My advice, if you want to become a good conversationalist, is just to crank up the amount of time you spend having conversations. If you are really serious, you could consciously review conversations after the fact, to try to find patterns and see where you could have improved.
What’s the link between visiting fellows and the weather?
My advice, if you want to become a good conversationalist, is just to crank up the amount of time you spend having conversations.
I can think of three people I know for whom that does not work. Not because they do not think they have opportunities for conversations, not even because they have opportunities but do not take advantage of them, but because they do, and put a great deal of effort into it, and yet I can see that it is not working for them. They are getting little in return for their efforts, because they are all doing it wrong, each in their own way. Whatever they need to be doing instead, having more conversations isn’t it.
Advice is good if it works for the person it is addressed to. It is bad if it does not. General advice like “talk to people more” cannot be expected to generally work any more than an appendectomy will work for every case of abdominal pain. An appendectomy will work only for someone whose problem is a diseased appendix.
A friend of mine video taped his conversations with people. (By which I mean, there was a video recording of some event, and he left it on following, to capture his social interactions.) In this way, he was able to see not just things he said, but also gauge people’s reactions to his body language. He said it was difficult to watch at first, but had a huge benefit to his social skills.
Video taping may not be the preferred way to go about it, but there is something to be said for reflection. While you are unlikely to get better without practice, merely sinking time into conversation won’t necessarily help, and may harm you. Without analyzing your attempts, even if it’s only a brief list of what went well and what didn’t, you may be practicing and learning bad habits. 100 ungraded math problems doesn’t make you better at math, and 100 uncoached squats may injure you.
Take a few moments after conversations to assess at least what went well and what didn’t. If you have access to an honest friend, you can do even better. Converse with a third party (your friend can participate or merely be near enough to observe) and run a sort of post-conversation analysis later. Treat it like any other skill you’re serious about learning. I’ve seen this help more than one struggling introvert.
My advice, if you want to become a good conversationalist, is just to crank up the amount of time you spend having conversations.
Good idea. Also, if you’re suffering from malnutrition due to poverty, just crank up the amount of cake you eat. If you are really serious, hire a dietician to figure out what you’re missing in your nutritional needs.
The people that aren’t good at conversation are the ones that don’t have easy opportunities to increase the number of conversations.
The people that aren’t good at conversation are the ones that don’t have easy opportunities to increase the number of conversations.
I don’t think that’s true. Who doesn’t have easy opportunities to increase their number of conversations, other than a total shut-in? People are everywhere, and therefore, so are potential conversations. You might not have the most interesting conversation with the guy standing behind you in line at the bank, but the only way to get better at conversation is practice, like the OP said.
Starting a conversation with a completely random stranger generally takes skill to begin with. Potentially creeping out 20 people in a row is not an acceptable risk—unless you’d like to bear it for me?
Also, others who have posted on the topic [1] said that if I’m at a low skill level at this, I shouldn’t practice on people in captive situations, like being in line at the bank. Which of you should I believe?
[1] can’t find the link right now, and I can’t even mention one of the people’s names
I think I’ve come up with a reasonable algorithm for determining if a stranger is open to conversation. (Mostly tested on females in New Jersey.) I developed it out of desperation, because, for a while now, if I didn’t talk to strangers, I wouldn’t be talking to anyone in person except my immediate family.
The algorithm:
Smile and make eye contact.
If eye contact is not returned within a reasonable period of time, find someone else. If eye contact is returned, wave.
If the stranger waves back or shows some other noticeable positive reaction, go ahead and introduce yourself.
The key seems to be the eye contact; as far as I can tell, if someone is willing to make eye contact with you, they’re usually willing to talk with you, and making eye contact seems to be inoffensive in most situations. You’ll probably get some false negatives, but false positives tend to be worse than false negatives and the false positive rate seems to be almost zero; you usually don’t creep people out by deciding to leave them alone.
Also, fan conventions (anime, gaming, etc.) are great places to find people willing to socialize with strangers. And take a camera; people often wear elaborate costumes at these events, and complimenting someone’s cosplay outfit has been a good conversation opener for me. (This is me at Otakon 2009.) I’ve also had some luck talking to fellow customers at bookstores; you know a few really good books you can recommend, right?
Not everyone will agree with me on this, and I know this is controversial. But I have the firm belief that no one becomes good at conversation, dating, or any social skill without the equivalent of “creeping out 20[0] people in a row”: it’s just that most people make most of their big social mistakes when they’re very young (just like most people’s middle or high school experiments with romance or sex end up being total disasters). If you’re not willing to creep out 200 or so people in a row, you’ll never learn.
The “avoid captive situations” comment is not particularly helpful for someone trying to learn social skills. In fact, I’d say it’s harmful, because the concern about making people feel uncomfortable is a big part of social anxiety, and social anxiety is what prevents people from developing social skills.
Not wishing to speak for Silas, but it looks to me like this. You believe that:
I have the firm belief that no one becomes good at conversation, dating, or any social skill without the equivalent of “creeping out 20[0] people in a row”
If you believe that you are not good at conversation, then you are speculating without practical experience. If you believe you are good at conversation, then by your account you must have gone through your 200 people. Silas is challenging you to share your experience of doing so -- I presume as a check on whether you really believe it, or merely believe that you believe it.
Creeping out 200 people in a row is like suggesting you can’t learn to ride a bicycle without breaking a few bones. It’s way excessive. Even creeping out 20 people in a row (Silas’ figure, which you chose to amend upwards, which argues against this being idle hyperbole) is an absurdity. By the time you’re creeping someone out, you’re already way off course.
You’re correct that if you go up to a random person 200 times and start talking, you will probably not creep out all 200. I was exaggerating, which is why I said “the equivalent of” creeping 200 people out: my point was that everyone needs to make lots of awkward mistakes to learn social skills, and that you need to be willing to do so. Silas stated that this wasn’t an acceptable risk, and I amended his figure upward to indicate that you have to be willing to deal with even worse outcomes than he was fearing, even if they’re unlikely to occur, and that learning conversational skills can be difficult and involve a lot of rejection.
I’m not going to list all my mistakes, but I have certainly made more than 200 awkward comments to people, experienced more than 200 rejections, made people feel uncomfortable more than 200 times, and so forth (though not in a row, admittedly). It doesn’t make you “way off course”; it’s the only way to learn.
It looks like we’re referring to different things by the term “[equivalent of] creeping people out”. I agree you will have to make mistakes and get rejections. But I was referring to a specific context for the “creeping out”.
Specifically, the problem at hand was that of how to get good at starting conversations with random strangers. The strategy being recommended was one that dismissed the downside of creeping out random strangers (which is often associated with the venue supervisor—boss, proprietor, conductor, bouncer, whatever—telling you to stop or leave).
My comment was that, no, doing things that disruptive and creepy, that often, in that short of a period, is not an acceptable risk, and not what you should suggest anyone should do if that’s the risk.
(And RichardKennaway confirmed that enduring that kind of social ostracism is way excessive for the skill being learned, so I’m not alone in this assessment.)
You, in turn, were taking “creeping out” to refer to relatively minor goofs in a context where the consequences are much less severe, where you’ve already done significant deft social navigation around that group, and where those who see the error have good reason to be much more understanding of the goof. While I agree that rejections, mistakes, etc. are to be expected and are part of life, you were equating very different kinds of rejections, and—like most sociality advisors here—assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier.
In any case, those are far different kinds of failures than “becoming the creepy guy at the bookstore” or having people get the bouncer to talk to you because of conversational goofs (which has happened to me, so this isn’t idle speculation). You have an inaccurate picture of what you were expecting me to go through, so your advice, though relevant for other social skills, was not applicable here, and comes across as—like Richard noted—shrugging off the possibility of breaking bones to learn how to ride a bike, as if it’s no big deal.
Am I starting to make sense here?
And who modded this down? I’m sorry the comment I made which Richard elaborated on was too brief to make my point, but why shouldn’t I have made that comment? Should I not have confirmed that Richard was correctly representing my objection?
I don’t care about the loss of karma here, but I want to know why someone deems it “a type of comment I want less of”. I get that if I were merely agreeing, it was a waste of space, but since I was the one making the original comment, my agreement and confirmation is informative to the discussion.
The strategy being recommended was one that dismissed the downside of creeping out random strangers (which is often associated with the venue supervisor—boss, proprietor, conductor, bouncer, whatever—telling you to stop or leave).
I’m not dismissing it. I’m saying that may be the price that you have to pay in order to develop these skills. If you’re not willing to pay it, I think it would be very difficult to learn (though there are ways of reducing the risk: CronoDAS suggests looking for eye contact first, which might help).
doing things that disruptive and creepy, that often, in that short of a period, is not an acceptable risk, and not what you should suggest anyone should do if that’s the risk.
If you know what these disruptive creepy things are, just don’t do them. If you don’t know what they are (and how to identify them on the fly), you need to learn, and that may involve making big mistakes. How else will you learn? If you don’t think it’s an acceptable risk, fine, but I think developing the skills is worth the risk. If you routinely, inadvertently, creep people out during social interactions, you have two options: avoid people forever and become a hermit, or practice talking to people and learn how to fix the problem, and it’s better to practice on strangers you never have to see again.
assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier
You have an inaccurate picture of what you were expecting me to go through
I don’t think I am assuming away the problem, and I think I do understand what you mean. It may be tougher for you than for most people, for a variety of reasons. In order to get past this barrier and develop social skills, I am recommending the specific strategy of going to different places (bookstores, coffeeshops, bars, parks, the grocery store) and starting up friendly conversations with lots of people. You can do this right now. I understand that you may get kicked out of these venues. I understand that everyone may think you’re creepy. I understand that this type of rejection is painful. Do it anyway. If you get kicked out of one place, try another. How else are you going to get past this barrier?
I am recommending the specific strategy of going to different places (bookstores, coffeeshops, bars, parks, the grocery store) and starting up friendly conversations with lots of people. You can do this right now. I understand that you may get kicked out of these venues. I understand that everyone may think you’re creepy. I understand that this type of rejection is painful.
I don’t think you do understand. I live in a small town, in which there are few alternatives if I’m kicked out of one of them. And I think it’s pretty easy for you to smugly shrug off this social ostracism as “just something we all have to go through” when, um, you didn’t have to go through it, and don’t understand why anyone would have to go through it.
This is not to say I’m looking for excuses to do nothing—everything I’ve said in this thread is quite well-grounded.
Nor to say that I haven’t made serious efforts—I’ve gotten involved in groups, which has gotten me experience, albeit not with random people.
Nor to say that I lack opportunities to practice conversations—just that I don’t have an immense hoard of people to draw interaction experience from.
Nor to say that I’m completely clueless—just that the random approach thing doesn’t come easily, and is a critical pre-requisite for the other advice.
Nor to say that no one can provide helpful advice—but some certainly can’t.
How else are you going to get past this barrier?
It’s inevitable that I’ll have to use advice that doesn’t assume away the problem, for one thing.
I think developing the skills is worth the risk … you have two options:
When someone starts saying there are only two options, that throws up a red flag for me. There are rarely just two options. A third option would be to listen to people who went through the mental transition I want to go through, or have studied this topic carefully, such as (to various degrees) CronoDAS, Roko, and HughRistik.
I’m proud of you for having most of these social skills naturally, and that for you, improvement mainly consists of going from great to supergreat. Really, I am. But maybe your perspective isn’t the appropriate one here?
I’ve joined a large organization that wouldn’t otherwise interest me, gotten involved in several of its subgroups and events, and practices conversation in those contexts. I’ve taken Juggler’s course and his subordinate’s. I’ve brought a date to company event to increase my apparent attractiveness. I’ve gone to four weddings. I’ve gone out with two women from the above group.
I’ve read books and web resources about sociality. I’ve been complimented on my ability to make group newcomers feel welcome. I’ve gotten to the point where I can comfortably say hi strangers. I’ve gone to two costume parties and talked with many of the people there. I’ve consulted with real meatspace people in the above group about my sociality problems and what to do. I’ve joined up with a political group, organized some of its events, and briefly led it.
For another it requires directing resources into solving the problem rather than justifying why your circumstances give you claim to victim status.
I disagree that that’s a fair characterization of me.
That’s a lot of social development! Nice. All that being the case I am somewhat surprised that you are still having problems with perceptions of scarcity.
I disagree that that’s a fair characterization of me.
Then do not read it as one. I intended it to be approximately as applicable as the sister:
It’s inevitable that I’ll have to use advice that doesn’t assume away the problem, for one thing.
I live in a small town, in which there are few alternatives if I’m kicked out of one of them.
Yeah, that would make things rough. If it’s at all feasible, I would look into moving to a large city, but of course moving can be very difficult, especially if you’re in a school program (I think you said you were in grad school).
And I think it’s pretty easy for you to smugly shrug off this social ostracism as “just something we all have to go through” when, um, you didn’t have to go through it,
I’m proud of you for having most of these social skills naturally, and that for you, improvement mainly consists of going from great to supergreat.
Oh, I definitely went through, and still go through, a lot of ostracism and rejection. I did, and do, have to go through it. I don’t think I’m at “great” by any means. And I don’t have these skills naturally. First of all, I don’t think anyone has them naturally, which was my point. Have you spent much time around kids or teenagers? Very few of them have any social skills at all; they’re still making mistakes. But if you mean that you think I learned social skills quickly without trouble or pain, no, they’re not easy for me either. I may not be able to provide helpful advice, because I don’t know all the details of your brain and your experiences, but it’s definitely not something I take for granted.
When someone starts saying there are only two options, that throws up a red flag for me. There are rarely just two options. A third option would be to listen to people who went through the mental transition I want to go through
You’re right, of course talking to people who know a lot about improving social skills will help. My point was that, if you inadvertently creep people out when you talk to them, then you have to risk it for right now as you go about conversations in your life, or else avoid people in general. In fact, I think that a large part of social and conversational skills is just not worrying or being afraid of people reacting negatively.
Oh, I definitely went through, and still go through, a lot of ostracism and rejection. I did, and do, have to go through it.
