desired effect, and which can be left out. Which is the 20% that brings 80% of the result. Otherwise, the price is too high. PUA explains how to get some of what jocks get, without having to become a full-time jock.
If you map says that higher status is not actually important, that it is mostly sought by insecure or evil people, and is not really worth sacrificing your life to get it... then the rational choice is to ignore it. If your map says that higher status will improve your life in almost all aspects, and that the first steps to improve it are rather easy... then the rational choice is to go for it. So you need to get your map right to make the right decision.
There is no need to go high-risk all the time. In some situations (a disco with a hundred pretty girls, you don't care about any one in particular, you don't mind dozens of rejections), high-risk, high-reward strategy is the best one. In other situations, tone down appropriately. There will always be some risk, because willingness to risk is an important "alpha" trait. (But keeping the risk reasonably low is an important "beta" trait.)
A new strategy is better tested on strangers. The people who already know you, will not react to your new strategy per se, but to your change. And people usually perceive change negatively; it disrupts social order. The stranger sees your new strategy and thinks this is what you are -- so you get a better response on what your future relationships would be if you became that.
And yes, you have to tweak all the advice to fit your personality. Also, while experimenting, you may discover traits you didn't know you had. Some of them good, some of them bad. You will have to deal with it too.
I would recommend you to find a torrent of "The Blueprint Decoded", watch it, go meet some new people, and do the experiments you feel (emotionally and ethically) comfortable with. Be just a little more courageous than you usually are, and notice how other people react to you, and how you feel inside once you become comfortable with it. Don't try too much at once. For example, if you have problem starting a conversation with a stranger, then during the first week consider successfully starting a conversation a victory. Don't push too far on the first try; you would sabotage yourself by converting every victory to a defeat.
EDIT: As a new environment with lot of girls, may I recommend dancing lessons? ;)
What do you care what the traditional roles in Western society are, so long as you're both happy?
What fraction of the time do they succeed? (And when they do, how do you know that part of the reason why they had picked Susan rather than Jane in the first place was that on some level they already knew that they had less of a chance with the latter than with the former?)
How has this worked out for you?
You must have been doing something right! I bet you'll have great success if you follow Villiam's advice.
This is not an actual explanation of the asymmetry -- why do men prefer to keep their preference mysterious less than women prefer to keep theirs mysterious? why do women have less of a disincentive to teach men's preferences to their competitors than men do?
Which official story? People preferring (brutally simplifying while trying to stay polite) to marry older, richer people but to sleep with younger, sexier people isn't that rare a trope as far as I can tell.
My impression is that there are many different shades with respect to this, ranging from 'explicitly learning social skills which others may learn implicitly' to 'behaviour intended to trick, force, pressure, or otherwise outright manipulate girls into bed with you' - with a great deal in between.
A man's negative take on PUA.
A woman's mostly negative take on PUA, though she thinks that a little PUA can be useful for men who are afraid to talk to women. Getting into the PUA sub-culture can leave men worse off.
Both have put a lot of thought into it.
My take is that PUA seems to be set in a universe where no one likes anyone else.
Funny thing is that I agree with the first article, I just have completely different connotations to that.
Yes, the stuff Mystery teaches really is dumbed down. Which is good, because some guys start so dumb that they need this; sometimes they have problems to understand even this. I was there once. And the stuff helped me to get out of there.
It feels to me like saying: "The elementary schools are so dumb, I learned much more at university!" -- Sure, good for you! Also, well-played sir; you gently reminded us of your higher status. The competition among PUA bloggers is strong these days; many authors have to market themself as beyond-PUA to be able to sell their PUA products. (Nothing wrong about that, I would probably do the same thing if I weren't too lazy to blog.)
I also agree with the rest of the article. If you take a mentally unstable person and teach them PUA, you will get a mentally unstable person with some PUA skills. And therefore... I mean, if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them Java programming, you will get a mentally unstable person with some Java skills. Perhaps it is socially unresponsible to teach mentally unstable people anything that increases their powers without fixing their problems first. But that is not a problem specific to PUA industry.
EDIT: Changed my mind about this.
Men helping low-status men to overcome their lack of social skills... is an evidence that no one likes anyone else? (Ten years ago, the help was provided online for free, only later it developed into a profitable industry.)
But they don't focus on liking women, do they? Well, they often don't. To make a fair comparison, how often do seduction (sorry, relationship) articles, magazines, and books for women talk about liking men, respecting their agency, et cetera?
And maybe the people criticizing PUAs just focus too much on the bad parts, and ignore the nicer parts. But I admit the bad parts may be majority of the stuff.
And if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them to use a weapon, you will get a mentally unstable person with some weapon-using skills. This may be more undesirable than a mentally unstable person with some Java skills.
The first link said that PUA could leave people in worse shape than it found them-- and Clarisse Thorn (second link) said the same.
Good point about PUA cultivating friendships between men. I'd missed that part. Still, it doesn't do a good job of encouraging friendliness between romantic/sexual partners.
Thank you for the links! I will most likely read the first link at some point, and maybe the second one eventually.
