Social grace cannot co-exist with truth seeking, they’re at conflict. But some truths can be communicated gracefully. “Saying something nicely” is often just stating the truth with a lower magnitude. “I hate that → It’s not really my cup of tea”. The vector is the same, the magnitude is smaller. It’s like whispering rather than yelling.
Edit: People here are rather mathematical, and truth seeking doesn’t see much resistance in math because it’s so neutral. Try digging up human bio diversity research or any other controversial topic. What, you think I’m just a bad person? That would imply that all unpleasant conclusions are false, and that people who hold them merely have unpleasant values. As if moral thinking is a good heuristic, and ad hominem not a fallacy? That I’m agree downvoted already proved my point.
But the lack of social grace is not a lack of skill—well it is, but more precisely it’s a lack of sensitivity (and therefore granularity). One is socially tone deaf in the same way that they’re musically tone deaf. The more different tones you can differentiate, the more subtle differences you can pick up.
People who lack social grace lack this subtlety. Their social landscape is more coarse—perhaps some dimensions are even missing from it. If something registers weakly for us, we assume it registers weakly to others (people who have poor hearing often speak too loudly). But one can also ruin their sensivity (their social taste), by calibrating it poorly. This damage is often done by strong stimuli, which reorder the scale which is compared against (If more bits are used for the exponent of a floating point variable, less bits can be used for the precision).
Somebody who drenches their food in chili-sauce is less likely to be able to taste if they’re drinking cheap wine or expensive wine. Porn addicts often judge the appropriateness of sexual behaviour poorly. If you’re used to people who use strong language, the baseline of what you consider rude speech may be out of sync with others. I also imagine that watching too much anime might ruin somebodies calibration, since a lot of things in anime are exaggerated (down to facial expressions—which may be why a lot of autistic people are drawn to anime).
More general intelligence is less restrained (that’s what general means), but social grace, manners, norms, etc. are primarily restrictions. For instance, the overton window is the acceptable space of ideas. Intelligent people can often “emulate” bounded behaviour, but they’re at a disadvantage within the bounded area (which is why being street smart might outperform being book smart). Finally, many intellectuals don’t get the importance of context (they prefer the world to follow general rules which are true in all contexts)
Social grace cannot co-exist with truth seeking, they’re at conflict. But some truths can be communicated gracefully. “Saying something nicely” is often just stating the truth with a lower magnitude. “I hate that → It’s not really my cup of tea”. The vector is the same, the magnitude is smaller. It’s like whispering rather than yelling.
Edit: People here are rather mathematical, and truth seeking doesn’t see much resistance in math because it’s so neutral. Try digging up human bio diversity research or any other controversial topic. What, you think I’m just a bad person? That would imply that all unpleasant conclusions are false, and that people who hold them merely have unpleasant values. As if moral thinking is a good heuristic, and ad hominem not a fallacy? That I’m agree downvoted already proved my point.
But the lack of social grace is not a lack of skill—well it is, but more precisely it’s a lack of sensitivity (and therefore granularity). One is socially tone deaf in the same way that they’re musically tone deaf. The more different tones you can differentiate, the more subtle differences you can pick up.
People who lack social grace lack this subtlety. Their social landscape is more coarse—perhaps some dimensions are even missing from it. If something registers weakly for us, we assume it registers weakly to others (people who have poor hearing often speak too loudly). But one can also ruin their sensivity (their social taste), by calibrating it poorly. This damage is often done by strong stimuli, which reorder the scale which is compared against (If more bits are used for the exponent of a floating point variable, less bits can be used for the precision).
Somebody who drenches their food in chili-sauce is less likely to be able to taste if they’re drinking cheap wine or expensive wine. Porn addicts often judge the appropriateness of sexual behaviour poorly. If you’re used to people who use strong language, the baseline of what you consider rude speech may be out of sync with others. I also imagine that watching too much anime might ruin somebodies calibration, since a lot of things in anime are exaggerated (down to facial expressions—which may be why a lot of autistic people are drawn to anime).
More general intelligence is less restrained (that’s what general means), but social grace, manners, norms, etc. are primarily restrictions. For instance, the overton window is the acceptable space of ideas. Intelligent people can often “emulate” bounded behaviour, but they’re at a disadvantage within the bounded area (which is why being street smart might outperform being book smart). Finally, many intellectuals don’t get the importance of context (they prefer the world to follow general rules which are true in all contexts)