No, you’re referring to relatively minor goofs in a context where the social consequences are much less severe, where you’ve already done significant deft social navigation around that group, and where those who see the error have good reason to be much more understanding of the goof. While I agree that rejections, mistakes, etc. are to be expected and are part of life, you are equating very different kinds of rejections, and—like most sociality advisors here—assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier.
Those are far different kinds of failures than “becoming the creepy guy at the bookstore” or having people get the bouncer to talk to you because of conversational goofs (which has happened to me, so this isn’t idle speculation).
To clarify: Have you been approched by a venue supervisor because of a conversational goof with a stranger or new acquaintance? If not, you’re not going through the risks I’m referring to or speaking to the situation I’m in.
I’m not asking that the entire situation be pleasant; I’m asking that I can reasonably expect the failures not to cascade so that I can really go through a large enough number of interactions while actually learning. When you’re ready to stop misinterpreting me otherwise, I will revise my opinion on the merit of your suggestions.
(And a suggestion for you: if you want to drop out and save some face, make a remark like, “Gosh, you’re unpleasant. Now I know why you have so much trouble. You deserve it, and I hope you do everyone a service by staying away from them.” I try to help people, even if they haven’t been as kind in the past.)
Have you been approched by a venue supervisor because of a conversational goof with a stranger or new acquaintance?
Frequently. And I’ve been ostracized and kicked out of groups before as well. I considered those minor mistakes, and just moved on to the next venue. When this happened, of course it hurt. A lot. But I tried to be a good conversationalist, and gave it my best effort, and it didn’t work out, so I learned what I could. People are weird sometimes.
I have had similar problems to yours (though, as I said, I don’t know your exact situation), and I’m trying to tell you exactly what I have done and am doing to solve them. (It’s worth noting that almost everyone has gone through the “huge failures” you’re talking about; it’s just that most people went through them as young children or teenagers, when they had an excuse for not knowing, and we just happened to learn slower.)
I’m asking that I can reasonably expect the failures not to cascade so that I can really go through a large enough number of interactions while actually learning.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean. Are you worried about building a negative reputation in your small town? Are you worried about being banned from every single location there? This sounds more like anxiety than a realistic concern (though as I said, I don’t know your situation), and I suspect it’s this very anxiety that’s the problem.
Were the past situations where you’ve been kicked out of venues or whatever in a different town, or in your current small town? Did these mistakes follow you afterwards? I think Jim Random H.’s comment that small towns are toxic is accurate: they’re not toxic for everyone, but for people with social difficulties, they can be horrible places because your mistakes follow you everywhere. Leave as soon as you can.
And a suggestion for you: if you want to drop out and save some face
I wouldn’t do something like that. I’m trying to help, and I’m interested and curious in your situation. But I’m curious if on some level you actually want people here to give up and say “yes, you’re beyond help, you’re way worse than me.”
Okay, is everyone’s knowledge of social skills really so brittle that their models break down for small towns? (And I mean on the order of 200k, shifting with the college year, not e.g. 10k. But still, most social places don’t even have many people there at any given time.) Is it really impossible to develop social skills except in large cities?
I’m ashamed to admit that Juggler told me something similar a few years ago, that what he teaches doesn’t work except in large metro areas (his site said nothing whatsoever about this being a prerequisite for his program, and yes he refunded).
Moving to another city is a non-trivial task, not because I’m in school, but because I don’t have the connections or exposure that make job-hopping easy.
By the way, when exactly did you have rumors spread about you being threatening? I guess I may not have appreciated the relevance of your experience.
200k is one order of magnitude larger than what I was thinking when you said “small town”. The relevant criteria is how far you can narrow down the set of activities and demographics you interact with and still have an effectively unlimited supply of strangers. My experiences are all plus or minus an order of magnitude from that, so I don’t really know if 200k is sufficient.
As for rumors about being threatening—if you’re referring to the conversation here on LW where I posted a nasty ill-considered reply to a deleted comment and ended up deleting it, then I apologize for that. If you’re referring to something that happened in person, then I think you’ll find people have surprisingly short memories for that sort of thing.
200k is one order of magnitude larger than what I was thinking when you said “small town”.
Wow. It was two orders of magnitude off what I was thinking! I grew up 20 minutes from the nearest town, which was ~4k so I had a different expectations of what would be limiting.
As for rumors about being threatening—if you’re referring to the conversation here on LW where I posted a nasty ill-considered reply to a deleted comment and ended up deleting it,
No, I wasn’t. As I should have said at the time, you’re not the first person to publicly accuse me of a serious crime I didn’t commit, due to conflict with me. You’re just the most remorseful.
If you’re referring to something that happened in person, then I think you’ll find people have surprisingly short memories for that sort of thing.
In the case I have in mind, it was at least two years.
I, for one, would really really like to see a videotape of several of your conversational attempts, if such videotape would be legal to take in your state. In fact, after reading the social awkwardness saga here, it’s almost worth a ticket to Texas to walk along and observe in person.
I’ll second the request for video. Maybe a web videoconference? That’s not as good as an in-person conversation (in particular, it screws up eye contact and eliminates location/distance-based signalling), but it gets around the need to travel and it’s easier to film.
I’d love to vidchat with people. I wanted to do it a lot when I got my MacBook back in ’07, but no one I knew wanted to do it and there weren’t good random-stranger vidchat sites at the time.
I’ll post my skype name when I get home.
But I hope you meant this as a separate measure of me than someone’s “in the field” observations.
200k isn’t a small town! You’re fine. Can you please answer these questions:
I’m not exactly sure what you mean. Are you worried about building a negative reputation … ? Are you worried about being banned from every single location there? This sounds more like anxiety than a realistic concern (though as I said, I don’t know your situation), and I suspect it’s this very anxiety that’s the problem.
Were the past situations where you’ve been kicked out of venues or whatever in a different town …? Did these mistakes follow you afterwards?
(I removed the small town references.) If you have these concerns in a college town of 200,000 people, I stand by what I said about anxiety being the problem even more.
Juggler told me something similar a few years ago, that what he teaches doesn’t work except in large metro areas
Juggler comes from, and developed skills in, a college town of about 100,000 people, so I’m surprised.
when exactly did you get accused of sexual harassment or have rumors spread about you being threatening?
You keep moving the goalposts. I may not have had every negative experience that you’ve had, but I’ve also had large social difficulties, as have many other people here trying to help you. You ask for a specific plan that you can do right now, and I’m giving you one (go to lots of public places and start friendly conversations with lots of people). If you have too much anxiety to do this, that’s understandable, but let’s address that issue then.
Juggler told me something similar a few years ago, that what he teaches doesn’t work except in large metro areas
Juggler comes from, and developed skills in, a college town of about 100,000 people, so I’m surprised.
I suspect that, if you’re a student, college towns’ social flexibility is more like considerably larger towns—the transient student population means that social networks have much less institutional memory than a stable population of the same size.
The answers to the first block are all yes, except for a little uncertainty on the last one.
And 200k rises and falls with the college year. There are very few hangout places with a lot of strangers you can interact with, and even out of those, very few people want to talk, at least to me.
You keep moving the goalposts. I may not have had every negative experience that you’ve had, but I’ve also had large social difficulties, as have many other people here trying to help you. You ask for a specific plan that you can do right now, and I’m giving you one (go to lots of public places and start friendly conversations with lots of people).
You’re giving me something that has downside risk no one else would tolerate, and which is extremely vague (starting a conversation is a complicated process). Also, since I’ve had lots of conversations with non-strangers with no improvement, its not clear how I would even know what I’m doing wrong.
There may be anxiety issues (I do better after consuming things which suppress this), but I’m not sure you can call it that if failure really would mean wiping out most of my practice grounds, and if I can’t effectively “reboot” whenever I want.
There may be anxiety issues (I do better after consuming things which suppress this),
Now there is an interesting topic. Do you just mean alcohol, nicotine and pot? Or have you considered the actual good options. For example: Phenibut, picamilon or aniracetam? Those are some substances that are seriously handy when it comes to socializing. In the case of aniracetam it comes with enhanced verbal fluency as well as anxiolytic properties.
The things I refer to are alcohol, or prescription medication with anti-anxiety effects (but only some of them). I’ve noticed that my normal condition is to have a sort of “inhibitor” in my brain that’s always saying, “no, don’t do that, here’s a downside”; after having consumed one of the above, that feeling is suppressed in proportion to dosage, and I feel comfortable enough to quit contemplating consequences and take an action.
In my normal state, I have to concentrate to speak like a normal person because I’ll get the same internal criticism about any phrasing I try, which makes me frequently trail off or re-start sentences. (Also, I’m often told that I sound like a foreigner, even though I’ve lived all my life in Texas.)
Note that it’s not that I have inhibitions per se, but rather, that I generate specific counterarguments as the inhibitor. It seems like a low-grade version of those cases you hear about where someone had brain damage to their emotional centers and they can’t make decisions because they won’t stop weighing the alternatives.
Thank you for the pointers to those three “supplements”; I didn’t know that such effective anti-anxiety substances were available OTC in the US! I’ve tried some supplements that “support positive mood” via effects on neurotransmitters, but not the ones you’ve listed; I’ll have to check them out.
Thankyou for sharing your introspective experience. I’m always interested in how the human brain works and I find that the more I am able to instantiate the model of ‘human’ for a specific person the more I am able to empathize, comprehend their meaning and cross the inferential gap when trying to express my thoughts in a way that translates accurately.
I too have a particularly active inhibitor in my brain, although through experiences and active personal development have significantly reduced the negative effects. The challenging part was removing the maladaptive inhibitions while keeping the ‘perfectionism’ benefits that for me came hand in hand with that overactive system.
Thank you for the pointers to those three “supplements”; I didn’t know that such effective anti-anxiety substances were available OTC in the US! I’ve tried some supplements that “support positive mood” via effects on neurotransmitters, but not the ones you’ve listed; I’ll have to check them out.
I should clarify somewhat what I am suggesting the supplements can be useful for.
Aniracetam Very safe. As in, it is more or less impossible to overdose on the stuff and it isn’t going to mess you. It is probably safer than just about anything you can get in a pharmacy, including the glucose lollies they sell the front desk. It also doesn’t seem to come with significant tolerance/dependency problems that anxiety drugs are notorious for.
… But the anxiolytic properties are not the primary use of aniracetam. It is a cognitive enhancer that happens to have some anti-anxiety effects thrown in as a bonus. It isn’t going to completely counter serious anxiety problems but most people find that it makes socializing more relaxing and flow better. More significant to me is that the primary effect is just what is needed when socializing too. It boosts verbal fluency in particular and (by subjective reports) makes the subtleties in communication and the naunces of music more salient.
Picamilon ”Mostly Harmless”—It is just Niacin and GABA hooked up together in a way that will get it through the blood-brain barrier before it falls apart. Reports tend to be that it has a mild but reliable effect on reducing anxiety without a nasty rebound. People tend to ‘cycle’ on and off so that they can maintain the effectiveness.
Phenibut ”Use Responsibily”—Phenibut is safer and way healthier than either benzos or booze but at the same time it is not a toy. With aniracetam you can casually eat a tablespoon of the stuff just to see if you notice the difference. You do not do that with Phenibut. This is a real drug, you show it the proper respect.
In terms of effect this stuff is powerful. It isn’t a ‘oh, yeah, that is a bit better’ kind of thing. When used to treat anxiety it is basically a drug with reliable and significant effects (and effectiveness). It does, however come with side effects when used excessively. Specifically it has unpleasant withdrawal effects if you stop using it suddenly after long term, high dose use. it also builds up tolerance relatively so you can not use it every day. It is better to use it once a week or so, when you are out socializing. ie; as an all round superior replacement for alcohol.
In comparison to alcohol: The effects on inhibition are extremely similar. This isn’t surprising since it approximately the same mechanism at play (boosting GABA). It also tends to boost confidence and mood (as alohol sometimes does). Unlike alcohol Phenibut makes you smarter, not dumber. It also doesn’t eliminate your sound judgement, ruin your liver and kill your neurons. (A note—if you combine phenibut with alcohol expect each drink to have twice as much effect as you are used to.)
Benzodiazepine (diazepam, Valium) THIS STUFF FUCKS YOU UP! Yes, I am both yelling and using an expletive. Whenever I lament the flaws in the medical system or suggest taking personal responsibility for your medical needs the misuse of benzo prescription is right up there on the list of reasons. I’m not being particularly contrarian here. This uncontroversial medical science (that isn’t reflected in medical practice in a sane way).
In terms of effectiveness this stuff will work to knock out anxiety (come to think of it it’ll knock the rest of you out too if you bump the dose). If you are having a panic attack or a seizure you want someone to be injecting it into you. What it also does in the short term is to impair all of your brain functions. What it does in the long term is permanently deteriorate both your physical health and brain activity. If you want to shock yourself look up some ‘before and after’ SPECT scans of the brains of benzo users.
To the usual disclaimer “I Am Not A Doctor” I will add “and you shouldn’t put your faith in what I say all that much even if I was.”
What about oxiracetam? Some of these sites list it as being more powerful and faster. Would that rank above phenibut?
It is certainly stronger and faster than aniracetam as a cognitive enhancer, but it isn’t above (or even on the same scale) as phenibut. Where aniracetam is relaxing oxiractam is stimulating. People report enhanced motivation and concentration on top of the effects on memory and cognition. Because it is stimulating it can also produce agitation and insomnia if you use too much or too late at night. Definitely worth considering if you are looking to play with nootropics in general.
What about oxiracetam? Some of these sites list it as being more powerful and faster. Would that rank above phenibut?
It is certainly stronger and faster than aniracetam as a cognitive enhancer, but it isn’t above (or even on the same scale) as phenibut. Where aniracetam is relaxing oxiractam is stimulating. People report enhanced motivation and concentration on top of the effects on memory and cognition. Because it is stimulating it can also produce agitation and insomnia if you use too much or too late at night.
Definitely worth considering if you are looking to play with nootropics in general.
I’ll be interested in reading any experiences you choose to share!
Which bottles were you referring to by the way? (If Aniracitam I would go on to recommend a choline source to go with it, or at least eating more eggs.)
I’ll be interested in reading any experiences you choose to share!
Which bottles were you referring to by the way? (If Aniracitam I would go on to recommend a choline source to go with it, or at least eating more eggs.)