(From the about page of the blog linked to:)
WOW, I have been looking for a website like this for a few months now. Again, thank you!
Me too.
I don't think the overlap between club-type dancing and the type of dancing that one takes lessons to learn is very large, though.
I don't have much experience with club dancing, but at the few occasions, I was there with a girl who I previously danced ballroom-style with, and we mostly danced jive or quickstep or cha-cha, just with shorter steps to take less space and not move across the room. We had fun, and the feedback from other people was positive.
But even with the club-type dancing, somehow it got much easier for me once I became good at ballroom dances. Maybe I got more confident, maybe I learned to follow the rhythm, maybe I started to understand some movement patterns; probably all of that together.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking.
A big problem I have with club dancing is that I am 6'6", and I feel (probably at least somewhat accurately) that I am unusually visible and that any move I do is being judged by at least a few people. So I end up just standing there, then immediately realizing "this is much more awkward than dancing really poorly is", then concluding "Oh my god, no matter what I do I am doomed, I have to get out of here right now", then leaving, then sitting alone feeling like there is something very flawed about me.
I will get over this someday by applying a dedicated effort, but right now there are more important self-improvement projects. Until then I just will stay far away from any dance where I can't get drunk beforehand.
Well, I agree that it needn't be at the top of your to-do list. In fact, I'm not sure you need worry about getting over it at all, really. Not enjoying hanging out/dancing in clubs is no serious character defect, and plenty of people share your preference. By the way, happy birthday (or was that yesterday?)
club dancing is basically doing whatever you feel like to the beat. This is a lot easier if you have a repertoire of moves from other styles of dance or activity that you can instantiate. Also what Villiam_Bur said.
The best advice I've ever received along these lines is "treat people as though they were already close friends." In my case, that mostly means having conversations with them about topics I actually care about, as opposed to conventional topics.
IME, this weirds a number of people out, who subsequently don't interact with me much, but that's not necessarily a problem.
It also causes people to think I'm coming on to them, which is sometimes a problem, but was less of one when I was in the dating pool.
I always interpreted that piece of advice as meaning something more along the lines of "Be as enthusiastic and casual when you're hanging out with a relatively new acquaintance as you would be when you're hanging out with an old friend." This seems like decent advice, but it's very difficult for me to actually put into action, and it also seems like it would make some people very uncomfortable.
But your take on it is interesting. I'm not 100% sure I can picture it, however. Could you maybe give some sort of example of this strategy in use?
If "enthusiastic and casual" characterizes how you differentially treat your close friends, then sure, I'd say go for that. It doesn't for me, especially.
What I find differentially characterizes my relationships with close friends is that I can start a conversation with whatever has recently been on my mind, however unconventional an opening gambit, and we will mutually engage at a fairly high-bandwidth level. (And vice-versa)
E.g., I recently started a conversation (or, well, replied to "So what's up?") with "I've been thinking a lot lately about how to tell the difference between a lack of motivation that signals lack of genuine interest in doing something, versus a lack of motivation that doesn't, and one thing I'm noticing is that if I ask myself 'Self, are you looking forward to getting out of this slump and being enthused for that project again?' myself sometimes says 'yes!' and sometimes says 'meh.' and I wonder if that's correlated."
And, yes, I agree that it makes some people uncomfortable. I generally operate on the principle that my goal is not to make close friends out of everyone, nor even to make as many close friends as possible, merely to make close friends without wasting a lot of time. If 19 people respond "Oh look I must be going" and the 20th engages with me and we find each other mutually interesting, I generally consider that a win.
Do you think by any chance you could give a percentage estimation on how many people respond well, poorly, and neutrally to this strategy? (Or something along those lines.) This is interesting to me.
Offhand, I don't know.
It's most relevant at parties and large social gatherings where I don't know anyone, and I don't really think in terms of percentages-of-people in such situations so much as how quickly I find someone worth talking to.
Over 95% of the time, I'd say the result is a little bit of chitchat followed by the person and I both talking to someone else. Whether that's responding well, poorly, or neutrally I don't know; that seems to be the default condition at parties.
Less than 1% of the time, the result is the other person's eyes lighting up in what I've come to label the "oh look, one of my people!" expression, and I make a new friend. Probably not much less than 1%, though.
(By way of establishing scale, I'd say I try this ~50 times in a given year... I'm not a terribly outgoing guy, and generally prefer to hang out in smaller groups or just stay home with my husband, but I'm reasonably socially ept when I do go out.)
That said, I also have a reputation in my social circle for being kind of intense and a little out there, but interesting to talk to if you're interested in, well, talking. Which also creates a second-order effect, where friends introduce me to friends of theirs who share this trait because we'd really enjoy each other, and more generally where my social environment self-selects.
So, are you trans?
If so, the queer clubs are a slam dunk, if you get along okay with that "type". One thing to bear in mind is, a lot of the opening chatter will be about gender and sexuality issues, which gets a little tiresome. Just accept that this is the new smalltalk for these spaces --- instead of talking about sports or what your major is, young queer kids often ask each other about coming out stories, etc. People are also trying on the role --- it's all new and unfamiliar to them, too. Many are unused to having an in-group, and overdo "tribe signalling".
