To me it sounds like the dating class hired models to tell people the dating class helped :-)
More seriously though, I imagine two groups of people. The first (“anxious normies”) would be helped a lot by this advice, because removing anxiety would unlock their social grace. The second (“non-normies”) don’t have much social grace to unlock, so this advice would rather hurt them by making their lack of grace more exposed. Or at least it should be supplemented by some other advice how to train grace.
Re: the first bit, all feedback was given in front of all the men and all the models. There weren’t really secrets about what the models thought and their brutality could be spectacular to witness. As could Lynn’s. Responses to guys at the end ranged from “you seem kinda like a child to me” to “you’re so anxious and i wish you could chill the fuck out” to “you seem really sexually inhibited and i think you should work on that” to “i really enjoyed working with you :)” to “you are the most insecure man I have ever met and need to learn to take any kind of criticism or you will never grow.”
Re: the second bit.… hmm. Yeah, I do sometimes wonder about this. Like, the problem with social anxiety is your social calibration is broken, and the problem with non-normies is they ALSO have broken social calibration but ALSO have poor baseline behaviors.
I have no idea how non-normies can train social grace.
Unfortunately I think social grace can only be trained to a small degree, for reasons similar to ASD not being curable. Some people just have a natural social grace, others are much more socially awkward, and removing their social inhibitions too much may make them “cringe” or even “creepy”.
For what it’s worth, I definitely had a period where my social anxiety had gone down and then I did some dumb stuff that people experienced as cringe and creepy for a while (causing my anxiety to shoot up again for a bit after some of them reacted extremely negatively). But then after a while, it got better as I learned from the feedback.
Children usually don’t have very much social grace either but then they get better at it over time, which suggests that it’s a trainable skill like any other.
I think it’s trainable mainly in the indirect sense: If someone has a lot of social grace, they can pull off things (e.g. a risque joke in front of a woman) that would be perceived as cringe or creepy in people with significantly less social grace. These latter people can become less cringe/creepy by learning not to attempt things that are beyond their social grace capabilities. (Which reduces their extraversion, in contrast to treating anxiety, which boosts extraversion.)
I think already children show significant differences in social grace. I remember a kid in elementary school who got bullied a lot because of his often obnoxious behavior. He had both very low social grace and very low social anxiety. I assume with time he learned to become less outgoing, because that wasn’t working in his favor. Outgoing behavior can be scaled down at will, but social grace can’t be easily scaled up. Even people who are good at social grace don’t explicitly know how to do it. It’s a form of nonverbal body/intonation language that seems to be largely innate and unconscious, perhaps controlled by an (phylogenetically) older part of the brain, e.g. the cerebellum rather than the cortex.
Of course that’s all anecdotal and speculation, but I would hypothesize that statistically the level of social grace of a person tends to stay largely the same over the course of their life. The main reason is that I think that lack of social grace is strongly related to ASD, which is relatively immutable. It seems people can’t change their natural “EQ” (which includes social grace) much beyond learning explicit rules about how to behave according to social norms, similar to how people can’t change their natural IQ much beyond acquiring more knowledge.
I would hypothesize that statistically the level of social grace of a person tends to stay largely the same over the course of their life
To be more precise, it’s that their social grace relative to their peers would be constant. Assume this is true. Now your hypothesis to explain this would be
I think that lack of social grace is strongly related to ASD, which is relatively immutable
Counter hypothesis: Social grace is learnable. When you do or say something, people around you can signal positively or negatively. Given enough signals, you can figure out what parts of your words/actions elicit positive or negative responses.
Then why do some people plateau in social grace?
In relatively uncalibrated individuals the training data is more costly to acquire: they’re relatively uncalibrated, so more likely to elicit negative response than their peers.
If you accumulate enough negative signals, then you’re out of the tribe.
Thus they’ve less opportunities to learn, either because they avoided many, or were ejected from their peer group.
miscalibration gets relatively worse over time: their peers improve faster.
This hypothesis would explain some ASD people’s consistent lack of social grace, even given lots of potential opportunities to learn, over a long time, even if they were equally perceptive of social signals.