Aniracetam and Picamilon, from Cognitive Nutrition. I will check Bulk Nutrition also; that may be cheaper. Why take choline along with aniracitam, and how much?
Aniracetam and Picamilon, from Cognitive Nutrition. I will check Bulk Nutrition also; that may be cheaper.
I’ve had positive experiences with Cognitive Nutrition too. The ‘cheap’ part of Bulk Nutrition is largely in the ‘Bulk’ keyword. :)
Why take choline along with aniracitam, and how much?
The primary cognitive enhancing function of aniracetam (and piracetam, oxiracetam and just about all the things that enhance memory and abstract thought...) work by boosting acetylcholine and, over a period of time, by boosting acetylcholine receptors. Basically this means you are going to burn through your choline more rapidly. A similar effect to if you burned it up by having an extended, intense cognitive workout without any nootropics. You will still get improvements from aniracetam, just less. Some people also describe ‘brain fog’ if they deplete their choline levels too much.
I use centrophenoxine as my choline source. It is actually quite a good nootropic even by itself. Alpha GPC is another popular source with positive effects apart from supplying choline. The basic source is choline bitartrate. Watch this video to see the advantages of choline bitartrate (and if my eyes don’t deceive me, bulk packaging from bulknutrition). Basically… it’s really really cheap.
Are centrophenoxine and choline bitartrate also available on those sites? Do you buy them by themselves? And how much do you take?
I already have some B complex vitamins that contain choline bitartrate (the label says each pill contains 40 mg of choline). Will this be enough, or are you talking about much larger amounts?
Choline usually should be taken at a 0.5:1 or 1:1 ratio. Given that you’ll be taking on the order of a gram of the -racetams (certainly with piracetam), 40mg of choline is laughably little—you want something more like 10x that.
Are centrophenoxine and choline bitartrate also available on those sites? Do you buy them by themselves? And how much do you take?
Any site that sells aniracetam will sell at least choline bitartrate. You usually buy them by themselves. I get mine in powder form and create the capsules myself. I create capsules with a controlled ratio of piracetam, aniracetam and centrophnisine then vary how many I take and how often as appropriate.
If taking just ani and centro a suitable, fairly conservative dose would be 500mg Ani + 250mg centro twice daily.
Not that with racetams the full effect can be expected after about two weeks.
Aniracetam and Picamilon, from Cognitive Nutrition. I will check Bulk Nutrition also; that may be cheaper.
I’ve had positive experiences with Cognitive Nutrition too. The ‘cheap’ part of Bulk Nutrition is largely in the ‘Bulk’ keyword. :)
Why take choline along with aniracitam, and how much?
The primary cognitive enhancing function of aniracetam (and piracetam, oxiracetam and just about all the things that enhance memory and abstract thought...) work by boosting acetylcholine and, over a period of time, by boosting acetylcholine receptors. Basically this means you are going to burn through your choline more rapidly. A similar effect to if you burned it up by having an extended, intense cognitive workout without any nootropics. You will still get improvements from aniracetam, just less. Some people also describe ‘brain fog’ if they deplete their choline levels too much.
I use centrophenoxine as my choline source. It is actually quite a good nootropic even by itself. Alpha GPC is another popular source with positive effects apart from supplying choline. The basic source is choline bitartrate. Watch this video to see the advantages of choline bitartrate (and if my eyes don’t deceive me, bulk packaging from bulknutrition). Basically… it’s really really cheap.
You can sometimes find them in larger supplement shops. But they will be much, much cheaper online. Bulknutrition.com is a source with a solid reputation for quality that can also be extremely cheap. Particularly, surprisingly enough if you buy in bulk and fill the capsules yourself.
You can sometimes find them in larger supplement shops. But they will be much, much cheaper online. Bulknutrition.com is a source with a solid reputation for quality that can also be extremely cheap. Particularly, surprisingly enough if you buy in bulk and fill the capsules yourself.
Thankyou for sharing your introspective experience. I’m always interested in how the human brain works and I find that the more I am able to instantiate the model of ‘human’ for a specific person the more I am able to empathize, comprehend their meaning and cross the inferential gap when trying to express my thoughts in a way that translates accurately.
I too have a particularly active inhibitor in my brain, although through experiences and active personal development have significantly reduced the negative effects. The challenging part was removing the maladaptive inhibitions while keeping the ‘perfectionism’ benefits that for me came hand in hand with that overactive system.
Thank you for the pointers to those three “supplements”; I didn’t know that such effective anti-anxiety substances were available OTC in the US! I’ve tried some supplements that “support positive mood” via effects on neurotransmitters, but not the ones you’ve listed; I’ll have to check them out.
I should clarify somewhat what I am suggesting the supplements can be useful for.
Aniracetam
Very safe. As in, it is more or less impossible to overdose on the stuff and it isn’t going to mess you. It is probably safer than just about anything you can get in a pharmacy, including the glucose lollies they sell the front desk. It also doesn’t seem to come with significant tolerance/dependency problems that anxiety drugs are notorious for.
… But the anxiolytic properties are not the primary use of aniracetam. It is a cognitive enhancer that happens to have some anti-anxiety effects thrown in as a bonus. It isn’t going to completely counter serious anxiety problems but most people find that it makes socializing more relaxing and flow better. More significant to me is that the primary effect is just what is needed when socializing too. It boosts verbal fluency in particular and (by subjective reports) makes the subtleties in communication and the naunces of music more salient.
Picamilon
“Mostly Harmless”—It is just Niacin and GABA hooked up together in a way that will get it through the blood-brain barrier before it falls apart. Reports tend to be that it has a mild but reliable effect on reducing anxiety without a nasty rebound. People tend to ‘cycle’ on and off so that they can maintain the effectiveness.
Phenibut
“Use Responsibily”—Phenibut is safer and way healthier than either benzos or booze but at the same time it is not a toy. With aniracetam you can casually eat a tablespoon of the stuff just to see if you notice the difference. You do not do that with Phenibut. This is a real drug, you show it the proper respect.
In terms of effect this stuff is powerful. It isn’t a ‘oh, yeah, that is a bit better’ kind of thing. When used to treat anxiety it is basically a drug with reliable and significant effects (and effectiveness). It does, however come with side effects when used excessively. Specifically it has unpleasant withdrawal effects if you stop using it suddenly after long term, high dose use. it also builds up tolerance relatively so you can not use it every day. It is better to use it once a week or so, when you are out socializing. ie; as an all round superior replacement for alcohol.
In comparison to alcohol: The effects on inhibition are extremely similar. This isn’t surprising since it approximately the same mechanism at play (boosting GABA). It also tends to boost confidence and mood (as alohol sometimes does). Unlike alcohol Phenibut makes you smarter, not dumber. It also doesn’t eliminate your sound judgement, ruin your liver and kill your neurons. (A note—if you combine phenibut with alcohol expect each drink to have twice as much effect as you are used to.)
Benzodiazepine (diazepam, Valium)
THIS STUFF FUCKS YOU UP! Yes, I am both yelling and using an expletive. Whenever I lament the flaws in the medical system or suggest taking personal responsibility for your medical needs the misuse of benzo prescription is right up her on the list of reasons. I’m not being particularly contrarian here. This uncontroversial medical science (that isn’t reflected in medical practice in a sane way).
In terms of effectiveness this stuff will work to knock out anxiety (come to think of it it’ll knock the rest of you out too if you bump the dose). If you are having a panic attack or a seizure you want someone to be injecting it into you. What it also does in the short term is to impair all of your brain functions. What it does in the long term is permanently deteriorate both your physical health and brain activity. If you want to shock yourself look up some ‘before and after’ SPECT scans of the brains of benzo users.
To the usual disclaimer “I Am Not A Doctor” I will add “and you shouldn’t put your faith in what I say all that much even if I was.”
In this post you indicated that you have already been doing a lot of productive work going places and practicing conversations. What I’m saying is just that continuing to do more of that is pretty much the only way of building more skills, and it does come with risks of rejection.
You’re giving me something that has downside risk no one else would tolerate,
What’s the difference between what you’ve been doing, and going to a coffeeshop or bookstore and talking to a couple of people? I’m a little confused. From that previous post, it sounds like the risk is mostly in your head, since you’ve listed a number of recent successes. Doesn’t what you’ve been doing have downside risks as well? There are lots of strangers at weddings, for instance.
The answers to the first block are all yes
So the bad experiences you described were all in a different town? How long ago? And are you reluctant to go to a bookstore and talk to people because you don’t want to wipe out your practice grounds in your current town, like you believe you did in the previous town?
You’ve indicated that you’ve been complimented on your ability to make people feel comfortable in a group. This ability can transfer to starting friendly conversations with people in a public place.
Also, since I’ve had lots of conversations with non-strangers with no improvement, its not clear how I would even know what I’m doing wrong.
I can guarantee that there’s been some improvement. And you don’t need to know what you’ve been doing wrong; at least for me, trying to figure out exact rules and specify my mistakes was just an exercise in frustration. People react in weird ways sometimes, and you can’t always predict or model when and why, but with practice, you can reduce the frequency of negative reactions.
There may be anxiety issues (I do better after consuming things which suppress this),
Now there is an interesting topic. Do you just mean alcohol, nicotine and pot? Or have you considered the actual good options. For example: Phenibut, picamilon or aniracetam? Those are some substances that are seriously handy when it comes to socializing. In the case of aniracetam it comes with enhanced verbal fluency as well as anxiolytic properties.
No, I remember it, though probably in much less detail than you do.
I think the tone of your posts has changed since then.
Evidence that people are not necessarily good at evaluating their own behavior: I know two people who became much more pleasant company after using anti-depressants. Neither of them had any idea that they were doing anything different, they just thought other people had become nicer for no apparent reason.
Where do you live? Some places have tighter courtesy rules than others (and, of course, rules vary from one place to another, too)-- what Suzette Haden Elgin has written about Ozark courtesy sounds like it would be terrifying if I had to get it right. Grammatical shifts which I can barely notice mean different things. (Sorry, no examples handy to mind.)
Can you video yourself in conversation? It’s conceivable that some bad habits will be more visible from the outside?
what Suzette Haden Elgin has written about Ozark courtesy sounds like it would be terrifying if I had to get it right. Grammatical shifts which I can barely notice mean different things.
That sounds really interesting. Do you have a book title or reference or anything, even if you don’t have examples?
With difficulties like that, you’re probably not going to find any genuinely useful advice on the Internet. It might help if you got some extroverted person to coach you face-to-face. Have you tried that?
(FWIW, I overcame my problems on my own, but my problems were minor compared to yours. I had low-status behaviors that caused people to ignore me, but I could always parse the nonverbal context just fine.)
No to the first, yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting.
I’m already involved in some groups, untasteful though I find them. The problem is not being in groups per se, but starting conversations with random people.
Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
As you may have gathered from previous interactions with me and others here, I’m generally careful about my phrasing when I do give advice: I normally preface it with “Here is what I recommend” or the like. I wasn’t giving you advice yet, but collecting information prior to giving advice.
I asked about Improv because it points out one specific thing I think you’re doing wrong: you’re often “blocking” as the improv jargon calls it. I would recommend you learn about (and practice) “yes and”.
Your answer to my question is “blocking” in a synctactically typical manner: “yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting”. “Yes, but” when what you’re looking for in conversation is “yes, and”. You’re telling me in an oblique way (“lost brain cells”) that Toastmasters wasn’t a satisfactory experience for you, without giving me an opening for further conversation on that topic.
You could have phrased that in a thousand other ways more inviting of further conversation. Example: “Yes, I did try Toastmasters, and I was bored out of my mind; why did you ask, and what were you thinking I should have expected to get out of attending?”
I disagree with your assessment that “the problems is not being in groups per se”. You’ve had many people here tell you that they find interacting with you often unpleasant, even though they are by no means “random people”, they are from a social set that you have chosen and that by your own admission you want to get more closely involved with.
And to repeat something I’ve said previously: people discussing this topic with you here and now may not be very good advice-givers, but then you’re not necessarily a very good advice-taker. Eye, mote, beam.
I’ve upvoted your response to the Go analogy because it’s factually true. One thing you’re overlooking, though, is that when a Go novice asks a Go master what they should learn about, it’s a good idea to try very hard to extract something from the master’s advice, no matter how bad the master seems to be at explaining. Otherwise you risk entering a common failure mode related to “blocking”:
Master: you should study life and death. Student: no, my problem isn’t life and death, I know about the two eyes thing, please teach me some killer openings. Master: at your level studying the opening is premature, learn how to stabilize your groups. Student: stop giving me advice I don’t need, what’s the best fuseki for black?
If you’re fed up with one master, go seek another—rather than fruitlessly spend energy blocking the one. But if many masters are telling you the same thing, perhaps it’s time to update.
I asked about Improv because it points out one specific thing I think you’re doing wrong: you’re often “blocking” as the improv jargon calls it. I would recommend you learn about (and practice) “yes and”. …
Yikes! I think you’re overextrapolating what I was trying to do based on my use or nonuse of various codewords that you’ve decreed to have certain meanings. I said “yes but” because I wasn’t trying to invite conversation as I would in an in-person discussion, so it’s no surprise that the remark doesn’t leave you options. In an in-person discussion I would do different things.
I had assumed (correctly) that you believed Toastmasters would help and would recommend it, so I just want to confirm that I had gone to it but found the rituals and leaders painfully stupid (which is what I meant by losing brains cells; I didn’t mean I was bored), intending to convey that it would not be helpful. If you were asking to probe for more information than that, you should have said so rather than asking a brief question from which you expect to extract volumes of meaning.
I didn’t know I was in the middle of a “conversation skills test”—you shouldn’t do that to people.
I appreciate the improv-based suggestions you’ve given; that is insightful. I don’t think you needed to wait until you were sternly lecturing me to give it, though.
And to repeat something I’ve said previously: people discussing this topic with you here and now may not be very good advice-givers, but then you’re not necessarily a very good advice-taker.
What does that even mean? If I can’t identify what I would be doing differently based on learning the advice, or am in a situation that renders the advice dangerous, should I just shut up about it and say “thank you”?