I guess I'm just advising you to be wary of the fundamental attribution error in these spaces, which can make people seem very narrow.
You can also turn this around and realise that there are ways you can help people avoid making the fundamental attribution error with you, too. For instance, if you're recently transitioning, I imagine that will feel really weird for a while. It's okay to talk about that! You can excuse some of your awkwardness this way, and I expect most of the folks in these spaces will find that quite endearing.
I'm pretty sure he meant "19 yo as of tomorrow" and not "male as of tomorrow", though I did consider teasing him about that (which may be what you are doing! Those things can be hard to tell online).
Well with the username I really thought it more likely he was trans. Shrug.
This is a nice Bayes learning opportunity. It's reasonable to infer that a female-looking username makes someone more likely to be female, maybe twice as likely (not much more than that; this is the internet and people give themselves weird usernames all the time, and actual women may avoid using female-looking usernames in male-dominated forums to avoid drawing attention to their gender). However, the base rate of transsexualism, even within a community as unusual as LW, is still incredibly low and requires a lot of evidence to overcome (e.g. someone telling you they're transsexual).
Do you really think 1/3rd of users named gothgirl* would be male? I'd guess something like 1-10%, compared with 1-3% transsexualism on LW: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/
On Less Wrong in particular, I would assign a high likelihood to various permutations of "gothgirl" being ironic, rather than sincere self expression of the user.
Yeah, sure. This is the internet. (Acknowledged that the base rate of transsexualism on LW is higher than I had expected.)
(for what it's worth, I didn't reason using base rates, I just remember an early comment by gothgirl420666 saying he was male and only took that name for the lulz)
Oh hey, what's up?
You thought his username gave you over 13 bits of evidence?
I needed fewer than 13 bits of evidence: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/
I likely committed some level of base-rate fallacy though (regardless of what the truth turns out to be). Trans* is more available to me because I hang out in queer communities, and know multiple transgender people.
The username contains more than 13 bits of information (being 14 characters long) so this might not be too unreasonable.
Transsexualism seems way overrepresented in geeky circles: off the top of my head, I could think of seven MtF and two FtM transsexuals within my circle of acquaintances, and there might be a few that I'm forgetting. LW definitely matches the definition of a "geeky community", so assuming a relatively high base rate would have been reasonable to me, based on my experience.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
It might help to precise-ify some of the language around what you mean by "more friends" and "more popular"? What kind of friends? What kind of popularity? Are there types of friends or popularity you don't want? Also, what kind of people can you usually hang out with one-on-one?
I think a decent litmus test for a "friend" is someone who you enjoy spending time with, and who you can reliably invite to hang out with you. You could rephrase this I suppose as someone who you enjoy spending time with, who enjoys spending time with you, where this knowledge is mutually available. Right now I only have one friend who clearly meets the criteria for this definition, though I have a few that come close. My tentative goal is to have five such friends, maybe by Thanksgiving break or so in college.
I'll admit that it's hard for me to find people who I genuinely relate to, enjoy spending time with and can feel comfortable "being myself" around, and I'm not sure if this has something to do with my own social strategies or if this is an unchangeable thing.
Popularity is a little more hard to pin down. I think what I want includes a mix of these qualities:
Obviously some of this is kind of unrealistic and selfish but it's an ideal, I guess.
These goals are not as hard as you'd think to achieve. I've basically gotten all of these by being active in several organizations on campus.
Just doing that gave more opportunities to talk to people, which as drethelin said, is very useful. If you take charge in organizing things, it helps a huge amount with social respect/status. The wide range of acquaintances happens by default.
You do have to make the effort to start hanging out with people outside the regular meetings though. It's pretty easy to do that if the meeting is just before a meal time, because then there's the convenient suggestion of eating together. In other cases, invite them to a party, along with several other people. Being known as the one who organizes groups is very useful for your goals.
Thank you for the advice!
This is comforting.
Out of curiosity, what kind of organizations are you active in? I'm trying to think of stereotypical campus organizations and isolate ones that I would enjoy, and I can't come up with too many. I like chess, so I guess if there's a chess club on campus I'll at least check it out, but that's all I can think of.
I speak from experience: Go to something new every week, or every day early when classes are light. As much as you can stand. You figure out what you like by trying things and not going back to lame events.
I am an introvert, and I found it easy to make friends in college in the right clubs. When everyone shares an interest, it's easy repeatedly meet people and interact.
I will strongly consider doing this. Thank you.
I'm in Secular Alliance, Queers and Associates, my school's circus club, massage, and our BDSM club. There are a few others that I go to when I can, but those are the main ones.
I second BrassLion's advice. Also, look at all the clubs ones that seem interesting, and sign up for their listhost as a reminder to go to them.
Wow, that must be interesting.
Yep, I enjoy it a lot. Came my first year in college because I was vaguely curious, and it ended up becoming a pretty big part of my life!