To me it sounds like the dating class hired models to tell people the dating class helped :-)
More seriously though, I imagine two groups of people. The first (“anxious normies”) would be helped a lot by this advice, because removing anxiety would unlock their social grace. The second (“non-normies”) don’t have much social grace to unlock, so this advice would rather hurt them by making their lack of grace more exposed. Or at least it should be supplemented by some other advice how to train grace.
ooh, just noticed this comment.
Re: the first bit, all feedback was given in front of all the men and all the models. There weren’t really secrets about what the models thought and their brutality could be spectacular to witness. As could Lynn’s. Responses to guys at the end ranged from “you seem kinda like a child to me” to “you’re so anxious and i wish you could chill the fuck out” to “you seem really sexually inhibited and i think you should work on that” to “i really enjoyed working with you :)” to “you are the most insecure man I have ever met and need to learn to take any kind of criticism or you will never grow.”
Re: the second bit.… hmm. Yeah, I do sometimes wonder about this. Like, the problem with social anxiety is your social calibration is broken, and the problem with non-normies is they ALSO have broken social calibration but ALSO have poor baseline behaviors.
I have no idea how non-normies can train social grace.
Unfortunately I think social grace can only be trained to a small degree, for reasons similar to ASD not being curable. Some people just have a natural social grace, others are much more socially awkward, and removing their social inhibitions too much may make them “cringe” or even “creepy”.
For what it’s worth, I definitely had a period where my social anxiety had gone down and then I did some dumb stuff that people experienced as cringe and creepy for a while (causing my anxiety to shoot up again for a bit after some of them reacted extremely negatively). But then after a while, it got better as I learned from the feedback.
Children usually don’t have very much social grace either but then they get better at it over time, which suggests that it’s a trainable skill like any other.
I think it’s trainable mainly in the indirect sense: If someone has a lot of social grace, they can pull off things (e.g. a risque joke in front of a woman) that would be perceived as cringe or creepy in people with significantly less social grace. These latter people can become less cringe/creepy by learning not to attempt things that are beyond their social grace capabilities. (Which reduces their extraversion, in contrast to treating anxiety, which boosts extraversion.)
I think already children show significant differences in social grace. I remember a kid in elementary school who got bullied a lot because of his often obnoxious behavior. He had both very low social grace and very low social anxiety. I assume with time he learned to become less outgoing, because that wasn’t working in his favor. Outgoing behavior can be scaled down at will, but social grace can’t be easily scaled up. Even people who are good at social grace don’t explicitly know how to do it. It’s a form of nonverbal body/intonation language that seems to be largely innate and unconscious, perhaps controlled by an (phylogenetically) older part of the brain, e.g. the cerebellum rather than the cortex.
Of course that’s all anecdotal and speculation, but I would hypothesize that statistically the level of social grace of a person tends to stay largely the same over the course of their life. The main reason is that I think that lack of social grace is strongly related to ASD, which is relatively immutable. It seems people can’t change their natural “EQ” (which includes social grace) much beyond learning explicit rules about how to behave according to social norms, similar to how people can’t change their natural IQ much beyond acquiring more knowledge.
To be more precise, it’s that their social grace relative to their peers would be constant. Assume this is true. Now your hypothesis to explain this would be
Counter hypothesis: Social grace is learnable. When you do or say something, people around you can signal positively or negatively. Given enough signals, you can figure out what parts of your words/actions elicit positive or negative responses.
Then why do some people plateau in social grace?
In relatively uncalibrated individuals the training data is more costly to acquire: they’re relatively uncalibrated, so more likely to elicit negative response than their peers.
If you accumulate enough negative signals, then you’re out of the tribe.
Thus they’ve less opportunities to learn, either because they avoided many, or were ejected from their peer group.
miscalibration gets relatively worse over time: their peers improve faster.
This hypothesis would explain some ASD people’s consistent lack of social grace, even given lots of potential opportunities to learn, over a long time, even if they were equally perceptive of social signals.
What do you think?