In any case, my criticism has not been of bad advice per se, but rather, advice that assumes away the very problem under discussion—the “let them eat cake” advice. I think we all remember the first glaring example of this. If I gave advice that assumed away someone’s very problem, I would want to know. Wouldn’t anyone?
I disagree with your assessment that “the problems is not being in groups per se”. You’ve had many people here tell you that they find interacting with you often unpleasant,
I’ve had a few do that, and online forums are significantly different from in-person interaction.
I’ve upvoted your response to the Go analogy
I didn’t make a comment replying to any Go analogy—do you mean RichardKennaway?
I didn’t make a comment replying to any Go analogy—do you mean RichardKennaway?
Yep, this one. My apologies for the misattribution—under the veil of the Anti-Kibitz and given the tenor of the reply (“You can in fact verbally explain Go”) I’d assumed you were the author.
Oh, well, in any case, I did try Go for a while, and I do think you can explain it verbally. Before playing any human opponent, I figured out a very simple procedure for beating the computer, though it only works when you play white.
Just copy your opponent’s moves, rotated 180 degrees about the center. It won’t be until the endgame that your opponent takes the center. Then just play as best you can (it will feel like getting a free move anyway). At the end of the game, you’ll have basically the same territories, but you’ll be in the lead because of white’s handicap (kyu or whatever).
I only briefly started trying this on human opponents, and for whatever reason, even on the major Go server, people would quit after a few moves when they saw me doing this.
I’m probably missing something big, but there you go.
Many people consider manego annoying, because it’s sort of a cop-out.
Whereas I consider the labeling and shaming of the opponent for making valid moves that are difficult to beat is either a total cop-out, an insult to the game or both. If you can’t beat someone when you can predict and for most part determine what their moves will be then you seriously suck or the game is a solved problem. Like checkers or tic-tac-toe.
Seriously, if you think you are a better player and you credit your opponent with the slightest hint of strategic competence you should EXPECT them to do what you do until such time as they suspect they are risking falling into a manego-trap.
Sometimes a game has one serious flaw but is nevertheless fun to play, and there is no obvious fix for that one serious flaw. In that situation, it can make sense to shame opponents who exploit the flaw. There is a sense in which this is an “insult” to the game, but both players might still like the game, on balance.
For example, I have found that in Stratego, it rarely makes sense to attack first against a player of roughly equal ability. At a certain point in the mid-game, evenly matched players will usually both find it optimal strategy to move a piece back and forth dozens of times in sort of “chicken” game where the goal is to get the other player to attack first. This is boring, so I don’t want to play with you if you’re going to do that every game, but potential Stratego partners are rare enough that if you otherwise enjoy playing Stratego with me, I might try to shame you into being more reckless with your attacks.
I might try to shame you into being more reckless with your attacks.
I would treat shaming (as distinct from banter) in that context as a ‘defection’. My response would be to then eliminate whatever suboptimal levels of recklessness that I had previously allowed to creep into my play in a spirit of cooperation or just any intrinsic recklessness that I had not chosen to stifle. Either that or I would disengage from the game entirely. Before doing so I would offer potential cooperative agreements if possible.
Most likely I would not find Stratego particularly appealing. If it is supposed to be about ‘strategy’ yet relies on people not using good strategies in order to work it is broken. I would much prefer to play a lighter game that at least doesn’t pretend to be about strategy.
When playing the card game 500 the standard rules for ‘misere’ are not well balanced. When playing people who are not rank amateurs I advocate a limit of one misere call per player per ‘game (up to 500)‘. If the opponent insists on the standard rule then I proceed to play (open) misere whenever the risk/reward ratio is favorable. This tends to result in most games being largely determined by my misere calls, with me winning two thirds of them and ‘going out backwards’ the other third. Naturally I do so with playful cheer and offer to impose the restrictions at any time.
It can actually be quite fun to play the meta-game of negotiation. Winning the game convincingly even (and especially) under the ‘broken’ system they insist on but offering to adopt an agreement that will effectively be a handycap for me. Fogging all manipulative shaming attempts and repeating the offer. Engaging in a good natured battle of wills with those too stubborn to admit their folly or, given that admission, to change their mind. Getting the kitty a LOT. Doing the balancing act of keeping the experience fun despite the broken rules and the resulting conflict. Knowing when to stop and switch to a different game or activity entirely (thus practicing the ability to maintain boundaries and accept ‘no-deal’ as a healthy alternative to ‘win-win’).
All that is a lot more enjoyable than for me playing a broken game and being largely disinterested.
I would treat shaming (as distinct from banter) in that context as a ‘defection’.
Sure. I guess instead of “shaming” I meant to say “banter which, if serious, would be considered shaming, but, since merely playful, instead conveys the idea that one’s opponent’s imaginary alter-ego inside the game is worthy of shame, despite the fact that one’s opponent himself is pretty much a cool dude.” I didn’t pay a lot of attention to word choice; I was mostly just adopting the language of the commenters above me on the thread.
If I ever had to really shame someone to get them to play Stratego interestingly, I agree with you that I should either (a) find another activity, (b) find another friend, or (c) look for a way to escape the alarmingly boring desert island that has hitherto prevented my access to other friends and activities.
Most likely I would not find Stratego particularly appealing.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
It can actually be quite fun to play the meta-game of negotiation.
Clippy, when you first became aware of yourself, so far as you know, did you have something like your present mental and social faculties? Some humans (and other biological animals) enjoy games at least in part because they help develop skills in a low-threat, low-risk environment.
There are better ways to enhance my skills, like checking for reflective coherence, validating models of phenomena, and refactoring code. To the extent that I enjoy doing that, perhaps it counts as a “game” for me, although it is not distinguished as a separate sphere of activity.
Doing something that doesn’t lead to paperclips just so I can get better paperclip-making skills as a side effect? That just seems stupid.
It’s not always obvious what leads to more paperclips, and a broad exploration of topics like game theory (which can apply to all sorts of economic and negotiation problems) can give you an idea of what you need to learn next.
“There is in it what is in it; ’tis a mirror held up to the reader, whereby if a donkey look in, surely a sage will not look out; the ends of all things are revealed within its pages to he who has the key; it keepeth away the pox, the flux, and the weeping sore.”
I don’t joke about serious issues like paperclips. Is there a modification to my most recent proposal you wish to make? Perhaps later delivery of the paperclips? A few orders of magnitude less paperclips?
It is very unlikely that I will agree to make orders of magnitude more paperclips than our existing agreement (10^20kg of paperclips in ~50 years in exchange for ~$50k in the next two years) for an order of magnitude less money. For any agreement where I give you orders of more magnitudes more paperclips than our first agreement, I likely require a delivery of paperclips later than 50 years from now, unless you are prepared to offer me at least an order of magnitude more money than $50k. I’m willing to negotiate, but you need to give me better starting terms for me to engage in a good faith negotiation.
Alright, I’ll think about other changes. What about if I just gave you USD for specification of the technique you’ll use to find the metal and collect it, with me doing all of the physical work?
I accept that we both sincerely intend to build the paperclips we would commit to, but a precommitment is only meaningful if it is realistic for you to keep it. The deceptive thing about accepting the bargain is that building ~10^26kg of paperclips in 20 years is orders of magnitude more improbable than building 10^20kg of paperclips in 50 years. Do you really have a probability of being able to build those paperclips in 20 years of higher than 50%?
10^20kg is already a %!#^ing lot of paperclips and you almost accepted a deal to build 100 earth masses of paperclips. Please remember that you are not negotiating just for yourself, but on behalf of the future resources of all humanity. It is negligent for you to accept that deal without renegotiating it.
Of course not, he’s role played by some human, but the meaningfulness of “real” and “not-real” becomes more ambiguous if you are living in a Level 4 multiverse.
My reading of Clippy is as a piece of role-playing, for comedic or didactic purposes. I therefore also assume that the $2000 is of the same nature as the gold pieces that D’n’D characters acquire.
Eh, Clippy has apparently already paid $1000 in real US dollars to SIAI as a down payment on an agreement with Kevin. There’s been 3rd-party confirmation on this from (IIRC) people at SIAI, though I don’t know all the details and whether that constitutes valid evidence—they could be in on the whole thing too.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
One of each if nobody has attacked at all (other player’s choice). If an attack has been made then a piece from the player who was not the last attacker.
That would allow some element of a stand-off potential if both players believe they are better served by a smaller scale battle, a stand off that would probably only be stable if at least one of the players was making an error in judgement. It also encourages various feinting strategies that should ensure that most games do not become dominated by a stale mate.
10.1 It is not allowed to move a piece more than 5 times non-stop between the same two squares, regardless of what the opponent is doing. It does not matter whether a piece is moving and thereby attacking an opponent’s piece, or just moving to an
empty square.
10.2 When a scout is involved in the Two Squares Rule, a scout is considered to start on the starting position of his move plus all the squares he steps over, and he ends on the final position of his move plus all the squares he steps over.
11 Repetition of Threatening Moves: More-Squares Rule
11.1 It is not allowed to continuously chase one or more pieces of the opponent endlessly. The continuous chaser may not play a chasing move again more which would lead to a position on the board which has already taken place.
11.2 Exception: chasing moves back to the square where the chasing piece came from in the directly preceding turn are always allowed as long as this does not violate the Two-Squares Rule (Five-Moves-on-Two-Squares).
11.3
Definitions:
continuous chase: the same player is non-stop threatening one or more pieces of his opponent that is/are evading the threatening moves.
chasing move: a move in a continuous chase that threatens an opponent’s piece that was evading during the continuous chase. Hereby:
a/to move: a/to move plus attacking or a/to move to an empty square.
to threaten: to move a piece next (before, behind or besides) a piece of the opponent.
to evade: to move a piece away promptly after it has been threatened.
Wait, those scouts sound familiar! I suspect I have played that game. (Everything has a point value, higher points usually beat lower points, scouts get to move like rooks, etc. I have vague memories of marshals and land mines too...)
Oops, I failed to notice that part. Well, no, I can’t. But then maybe you should just be playing a different game, or if you have a lot of time, redesigning Stratego from scratch. :) But failing that I guess opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it.
Edit: But I don’t see how it can be considered at all a good solution. It also requires that you both recognize the problem in the first place. Though with something like stalling I’m not sure there is any real stable solution, due to boundary exploitation and the ability to stall more subtly. Hm, I guess I take back my “opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it”; if you’re already at the point that it’s the only solution you can find, then it isn’t going to solve the problem.
Though with something like stalling I’m not sure there is any real stable solution, due to boundary exploitation and the ability to stall more subtly.
I find that this analysis is exactly correct for bughouse, a time-based 4-player game where stalling can be the key to victory and is very difficult (costly) to monitor, because any time you spend seeing if your partner’s opponent is stalling becomes time that you can’t spend defeating your own opponent.
In Stratego, a turn-based 2-player game, you can often treat the decision to stall or not-stall as an iterated fake Prisoner’s Dilemma, especially because the cost of being defected on for one turn is quite small, and the act of defecting for an entire game is quite noticeable. If I ‘cooperate’ by attacking you for 2 games in a row, and then you refuse to attack me on the 3rd game, I can’t help but notice that I’m always the one attacking, and I can just refuse to play a 4th game with you until you apologize.
Edit: WTF is with my double posts? I have not been clicking twice or anything that should result in a double submission but every comment I make appears twice. I cannot think of anything I have changed on my browser that would cause this either. Seroiusly strange.
Yup, I agree. If someone pulls manego on me I usually smile and see it as an opportunity to learn something.
But in a more subtle way an evenly matched game does have both opponents doing “exactly the same thing” in the opening. Both follow the same recipe—stake out one corner, possibly the remaining corner, then go for a corner approach to simultaneously sketch side territory. It’s just that the half-dozen or so possible corner moves each have a subtly different meaning, and so symmetry is usually broken quite rapidly.
What is the impact of trying manego against a skilled opponent? Would it be correct to say that by simply telling someone the above strategy, you have significantly increased their skill level, even if they still get beaten by good players?
Someone good (low kyu or dan level) will eventually play a symmetry-breaking move such as tengen, and then the novice (who doesn’t have a good follow-up because they didn’t really understand the moves they were playing) will get clobbered.
Manego is like guessing the teacher’s password by parroting back every single word the teacher speaks. :) What counts as skill in Go is understanding the moves you play (and being able to read out their consequences).
It does impress novice opponents, which I suppose is why you’d see people not want to keep playing you once they caught on that you were doing it.
I wouldn’t compare it to guessing the teacher’s password, or at least not only compare it to that.
Recall the points made in our discussion of tacit knowledge. Here is a case where a simple verbal instruction, in a significant, measurable way, can increase someone’s skill at a game with notoriously inarticulable strategy.
You explain manego to a beginner. (Not tournament beginner, I mean, someone who knows the rules, read a tutorial, only played a few games.) Now, they can almost always beat a computer[1] as white, when before they could not. You made a huge difference, purely through verbal instruction.
I would say that’s more of a problem with GnuGo than an actual increase in skill. Manego is more of a trick play that only works against people who don’t know how to deal with it.
Many people consider manego annoying, because it’s sort of a cop-out.
Whereas I consider the labeling and shaming of the opponent for making valid moves that are difficult to beat is either a total cop-out, an insult to the game or both. If you can’t beat someone when you can predict and for most part determine what their moves will be then you seriously suck or the game is a solved problem. Like checkers or tic-tac-toe.
Seriously, if you think you are a better player and you credit your opponent with the slightest hint of strategic competence you should EXPECT them to do what you do until such time as they suspect they are risking falling into a manego-trap.
Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
I’m one of the people here who fit this description, but I may have been experiencing different-but-overlapping challenges to yours.
The primary social difficulties I used to have:
Severe social anxiety (probably undiagnosed social phobia)
Not knowing what to say and do in unscripted informal social situations
Difficulty reading people and developing models of how they respond and feel (theory of mind?)
I currently experience all these difficulties in lingering amounts, but probably no more than average people. And I am way ahead of others with similar personality traits and cognition to mine.
I engaged in a long period of social experimentation (handled “in software” to use Roko’s analogy). During this time, I developed the ability to understand many aspects of social interaction on an intuitive level, exercising social “muscles” I never knew I had (to switch to a completely different analogy).
As Blueberry describes, I had to risk making social blunders to learn. I made a bunch of people uncomfortable at various points in my learning process, such as when I was learning to be more spontaneous instead of turning over comments in my mind for minutes before uttering them, which sometimes involved me blurting out ill-considered things until I developed the right balance between filtering and spontaneity.
Yet I’ve never had difficulties comparable to getting in trouble with venue supervisors. I can’t even remember seriously offending anyone or having anyone unhappy with me.
For some reason, these were never lessons that I had to learn by trial-and-error, and the thread is making me think of some possibilities why:
I am non-confrontational, and have trouble expressing anger, aggression, or assertiveness (though I’ve improved on the last one)
People seem to perceive me as non-threatening and trustworthy
I was raised with a restrictive notion of manners
All of these factors contributed to me having social problems when I was younger, because I was unable to handle bullying and teasing, and I was perceived as a pushover and as rather mousy. Yet I wonder if these factors actually facilitated my efforts to learn social skills later in life.
Thanks to these factors, my own personality made it difficult for me to make significant social blunders and offend people in real life. Even when I was trying to act like a jerk, the result was still pretty nice relative to the average male. I was free to experiment, knowing that if things went wrong, the constraints of my own personality would keep me from causing real offense to people. Furthermore, with only a bit of social practice and observation, I became very sensitive to other people’s emotions. The social experimentation allowed me to learn social procedural knowledge very fast, such that I no longer had to view socializing as a form of experimentation at all (though that’s another discussion).
I also practiced facial expressions in the mirror a ton, and worked a lot on my voice tonality, to make sure that my subcommunication was really how I wanted to come across.
For someone with lower Agreeableness and lower interpersonal sensitivity trying to learn social skills, their experimentation might have a higher risk of going wrong in worse ways. If someone can learn social skills with only a small period of time of offending people, that might work, but any extended time in such a learning process is potentially grueling to the person involved (and of course difficult for those he or she is interacting with). If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs, but if you find your shooting eggs out of rockets launchers, something may be wrong.
I would wonder if there are any ways to shorten that the process of learning social skills necessary to have interactions with people, while avoiding offending or alienating them, or getting in trouble with venue supervisors.
It’s been my experience that people with high Agreeableness are often under-served by social advice, and they end up getting walked over. Yet I’m starting to wonder if it’s also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways. Mainstream culture tells people to be polite and nice, but it doesn’t really explain how a low-Agreeableness person can connect with others betters. And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting “high status,” being “the prize,” and “not giving a crap.” These lessons may be useful to high-Agreeableness males with low-status, but badly backfire for low-Agreeabless males with low-status.
I can think more about how people with different personality traits to mine might learn social skills; it won’t be completely based on my own experience, but I do have some ideas.
Yet I’m starting to wonder if it’s also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways.
Low agreeableness makes it hard to even hear social advice properly. (It’s hard enough for males to accept advice even when agreeable.)
And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting “high status,” being “the prize,” and “not giving a crap.”
Surprisingly enough each of these three are still important for the low agreeableness/low status males to learn. It is just harder to explain which specific skills it would take to develop these attributes. Apologizing whenever someone else disapproves of you is not actually all that much different to attacking whenever someone else disapproves of you. It signals the same underlying insecurity.
Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
No advice here, but I started thinking what the sort of advice you are looking for would look like, and whether much such advice even exists.
A different skill from social interactions, and probably a simpler one is playing Go. A notable thing about Go is that there isn’t much instruction in the form of “if this happens, do that”. That doesn’t work, as there are too many possible game configurations, and whatever form a successful player’s skill actually takes can’t really be verbalized. Instead, people are just told to expect to lose a bunch of games at first, during which they are expected to build up the difficult to verbalize pattern matching abilities about what works and what doesn’t in different situations. A bit like the advice to have a bunch of social interactions which you expect not to end very successfully.
Of course social interactions also have a much wider space of viable approaches than games of Go, so the analogy of needing to do things the hard way to build non-verbalizable pattern matching skills might not be that tight.
Reg Braithwaite has an article about the problems with a certain type of personality and trying to learn Go, when you just can’t seem to go from declarative knowledge to procedural skill when picking up the game. Maybe it’s relevant to learning social skills as well.
A notable thing about Go is that there isn’t much instruction in the form of “if this happens, do that”.
Are you kidding? There are plenty of books teaching Go, full of verbal instruction, covering the basics (take territory first in the corners, then the edges, then the middle), standard opening patterns (joseki), detailed tactical situations (tesuji), proverbs, middle game, end game, every aspect of the game. Of course, it takes practice to turn that advice into skill, as with any skill, but the advice is there, and it works.
For someone who can learn from it. People do learn from it—I did, back when I played Go, and the books and Go magazines would not be published if they were not useful.
So what distinguishes those who find it straightforward to learn Go by study and practice, as I did, and those who get into the emotional stew that Braithwaite describes? What distinguishes those who learn to ride a bicycle by practice alone, as I did, from those who need instruction also? What distinguishes those who are willing to have a go in social situations and manage to observe, learn and improve, from those who are not, or do not?
If I knew that, I could set up as a personal development guru.
BTW, while I find Braithwaite’s account weird in relation to go, it pretty much sums up how I used to feel about socialising, so I have some experience of both sides of this. I don’t actually socialise any more than I used to, though.
BTW2, it’s just occurred to me that there are many books on social skills for people with Asperger’s syndrome. I’ve not read any of them and I can’t comment on how useful they are, but I happen to be aware of a publisher that specialises in books on autism and Aspergers, Jessica Kingsley. FWIW.
Are you kidding? There are plenty of books teaching Go, full of verbal instruction, covering the basics (take territory first in the corners, then the edges, then the middle), standard opening patterns (joseki), detailed tactical situations (tesuji), proverbs, middle game, end game, every aspect of the game.
Yeah, bad wording on my part. There’s a lot of instruction, but I understand that a great deal of practice is utterly vital in order to put the instruction into efficient use. The assumption I’m basically after is that if someone would study Go literature fulltime for a year but wouldn’t play any games, they would still play their first games very poorly. I’m not sure to what degree this is really the case.
I have a friend (admittedly a very very smart friend) who become interested in Go after studying combinatorial game theory and discovering that the infinitesimal game value “up arrow” actually occurs in Go, and that game theorists had had productive conversations with Go masters on the subject—the theory actually had applications.
Using nothing but readings in this area and a few games with me, the friend leveled up from “pure but highly read” beginner to about 14kyu (relative to IGS in 2002?) within four or five games.
My impression is that true tacit knowledge exists, and that theory really doesn’t help it a lot… but also that it mostly comes up in domains where the brain is going to be relying on muscle memory a lot, like dissecting the nervous system of shrimp or juggling or such. As a separate thing there are deeply theoretical domains where something appears to be tacit knowledge but its really just a matter of observers not understanding need for patient study when dealing with large inferential distances.
Silas, I’ve never gone from “social difficulties” to “no social difficulties” based on a direct and obvious course of study, but one very general life heuristic I’ve found to work well for similarly major work is to search for “the best self help book on the subject” whenever I notice a thing about myself that I really want to cultivate or “fix”.
Sometimes it takes me a half a day on Amazon to make an educated guess about which book might meet my “best on the subject” criteria. One of the things I look for are reader reviews of books that recommend some other author or book as clearly superior to the book being reviewed—the best of these suggested books “jump subjects” by invoking a distinct set of keywords or different focus which opens up a whole new “vein of thought” on the subject. Discovering veins, finding “best of breed” within each vein, and then comparing the best of breeds is what can take a while.
Another quick thought: I think you might be living in a small town where you expect to stay for years or decades. If this guess is correct, I would take social advice from “city people” with a huge grain of salt. The environment, opportunities, upsides, downsides, and the social expectations based on this different environment can be substantially different. You can’t “throw people away” in a small town… even if you don’t like someone, you’ll have to live in proximity to them for decades. This also might open the possibility of a weird “solution” to your situation: move! :-)
I’m not sure I would unreservedly recommend books I find this way, because they aren’t all full of things I wholeheartedly endorse. They’re usually experiments prompted by a sense of personal inadequacy and some of them are kind of embarrassing, but.… here are some books I found in roughly the way I recommended to Silas and what I think of them now:
When I was having difficulties navigating casual not-really-friendly acquaintances with other women (like in the workplace) where I couldn’t just avoid people who gave me bad vibes, I found Catfight to be reasonably helpful. I decided on this over various books about “queen bees” that seemed unscientific and possibly amoral… but I haven’t read any of those to justify the impression. This book helped me flesh out some details in a pet theory of mine about the way the “aesthetics of signaling” are a major locus of negotiation in real-world socially-embedded virtue ethics. I liked it a lot for that reason, though the text didn’t contain the theory explicitly.
When I was trying to figure out what I should be thinking (when planning for retirement) or saying (when my parents brought up investing), I discovered a classic called The Intelligent Investor which was written by the mentor of Warren Buffet and which helps deflate some of the horrible epistemology around investing. I can’t really speak for the utility here, because I’ve had very few opportunities to apply the knowledge since acquiring it but a nice theoretical example of its content is that it pointed out the difference between inside view and outside view calculations of investment value. Given the distinction, it counsels the use of the outside view with a reference class including market conditions over periods of time longer than a human investing career (though it doesn’t use the precise terminology to say this that this community might use for such things).
At one point I was wondering if I should change my sexual ethics and I searched my way to Why Men Love Bitches but reading this mostly this helped me decide that the whole subject area was almost as morally bankrupt as PUA stuff, and even more intellectually bankrupt (relying almost solely on anecdotes rather than the PUA community’s “self congratulatory theory plus quick and dirty experimental method”). I had my first date with my husband about two months after reading this and I suspect that part of the reason the relationship has been so rewarding (lots has to do with him being amazing) is that I had much more internal clarity about what I wanted in a relationship and what I was willing to give in order to get it. The book helped bring the clarity, even if it didn’t directly apply.
Lately I’ve been in the planning stages for a startup where I expect to be in a leadership position and I thought I should spend some time seeing if I had any gross character defects I could patch before subjecting future employees to potential misery (or to at least have criteria for recognizing a co-founder to help in the absence of a patch). The best I could find in this area wasn’t that great, but it was Smarts: Are We Hardwired For Success?. It turned out to be kinda shallow and sad with poorly designed psych instruments and unsupported cognitive biases about personal immutability all over the place.
“Smarts” mostly just confirmed for me that any subject area people usually come to with selfish motivations (esp in business writing ) will mostly have crap for epistemology. I don’t even have a single working hypothesis as to why this is so common in this area, but I have various suspicions that are all generically reinforced every time I find books like this.
The only really valuable thing I got out of “Smarts” was a working theory for “style conflicts” I’d seen between people who are good at (and value) flexible reaction to surprises and people who are good at (and value) up front planning and diligent execution. I’ve been trying to get better at Aumann updating with people when high-level abstractions are used as justifications when there are tactical differences of opinion. This was one of the first real “hits” I’ve had in that area (though that wasn’t what I bought the book for).
(
For what I wanted, I should have bought Leadership and Self Decption, which I didn’t find by the “best of breed” strategy, but found next to my bed when I was falling asleep in Benton House after a day hanging out with SIAI’s Visiting Fellows. Most of the one-star Amazon reviews of this book appear to be true, but the topic (someone’s pet theory about the psychological mechanisms behind self deception in social contexts) was fascinating and helped me find some areas where I probably really was broken and it was simple to detect this and fix it.
I’m not sure how that book ended up in that bedroom, but I am grateful for whatever serendipity (or Machiavellian plotting :-P) brought it to my awareness!
)
In the course of gearing up for the startup I also tracked down a “brass tacks and details” book on the subject (which is still in my “to read” queue) called The Startup Company Bible For Entrepreneurs. I haven’t looked at this book enough to form a substantive opinion.
At one point I was wondering if I should change my sexual ethics and I searched my way to Why Men Love Bitches but reading this mostly this helped me decide that the whole subject area was almost as morally bankrupt as PUA stuff, and even more intellectually bankrupt (relying almost solely on anecdotes rather than the PUA community’s “self congratulatory theory plus quick and dirty experimental method”).
“Why Men Love Bitches” is a really great book (and it works just as well if you reverse the genders). That’s one of the books that helped me learn about people and relationships and figure out what I want as well. I’m sorry to hear you decry the whole PUA/dating/social skills/relationship advice field as bankrupt; I’ve found these materials and quick-and-dirty experimental method very useful for figuring out what works and feels right for me.
I’m curious, what do you mean about changing your sexual ethics?
Another classic that I found in a similarly serendipitous way is Cialdini’s “Influence”.
The problem I had with them is that advice in this area generally applies an instrumental view to “other people”, without attention to the kinds of people the skills are likely to work on, and whether those people (after the interaction or deep into it) are likely to be better people who are retrospectively happy about their interactions with you.
For most of my life I’ve been of the opinion that the idea of “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a sham excuse that people invent after having been partly responsible for causing an emotional trainwreck that was very painful to most of the people involved. My working hypothesis, then and now, is that it is probably better not to get romantically entangled with someone unless you and your sweetie are both capable offering and granting something approaching research grade informed consent (as opposed to merely judicial grade where its pretty much deemed not to have been obtained only in cases of gross fraud or dramatic mental impairment).
I’m not talking about getting signatures before smooching with someone, but I am talking about (1) thinking about it first, (2) imagining possible consequences for both parties (and possible children who may be created) in the coming weeks, months, and years, and (3) doing one’s best to avoid harm to anyone given such thoughtfulness which probably requires some time in private and lengthy conversation.
Cialdini’s “Influence” is an interesting example of the social skills literature, because he ostensibly wrote it as a “defense against the dark arts” textbook to help people avoid being manipulated. In practice, it is studied mostly by compliance professionals as one of the most epistemologically sound manuals that exists on the subject of the “dark arts” in general. I don’t think it is an accident that sound epistemology and benevolent moral intent went together like this.
Though there is great ethical value in helping people avoid influence techniques, I contend that there is also great ethical value in teaching people how to influence others. I argue that social skills (of which social influence is a subset) are distributed inequitably in society, and that this result is unjust. Some people are dramatically better at social influence (status, etc...) than others knowingly or unknowingly, due to different personality traits and upbringings. There are the haves, and the have-nots in the area of social skills.
The only way for social equality to exist is for people to be in the same bracket of social skills (and social influence ability). We can’t make things equal, but we can compress the disparity between the top and the bottom, so the people at the bottom aren’t getting stomped on so badly.
Either the haves must give up their social skills, or the have-nots must attain more social skills. The first solution is impossible. With their higher social status, the haves can’t be forced to do so, and they will scoff at requests to disarm out of the goodness of their hearts. The cool kids aren’t going to change how they do things no matter how much the uncool kids stamp their feet. Furthermore, some of the haves are naturally that way due to their phenotype, and they can’t lower their social skills (at least, not without the help of the Handicapper General ).
The solution is for the have-nots to learn to be more socially influential. Yet if you do so, you join the ranks of the haves, though you may be one of their more restrained and reflective members. Unfortunately, if you become one of the haves you will still encounter have-nots. You should avoid stomping on them, but they may end up at a disadvantage relative to you. It isn’t your fault that they aren’t educated about social influence, and it isn’t your individual responsibility to do so.
A society where disparities in social skills have been compressed by pulling people at the bottom upwards would be more equal than what we have today. Reducing this inequality is a good thing. There would be great transparency about social influence. That’s part of the reason I write so much about these subjects: I’m trying to do my part to get the knowledge more evenly distributed. Yet there is a strange agreement in society between the haves and the have-nots: they both often look down on have-nots trying to become haves.
I also believe that there should be more discussion of the ethics of social influence. Yet in discussions of the ethics of social influence, I often notice a greater degree of scrutiny on people who are learning social influence, rather than on those who are already doing it. Furthermore, some ethical criticisms of social influence (usually leveled at those learning it) seem overly idealistic. When social influence and status is woven so deeply into the fabric of society, the phrase “don’t hate the player; hate the game” can often be a valid defense.
I see learning status gaining skills as an arms race. That is you gaining more social influence will encourage others to gain more to try and stay ahead of you so that they can get what they want. Thus forcing you to spend more time and energy on socialising. It is not as simple as have and have-nots.
I’d guess the haves socially denigrating the have-nots for trying to get more social skills is part of their way of fending off competitors.
Why the have-nots might do it? Well if they are part of your social group there are a number of reasons.
They might not want to be on their guard around you in case you try and manipulate them.
They might worry that you will become less interesting to talk to or less of a friend as you spend less time with your head in a book/consuming in-group media and more time shmoozing and climbing the greasy pole.
If they are not part of your social group, then yep a legitimate bias unless they are trying to defuse the arms race. Which is a bit overly idealistic I’ll grant you.
It might be a game, and engaging in it might lead to more energy put into socially unproductive purpose down the line. But, unfortunately, the only way to win IS to play, otherwise you’ll be losing influence to suburban WASPS with nice hair. Some of them might even be sociopaths. :(
Yes and no. If you personally want to be influential in government or CEO of a major company then yes. However that is not the only way to influence society.
There are two rough ways to shape society. Through social means and technological. An example of technological shaping is the creation of effective birth control allowed many women to take more control of their lives. It allowed them to have sex and maintain a career. Artificial wombs would have further societal consequences.
So if you are going the technological route to societal influence then all you need is sufficient resources to create the technology and market it to sufficient people such that it becomes self-sustaining. It would become self-sustaining by becoming the basis of a profitable business with lobbyists etc. If you are fulfilling a large need, then all you may need to do is develop the tech and license the patent. That may not require to much resources or lots of social skills. However the fallout of any technology is not predictable and it is very hard to “undo” a technological release if it is not to your liking (requiring lots of social influence).
In terms of long lasting social influence you can support a group that has the same or similar goals as you. The groups marketing team can then use their skills to transform your money into influence more effectively than the individual donator.
If your idea is insufficiently popular to be a major influence in that fashion it is likely if you get into politics that mentioning it or suggesting might well be political suicide.
Lone genius inventors have influence in society, but they don’t have much status. I don’t even know the name of the guy who invented birth control. It’s the marketers and CEOs in the technology sphere who get most of the status, outside of the geek world.
To truly capitalize on many inventions, it’s necessary to negotiate with your licensees, investors, or partners. How much social skills that takes depends on how well you want to come out in your negotiations. Business social skills aren’t the same thing as the status skills present in more general contexts, but there is substantial overlap.
Personally, I want to have my cake and eat it, too: I want to influence society, and gain status for it rather than creating things that give other people more status than me.
Not everyone shares a preference for attaining status, but many people share preferences for things that status can facilitate, such as money, dates, friends, and mental health. Those who can attain those things to their satisfaction without any additional efforts spent on status, are in a great spot. Those who can’t will have to either learn status, be unsatisfied, or downgrade their preferences to what they can achieve. While not everyone shares my preferences, it’s possible that more people should if they want to effectively fulfill their preferences.
I encourage people to be honest with themselves about what their goals actually are, instead of selling themselves short and accepting a mediocre situation out of fear of leaving their comfort zones. I make this encouragement because in the past I’ve observed many people (myself included) abandoning ambitions out of feelings of resignation and unworthiness, and convincing themselves that they don’t really want those things as a coping mechanism. This can be a dangerous form of self-deception.
But you accept that there are some people with genuinely low ambition? Whether I am one or not* is somewhat irrelevant; you probably don’t have sufficient biographical material to tell one way or another. Do you have a good way of testing whether low ambition is due to low ambition or low self-worth? Any research on the subject?
*I’d characterise mysefl as ambitious in what I would like to achieve, but I actively do not want the trappings of power. The thought of sycophantic yes-men vieing for my attention turns my stomach and makes me feel tired, for example. As do girls that would want to try and exploit me for my money/connectedness. So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
Whether I am one or not* is somewhat irrelevant; you probably don’t have sufficient biographical material to tell one way or another.
Of course, which is why I addressed my comment in general terms.
Do you have a good way of testing whether low ambition is due to low ambition or low self-worth? Any research on the subject?
I would expect individuals to vary on ambition and status-seeking. I do not know the precise factors that cause variance in these traits. I am advocating attention to specific factors that lead people to state low ambition or low desire/concern for status. These factors may include defeatism, lack of opportunity, discourage from others, negative emotion associations, akrasia, or past mistreatment or abuse.
*I’d characterise mysefl as ambitious in what I would like to achieve, but I actively do not want the trappings of power. The thought of sycophantic yes-men vieing for my attention turns my stomach and makes me feel tired, for example. As do girls that would want to try and exploit me for my money/connectedness. So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
Your view of status interaction seems different from mine. Having status doesn’t mean you have to have sycophantic yes-men. People (men or women) drawn to you for your money or connectedness (especially the latter) aren’t necessarily trying to exploit you.
So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
I guess it’s a question of costs vs. benefits and what your goals are. For most sorts of goals that people have, I suggest that status will probably help them achieve their goals to a similar degree that money could (think of the term “social capital”). I’ve noticed that people without much social experience, particularly with status interaction, often have an overly cynical outsider’s view of those sorts of interaction, which could lead to skewed estimate of costs and benefits.
Personally, I’ve found that many specific ways of acquiring social status or influence, even if not actively unethical, don’t fit my values or personality. Yet I feel a lot more comfortable rejecting them having tried them out, knowing that my arguments against them are based on empirical data, not on purely theoretical conceptions that may be subject to bias (e.g. self-deception, sour graps, slave morality).
You are worried about hypothetical people that say they are happy with their current social status when they really are not.
I’m worried about the truely less social being harangued to try and make them change themselves when they really don’t want to.
Until you recognise there is this group and include them in your plans for social change in some fashion (even if it is only identify and leave alone), then you are just making their lives more difficult (in a well meaning fashion).
Your view of status interaction seems different from mine. Having status doesn’t mean you have to have sycophantic yes-men. People (men or women) drawn to you for your money or connectedness (especially the latter) aren’t necessarily trying to exploit you.
I never said you have to have them or that all of them will be, merely if you are a top flight CEO or politician they will be drawn to you compared to if you are a bum. Thieves don’t steal from paupers. I’m an Agreeable guy and would not want to have to be saying no to them or be rude to them. And being on my guard against them would cramp my style as well.
My current social setting where I have a lot of help that I can provide and enjoy providing, I am sort out by people that try and curry my favour (E.g. by saying things I am interested in are interesting when they don’t understand them). Also people try to talk to me to be my friend, which annoys me when I am wanting to do something else. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind social interaction, I would just prefer it to be non-verbal, humourous, about a plan they have or based on shared intellectual interests.
Normally what they talk to me is about worries about the course and bitching. This I find I have nothing to add to really or interest in. Which probably colours my social interactions.
You are worried about hypothetical people that say they are happy with their current social status when they really are not.
Yes. Or when they want things that higher social status can help them achieve, which they don’t realize or are in denial about.
To make an analogy again to money, there are lots of people who say that they don’t care much about money, or don’t like the process of making money, but who want things (e.g. possessions, getting out of debt, donating to charities, or whatever), that can most efficiently be achieved through having more money than they currently have. For instance, let’s say we have someone who is in $10,000 credit card debt, who would love to donate to SIAI, but who says that he isn’t very concerned with money. At face value at least, something isn’t matching up.
What I encourage is for such people to (a) do some soul-searching about what their actual goals are, (b) be realistic about what means it will take to achieve those goals, and (c) attempt to avoid bias in an evaluation of the costs and benefits of those means.
I would want my example person to assess the value of paying off his debt and donating to SIAI, and what he is going to need to do to achieve those goals. Making some money is not the only way to achieve them, but it is one of the most direct ways. As a result, I would encourage an analysis of the costs and benefits of seeking more money, vs. other means for achieving his goals.
If he can find other ways to achieve his goals, then great! What I’m just skeptical of is people sitting around with goals, and rejecting viable means for achieving those goals out of a biased and uninformed assessment of those means. I am also skeptical of people abandoning goals too early and then rationalizing that they don’t really want those things.
I’m worried about the truely less social being harangued to try and make them change themselves when they really don’t want to.
I am not worried about people being encouraged to avoid self-deception about their goals, and avoid bias in their cost-benefit analyses of the means for those goals. I feel that people who don’t need such encouragement will easily shrug it off, and the cost of misplaced advice to them will be low. Yet for people who need such encouragement, the cost of not receiving it is potentially quite high.
Of course, I want to encourage people to engage in that sort of scrutiny in ways that doesn’t make them feel “harangued.” Yet right now on LessWrong, my primary goal isn’t to be maximally persuasive to particular people; it’s to discuss the problem at a more abstract level. Once I understand the scope and prevalence of these particular sorts of problems better, and how to recognize when people might be falling prey to them, I will have a better sense of if/how I should attempt to persuade people to change their thinking.
Until you recognise there is this group and include them in your plans for social change in some fashion (even if it is only identify and leave alone), then you are just making their lives more difficult (in a well meaning fashion).
I do recognize this group:
Not everyone shares a preference for attaining status, but many people share preferences for things that status can facilitate, such as money, dates, friends, and mental health. Those who can attain those things to their satisfaction without any additional efforts spent on status, are in a great spot.
I have no objection to people deciding that there is higher marginal benefit in devoting their next unit of effort towards something other than social skills/status/influence. I just advocate that this decision be based on a minimally-biased analysis of the nature of social interaction, and of the costs and benefits of developing in those areas.
Unfortunately, people who are relatively unsocialized and inexperienced in status interaction often seem to have certain biases about how social interaction works, which are difficult to fix without more social experience (see pjeby’s excellent post about the differences in perception of social interaction between “cats” and “dogs”).
In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attractiveness, social skills, and social status, according to their own values. The marginal benefit of putting in a small amount of effort is pretty high for people who are initially deficient in those areas. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit, such as making small tweaks to body language and posture, wearing clothes that fit properly, doing something with one’s hair, and avoiding putting oneself down or overly apologizing for things.
Normally what they talk to me is about worries about the course and bitching. This I find I have nothing to add to really or interest in. Which probably colours my social interactions.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
It is not just that. I get annoyed and tune out when anyone bitches and moans. Even people I like otherwise. Especially when they are trying to create ingroup outgroup divisions due to bruised egos (or at least that is how I interpret it).
In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attractiveness, social skills, and social status, according to their own values.
Mating is the social arena where a modest improvement can pay off (if you are going for the monogamy route). A slight improvement might also work if the dating scene is not very competitive where you are. But if we are in the hyper competitive era where only the very attractive men get all the girls, then it won’t work very well. It is also the least likely arena for you to get hangers-on or require you to do unethical actions to get ahead, so from this point of view good for geeks.
So I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with this. Improving the ability of geeks to work in business and politics I think would get more push back due to ethics such as anti-advertising, truth-telling and simply having to spend a long time to get any good at it due to its competitive nature.
This is reminding me of Westerfeld’s Uglies, a pretty good science fiction novel about a society where everyone gets plastic surgery at age 16 to make them extremely beautiful.
As might be expected in a novel, there’s an arbitrarily added catch to the beauty, but would just having the surgery be standard be a bad idea?
The novel was inspired by Raphael Carter’s “”‘Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation’ by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin”″, a short story which explores the implication of people having the option of not noticing whether people are beautiful or not.
It does seem like there are tree options to reduce beauty-based inequalities:
Make less beautiful people more beautiful (which may indeed involve routine surgery in the future).
Make the beautiful people less beautiful (e.g. the Handicapper General).
Make people care about beauty less (feasible in the future, but only partially effective in the present since so much of perceptions of beauty seem biologically predisposed).
I support #1 in the present, and some combination of #1 and #3 in the future, when we have more effective ways of changing people’s preferences.
It might also be possible in future to mimic the effect of options 1 and 2 by altering one’s own perception of who is beautiful and who isn’t. (For example, instead of handicapping beautiful people, I could get my brain reprogrammed to see as ugly the people others see as beautiful.) This is like #3 in that it’s about altering someone other than the beautiful/non-beautiful people themselves, but different in that one changes what one sees as beautiful instead of how much one cares about beauty.
someone’s pet theory about the psychological mechanisms behind self deception in social contexts
If you’re interested in a few people’s theories about self deception (perhaps on a more philosophical level), including an entry by Tom Schelling (though it wasn’t about self deception as much), you might like The Multiple Self
• Fact finder—to probe, to clarify, to observe, to evaluate, to inform, to delegate
gives the ability to be detailed, to research and use language skills
• Follow through—to pattern, to structure, to design, to co-ordinate, to theorize, to plan
gives the ability to organize, create systems and to complete tasks
• Quick start—to promote, to risk, to challenge, to innovate, to motivate, to brainstorm
– gives the ability to initiate, to sell, to be adaptable and entrepreneurial
• Implementer—to craft, to build, to fix, to manufacture, to handle, to sculpt, to transport
gives the ability to work with the hands, have mechanical ability, and to do quality control
Each drive is measured on a scale from one to ten of its prorated share of an individual’s total motivational drive, all together which normally total 20. The combination patterns thus derived indicate qualities of differing strengths of motivation available to that individual.
If a motivational quality is stronger than average, over 6 points, it is called insistent, if between 4 and 6 points, accommodating, and if less than average, below 4 points, it is called resistant. An insistent quality will be demonstrated quite strongly in a person’s modus operandi throughout their entire life. If, however, the individual’s pattern includes a resistant quality, the individual will find it difficult to work at a job where qualities of that particular drive are major requirements. On the other hand, recreational activities that stimulate this resistant area will be beneficial for a person.
If all drives have totals in the accommodating range the person will be able to work in all areas but will not want to be pushed into the forefront in any one area. This work style is named Mediator or Facilitator.
Thanks a lot for the link to CGT and Sprague-Grundy theory. It’s a beautiful area of math that I once knew in detail, but somehow managed to forget completely.
My way of saying thanks: take a look at Ford circles.
Great article. Thanks so much for linking to it. I interpreted the article to be about dealing with anxiety, though, not about learning skills from declarative knowledge. And yes, it’s relevant for social situations as well, especially:
The irony is, competence is not a cure for the fear of incompetence. The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence.
And the courage to socialize incompetently is a huge part of what it means to have social skills.
Wow. That linked article is killing me softly. I wish he had a general solution to that problem expressable in declarative knowledge—I’ve never played Go, and certainly don’t plan to now, because I know exactly what he’s talking about.
Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
You don’t need to control others to get what you want out of an interaction. In fact, letting go of control is a key step. It also paradoxically increases your influence (in non-toxic environments.) Reading Morendil’s reply seven times is recommended. That was golden.
there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
I do happen to meet that criteria, but there is more than one challenge that I (and most people to various degrees) had to overcome when starting conversations with random people, some of which required simple behavioral changes while some required fundamental changes in beliefs.
Is changing your beliefs a skill that you have developed? For example, did Juggler’s influence change the way you think about social dynamics? Do you have the ability to actively question and update your model of yourself and your environment based on introspection and self awareness? I’m not making a snide insult here. Developing that skill is central to how I overcame those difficulties and, in various guises, what many social skills and personal development gurus will recommend. It does involve asking ourselves questions that we really don’t want to hear.
I live in a small town, in which there are few alternatives
There’s the root of the problem. You can’t develop socially if you’re trapped at home. And make no mistake: if you can’t reliably get to a city or public transit hub without calling in a favor, then you are very much trapped. A small town that you can’t routinely leave is a toxic environment, and you need to escape it by any means necessary. Free housing is not a favor if it’s in a location that destroys your life.
The “that you can’t routinely leave” part seems more important than the “small town” part, to me—it’s a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.
You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don’t have RL opportunities to do so. It’s not perfect—the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can’t learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it’s more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.
I don’t know, but I put it back up to zero for exactly the reason you gave for considering it useful, and I did so before reading the comment I’m replying to.
Well, full disclosure: I’m a really extroverted person, so I apologize if I may be trivializing the art of small talk. That’s definitely not my intention, since I want to make it clear that it’s a skill that is to be learned. Also, the conversational nuances are a bit different if you’re chatting up someone of the opposite sex versus just making small talk with a random stranger. I’m only talking about the latter, I don’t claim to have any helpful advice regarding the former. ;) I’m assuming that’s what the “captive situation” thing refers to.
Generally, people like to talk. Sometimes they don’t. You might be a brilliant conversationalist and run into someone who’s pissed off and doesn’t want to talk, so you shouldn’t take that personally. You can pick up cues about people as to how amenable they are to conversation; if they’re avoiding all eye contact with everyone in the area, that’s a bad sign. If you make eye contact and smile, that’s a good sign. If you’re not practiced at small talk, you start with the smiley people. Practice talking to people who are good at conversation; observe the way they steer conversations and what their mannerisms are.
If you’re extroverted by nature, you probably have no experience in making yourself extroverted, and so are unqualified to give advice. You can teach by example, though.
I notice this pattern a lot. Naturally talented singers can’t teach you how to sing because they don’t know it. If you don’t perceive the obstacles that your students claim to face, you have no business teaching, no matter how good you are at the activity itself. A lot of harmful advice to introverts (like the dreaded “just be yourself”) comes from people such as you. I say that as a former introvert who successfully changed :-)
Yeah, I didn’t realize I was entering into a discussion on how to acquire extroversion! I admit, I’m unqualified there. But I definitely do have experience, and advice to give, on how to steer conversation toward interesting topics for both individuals interested in having a conversation, which is what I thought we were talking about in the first place. :)
What cousin_it said, times a thousand. Harsh, but true.
Ability to do something does not imply ability to teach it. It just means you’ve reached Level 1. Until you can imagine what it was like to be without your skill, and the mental steps you went through going out of that state, you will be forever giving advice that assumes away the problem.
It helps if student and teacher are both clear on what the subject being taught actually is in the first place, and which level everybody is starting at. The fact remains that just because you’re not good at making small talk doesn’t mean that the opportunity isn’t there, everywhere. Either way, in order to get better, you will have to practice, regardless of how difficult it is to get to the point of even being able to practice. Kaj Sotala’s post wasn’t about how to talk to random strangers, but how to get to interesting conversations with someone you’re already talking to. It’s a bit unfair to accuse people who are here to help with that issue of not being helpful on a related, but different one.
Kaj Sotala’s post wasn’t about how to talk to random strangers, but how to get to interesting conversations to some you’re already talking to. It’s a bit unfair to accuse people who are here to help with that issue of not being helpful on a related, but different one.
Perhaps, but your advice required the ability to successfully start conversations, since you were suggesting to talk to random people:
Who doesn’t have easy opportunities to increase their number of conversations, other than a total shut-in? People are everywhere, and therefore, so are potential conversations. You might not have the most interesting conversation with the guy standing behind you in line at the bank,
It’s true that practice is necessary, but not just any practice will suffice. And following the practice recommendations you gave would not be helpful unless the problem were mostly solved to begin with.
Perhaps, but your advice required the ability to successfully start conversations, since you were suggesting to talk to random people
Well, the entire topic of the original post was contingent upon already being in a situation of engaging in small talk with someone. The LW meet-up, for example. If you are already able to start conversation with someone, but wanting to skill up in steering the conversation into interesting avenues, Kaj Sotala’s post should be very helpful. Being able to make small talk does not at all imply skill in having interesting conversation.
What’s the link between visiting fellows and the weather?
The Visiting Fellows program is in California, which has a different weather than my native Finland. (There should possibly have been some intermediate node like “California” between “Weather” and “Visiting Fellows”.)
My advice, if you want to become a good conversationalist, is just to crank up the amount of time you spend having conversations. If you are really serious, you could consciously review conversations after the fact, to try to find patterns and see where you could have improved.
What’s the link between visiting fellows and the weather?
I can think of three people I know for whom that does not work. Not because they do not think they have opportunities for conversations, not even because they have opportunities but do not take advantage of them, but because they do, and put a great deal of effort into it, and yet I can see that it is not working for them. They are getting little in return for their efforts, because they are all doing it wrong, each in their own way. Whatever they need to be doing instead, having more conversations isn’t it.
Advice is good if it works for the person it is addressed to. It is bad if it does not. General advice like “talk to people more” cannot be expected to generally work any more than an appendectomy will work for every case of abdominal pain. An appendectomy will work only for someone whose problem is a diseased appendix.
That is good advice.
A friend of mine video taped his conversations with people. (By which I mean, there was a video recording of some event, and he left it on following, to capture his social interactions.) In this way, he was able to see not just things he said, but also gauge people’s reactions to his body language. He said it was difficult to watch at first, but had a huge benefit to his social skills.
Video taping may not be the preferred way to go about it, but there is something to be said for reflection. While you are unlikely to get better without practice, merely sinking time into conversation won’t necessarily help, and may harm you. Without analyzing your attempts, even if it’s only a brief list of what went well and what didn’t, you may be practicing and learning bad habits. 100 ungraded math problems doesn’t make you better at math, and 100 uncoached squats may injure you.
Take a few moments after conversations to assess at least what went well and what didn’t. If you have access to an honest friend, you can do even better. Converse with a third party (your friend can participate or merely be near enough to observe) and run a sort of post-conversation analysis later. Treat it like any other skill you’re serious about learning. I’ve seen this help more than one struggling introvert.
Good idea. Also, if you’re suffering from malnutrition due to poverty, just crank up the amount of cake you eat. If you are really serious, hire a dietician to figure out what you’re missing in your nutritional needs.
The people that aren’t good at conversation are the ones that don’t have easy opportunities to increase the number of conversations.
I don’t think that’s true. Who doesn’t have easy opportunities to increase their number of conversations, other than a total shut-in? People are everywhere, and therefore, so are potential conversations. You might not have the most interesting conversation with the guy standing behind you in line at the bank, but the only way to get better at conversation is practice, like the OP said.
Starting a conversation with a completely random stranger generally takes skill to begin with. Potentially creeping out 20 people in a row is not an acceptable risk—unless you’d like to bear it for me?
Also, others who have posted on the topic [1] said that if I’m at a low skill level at this, I shouldn’t practice on people in captive situations, like being in line at the bank. Which of you should I believe?
[1] can’t find the link right now, and I can’t even mention one of the people’s names
I think I’ve come up with a reasonable algorithm for determining if a stranger is open to conversation. (Mostly tested on females in New Jersey.) I developed it out of desperation, because, for a while now, if I didn’t talk to strangers, I wouldn’t be talking to anyone in person except my immediate family.
The algorithm:
Smile and make eye contact.
If eye contact is not returned within a reasonable period of time, find someone else. If eye contact is returned, wave.
If the stranger waves back or shows some other noticeable positive reaction, go ahead and introduce yourself.
The key seems to be the eye contact; as far as I can tell, if someone is willing to make eye contact with you, they’re usually willing to talk with you, and making eye contact seems to be inoffensive in most situations. You’ll probably get some false negatives, but false positives tend to be worse than false negatives and the false positive rate seems to be almost zero; you usually don’t creep people out by deciding to leave them alone.
Also, fan conventions (anime, gaming, etc.) are great places to find people willing to socialize with strangers. And take a camera; people often wear elaborate costumes at these events, and complimenting someone’s cosplay outfit has been a good conversation opener for me. (This is me at Otakon 2009.) I’ve also had some luck talking to fellow customers at bookstores; you know a few really good books you can recommend, right?
Not everyone will agree with me on this, and I know this is controversial. But I have the firm belief that no one becomes good at conversation, dating, or any social skill without the equivalent of “creeping out 20[0] people in a row”: it’s just that most people make most of their big social mistakes when they’re very young (just like most people’s middle or high school experiments with romance or sex end up being total disasters). If you’re not willing to creep out 200 or so people in a row, you’ll never learn.
The “avoid captive situations” comment is not particularly helpful for someone trying to learn social skills. In fact, I’d say it’s harmful, because the concern about making people feel uncomfortable is a big part of social anxiety, and social anxiety is what prevents people from developing social skills.
Okay, who were your first 200? Please list 50 of the incidents when the venue supervisor asked you to leave or modify your behavior.
Why are you asking that? I’m missing your point.
Not wishing to speak for Silas, but it looks to me like this. You believe that:
If you believe that you are not good at conversation, then you are speculating without practical experience. If you believe you are good at conversation, then by your account you must have gone through your 200 people. Silas is challenging you to share your experience of doing so -- I presume as a check on whether you really believe it, or merely believe that you believe it.
Creeping out 200 people in a row is like suggesting you can’t learn to ride a bicycle without breaking a few bones. It’s way excessive. Even creeping out 20 people in a row (Silas’ figure, which you chose to amend upwards, which argues against this being idle hyperbole) is an absurdity. By the time you’re creeping someone out, you’re already way off course.
You’re correct that if you go up to a random person 200 times and start talking, you will probably not creep out all 200. I was exaggerating, which is why I said “the equivalent of” creeping 200 people out: my point was that everyone needs to make lots of awkward mistakes to learn social skills, and that you need to be willing to do so. Silas stated that this wasn’t an acceptable risk, and I amended his figure upward to indicate that you have to be willing to deal with even worse outcomes than he was fearing, even if they’re unlikely to occur, and that learning conversational skills can be difficult and involve a lot of rejection.
I’m not going to list all my mistakes, but I have certainly made more than 200 awkward comments to people, experienced more than 200 rejections, made people feel uncomfortable more than 200 times, and so forth (though not in a row, admittedly). It doesn’t make you “way off course”; it’s the only way to learn.
It looks like we’re referring to different things by the term “[equivalent of] creeping people out”. I agree you will have to make mistakes and get rejections. But I was referring to a specific context for the “creeping out”.
Specifically, the problem at hand was that of how to get good at starting conversations with random strangers. The strategy being recommended was one that dismissed the downside of creeping out random strangers (which is often associated with the venue supervisor—boss, proprietor, conductor, bouncer, whatever—telling you to stop or leave).
My comment was that, no, doing things that disruptive and creepy, that often, in that short of a period, is not an acceptable risk, and not what you should suggest anyone should do if that’s the risk.
(And RichardKennaway confirmed that enduring that kind of social ostracism is way excessive for the skill being learned, so I’m not alone in this assessment.)
You, in turn, were taking “creeping out” to refer to relatively minor goofs in a context where the consequences are much less severe, where you’ve already done significant deft social navigation around that group, and where those who see the error have good reason to be much more understanding of the goof. While I agree that rejections, mistakes, etc. are to be expected and are part of life, you were equating very different kinds of rejections, and—like most sociality advisors here—assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier.
In any case, those are far different kinds of failures than “becoming the creepy guy at the bookstore” or having people get the bouncer to talk to you because of conversational goofs (which has happened to me, so this isn’t idle speculation). You have an inaccurate picture of what you were expecting me to go through, so your advice, though relevant for other social skills, was not applicable here, and comes across as—like Richard noted—shrugging off the possibility of breaking bones to learn how to ride a bike, as if it’s no big deal.
Am I starting to make sense here?
And who modded this down? I’m sorry the comment I made which Richard elaborated on was too brief to make my point, but why shouldn’t I have made that comment? Should I not have confirmed that Richard was correctly representing my objection?
I don’t care about the loss of karma here, but I want to know why someone deems it “a type of comment I want less of”. I get that if I were merely agreeing, it was a waste of space, but since I was the one making the original comment, my agreement and confirmation is informative to the discussion.
I’m not dismissing it. I’m saying that may be the price that you have to pay in order to develop these skills. If you’re not willing to pay it, I think it would be very difficult to learn (though there are ways of reducing the risk: CronoDAS suggests looking for eye contact first, which might help).
If you know what these disruptive creepy things are, just don’t do them. If you don’t know what they are (and how to identify them on the fly), you need to learn, and that may involve making big mistakes. How else will you learn? If you don’t think it’s an acceptable risk, fine, but I think developing the skills is worth the risk. If you routinely, inadvertently, creep people out during social interactions, you have two options: avoid people forever and become a hermit, or practice talking to people and learn how to fix the problem, and it’s better to practice on strangers you never have to see again.
I don’t think I am assuming away the problem, and I think I do understand what you mean. It may be tougher for you than for most people, for a variety of reasons. In order to get past this barrier and develop social skills, I am recommending the specific strategy of going to different places (bookstores, coffeeshops, bars, parks, the grocery store) and starting up friendly conversations with lots of people. You can do this right now. I understand that you may get kicked out of these venues. I understand that everyone may think you’re creepy. I understand that this type of rejection is painful. Do it anyway. If you get kicked out of one place, try another. How else are you going to get past this barrier?
I don’t think you do understand. I live in a small town, in which there are few alternatives if I’m kicked out of one of them. And I think it’s pretty easy for you to smugly shrug off this social ostracism as “just something we all have to go through” when, um, you didn’t have to go through it, and don’t understand why anyone would have to go through it.
This is not to say I’m looking for excuses to do nothing—everything I’ve said in this thread is quite well-grounded.
Nor to say that I haven’t made serious efforts—I’ve gotten involved in groups, which has gotten me experience, albeit not with random people.
Nor to say that I lack opportunities to practice conversations—just that I don’t have an immense hoard of people to draw interaction experience from.
Nor to say that I’m completely clueless—just that the random approach thing doesn’t come easily, and is a critical pre-requisite for the other advice.
Nor to say that no one can provide helpful advice—but some certainly can’t.
It’s inevitable that I’ll have to use advice that doesn’t assume away the problem, for one thing.
When someone starts saying there are only two options, that throws up a red flag for me. There are rarely just two options. A third option would be to listen to people who went through the mental transition I want to go through, or have studied this topic carefully, such as (to various degrees) CronoDAS, Roko, and HughRistik.
I’m proud of you for having most of these social skills naturally, and that for you, improvement mainly consists of going from great to supergreat. Really, I am. But maybe your perspective isn’t the appropriate one here?
(Edited to tone down.)
For another it requires directing resources into solving the problem rather than justifying why your circumstances give you claim to victim status.
Didn’t I read this same conversation a year ago? Or was that someone else with the same script?
In the past year or two:
I’ve joined a large organization that wouldn’t otherwise interest me, gotten involved in several of its subgroups and events, and practices conversation in those contexts. I’ve taken Juggler’s course and his subordinate’s. I’ve brought a date to company event to increase my apparent attractiveness. I’ve gone to four weddings. I’ve gone out with two women from the above group.
I’ve read books and web resources about sociality. I’ve been complimented on my ability to make group newcomers feel welcome. I’ve gotten to the point where I can comfortably say hi strangers. I’ve gone to two costume parties and talked with many of the people there. I’ve consulted with real meatspace people in the above group about my sociality problems and what to do. I’ve joined up with a political group, organized some of its events, and briefly led it.
I disagree that that’s a fair characterization of me.
That’s a lot of social development! Nice. All that being the case I am somewhat surprised that you are still having problems with perceptions of scarcity.
Then do not read it as one. I intended it to be approximately as applicable as the sister:
Yeah, that would make things rough. If it’s at all feasible, I would look into moving to a large city, but of course moving can be very difficult, especially if you’re in a school program (I think you said you were in grad school).
Oh, I definitely went through, and still go through, a lot of ostracism and rejection. I did, and do, have to go through it. I don’t think I’m at “great” by any means. And I don’t have these skills naturally. First of all, I don’t think anyone has them naturally, which was my point. Have you spent much time around kids or teenagers? Very few of them have any social skills at all; they’re still making mistakes. But if you mean that you think I learned social skills quickly without trouble or pain, no, they’re not easy for me either. I may not be able to provide helpful advice, because I don’t know all the details of your brain and your experiences, but it’s definitely not something I take for granted.
You’re right, of course talking to people who know a lot about improving social skills will help. My point was that, if you inadvertently creep people out when you talk to them, then you have to risk it for right now as you go about conversations in your life, or else avoid people in general. In fact, I think that a large part of social and conversational skills is just not worrying or being afraid of people reacting negatively.
No, you’re referring to relatively minor goofs in a context where the social consequences are much less severe, where you’ve already done significant deft social navigation around that group, and where those who see the error have good reason to be much more understanding of the goof. While I agree that rejections, mistakes, etc. are to be expected and are part of life, you are equating very different kinds of rejections, and—like most sociality advisors here—assuming away the problem of having passed a certain social barrier.
Those are far different kinds of failures than “becoming the creepy guy at the bookstore” or having people get the bouncer to talk to you because of conversational goofs (which has happened to me, so this isn’t idle speculation).
To clarify: Have you been approched by a venue supervisor because of a conversational goof with a stranger or new acquaintance? If not, you’re not going through the risks I’m referring to or speaking to the situation I’m in.
I’m not asking that the entire situation be pleasant; I’m asking that I can reasonably expect the failures not to cascade so that I can really go through a large enough number of interactions while actually learning. When you’re ready to stop misinterpreting me otherwise, I will revise my opinion on the merit of your suggestions.
(And a suggestion for you: if you want to drop out and save some face, make a remark like, “Gosh, you’re unpleasant. Now I know why you have so much trouble. You deserve it, and I hope you do everyone a service by staying away from them.” I try to help people, even if they haven’t been as kind in the past.)
Frequently. And I’ve been ostracized and kicked out of groups before as well. I considered those minor mistakes, and just moved on to the next venue. When this happened, of course it hurt. A lot. But I tried to be a good conversationalist, and gave it my best effort, and it didn’t work out, so I learned what I could. People are weird sometimes.
I have had similar problems to yours (though, as I said, I don’t know your exact situation), and I’m trying to tell you exactly what I have done and am doing to solve them. (It’s worth noting that almost everyone has gone through the “huge failures” you’re talking about; it’s just that most people went through them as young children or teenagers, when they had an excuse for not knowing, and we just happened to learn slower.)
I’m not exactly sure what you mean. Are you worried about building a negative reputation in your small town? Are you worried about being banned from every single location there? This sounds more like anxiety than a realistic concern (though as I said, I don’t know your situation), and I suspect it’s this very anxiety that’s the problem.
Were the past situations where you’ve been kicked out of venues or whatever in a different town, or in your current small town? Did these mistakes follow you afterwards? I think Jim Random H.’s comment that small towns are toxic is accurate: they’re not toxic for everyone, but for people with social difficulties, they can be horrible places because your mistakes follow you everywhere. Leave as soon as you can.
I wouldn’t do something like that. I’m trying to help, and I’m interested and curious in your situation. But I’m curious if on some level you actually want people here to give up and say “yes, you’re beyond help, you’re way worse than me.”
Okay, is everyone’s knowledge of social skills really so brittle that their models break down for small towns? (And I mean on the order of 200k, shifting with the college year, not e.g. 10k. But still, most social places don’t even have many people there at any given time.) Is it really impossible to develop social skills except in large cities?
I’m ashamed to admit that Juggler told me something similar a few years ago, that what he teaches doesn’t work except in large metro areas (his site said nothing whatsoever about this being a prerequisite for his program, and yes he refunded).
Moving to another city is a non-trivial task, not because I’m in school, but because I don’t have the connections or exposure that make job-hopping easy.
By the way, when exactly did you have rumors spread about you being threatening? I guess I may not have appreciated the relevance of your experience.
200k is one order of magnitude larger than what I was thinking when you said “small town”. The relevant criteria is how far you can narrow down the set of activities and demographics you interact with and still have an effectively unlimited supply of strangers. My experiences are all plus or minus an order of magnitude from that, so I don’t really know if 200k is sufficient.
As for rumors about being threatening—if you’re referring to the conversation here on LW where I posted a nasty ill-considered reply to a deleted comment and ended up deleting it, then I apologize for that. If you’re referring to something that happened in person, then I think you’ll find people have surprisingly short memories for that sort of thing.
Wow. It was two orders of magnitude off what I was thinking! I grew up 20 minutes from the nearest town, which was ~4k so I had a different expectations of what would be limiting.
No, I wasn’t. As I should have said at the time, you’re not the first person to publicly accuse me of a serious crime I didn’t commit, due to conflict with me. You’re just the most remorseful.
In the case I have in mind, it was at least two years.
I, for one, would really really like to see a videotape of several of your conversational attempts, if such videotape would be legal to take in your state. In fact, after reading the social awkwardness saga here, it’s almost worth a ticket to Texas to walk along and observe in person.
PM me to schedule a time, I’ll pay for the trip just so I can have a witness.
I’ll second the request for video. Maybe a web videoconference? That’s not as good as an in-person conversation (in particular, it screws up eye contact and eliminates location/distance-based signalling), but it gets around the need to travel and it’s easier to film.
I’d love to vidchat with people. I wanted to do it a lot when I got my MacBook back in ’07, but no one I knew wanted to do it and there weren’t good random-stranger vidchat sites at the time.
I’ll post my skype name when I get home.
But I hope you meant this as a separate measure of me than someone’s “in the field” observations.
There appears to be only one account with the name Silas Barta on skype. Is that you?
Skype screenname: silasxdx, and yes, I’m that Silas Barta
I’m on right now if anyone wants to vidchat. PM me if you want to set a time.
Sad as it may sound, I’m not sure. I haven’t used it in a while.
In any case, hold your horses! Anyone who wants will be able to chat with me soon enough! ;-)
200k isn’t a small town! You’re fine. Can you please answer these questions:
(I removed the small town references.) If you have these concerns in a college town of 200,000 people, I stand by what I said about anxiety being the problem even more.
Juggler comes from, and developed skills in, a college town of about 100,000 people, so I’m surprised.
You keep moving the goalposts. I may not have had every negative experience that you’ve had, but I’ve also had large social difficulties, as have many other people here trying to help you. You ask for a specific plan that you can do right now, and I’m giving you one (go to lots of public places and start friendly conversations with lots of people). If you have too much anxiety to do this, that’s understandable, but let’s address that issue then.
I suspect that, if you’re a student, college towns’ social flexibility is more like considerably larger towns—the transient student population means that social networks have much less institutional memory than a stable population of the same size.
In my experience, this is true even if you’re not a student.
The answers to the first block are all yes, except for a little uncertainty on the last one.
And 200k rises and falls with the college year. There are very few hangout places with a lot of strangers you can interact with, and even out of those, very few people want to talk, at least to me.
You’re giving me something that has downside risk no one else would tolerate, and which is extremely vague (starting a conversation is a complicated process). Also, since I’ve had lots of conversations with non-strangers with no improvement, its not clear how I would even know what I’m doing wrong.
There may be anxiety issues (I do better after consuming things which suppress this), but I’m not sure you can call it that if failure really would mean wiping out most of my practice grounds, and if I can’t effectively “reboot” whenever I want.
Now there is an interesting topic. Do you just mean alcohol, nicotine and pot? Or have you considered the actual good options. For example: Phenibut, picamilon or aniracetam? Those are some substances that are seriously handy when it comes to socializing. In the case of aniracetam it comes with enhanced verbal fluency as well as anxiolytic properties.
The things I refer to are alcohol, or prescription medication with anti-anxiety effects (but only some of them). I’ve noticed that my normal condition is to have a sort of “inhibitor” in my brain that’s always saying, “no, don’t do that, here’s a downside”; after having consumed one of the above, that feeling is suppressed in proportion to dosage, and I feel comfortable enough to quit contemplating consequences and take an action.
In my normal state, I have to concentrate to speak like a normal person because I’ll get the same internal criticism about any phrasing I try, which makes me frequently trail off or re-start sentences. (Also, I’m often told that I sound like a foreigner, even though I’ve lived all my life in Texas.)
Note that it’s not that I have inhibitions per se, but rather, that I generate specific counterarguments as the inhibitor. It seems like a low-grade version of those cases you hear about where someone had brain damage to their emotional centers and they can’t make decisions because they won’t stop weighing the alternatives.
Thank you for the pointers to those three “supplements”; I didn’t know that such effective anti-anxiety substances were available OTC in the US! I’ve tried some supplements that “support positive mood” via effects on neurotransmitters, but not the ones you’ve listed; I’ll have to check them out.
Thankyou for sharing your introspective experience. I’m always interested in how the human brain works and I find that the more I am able to instantiate the model of ‘human’ for a specific person the more I am able to empathize, comprehend their meaning and cross the inferential gap when trying to express my thoughts in a way that translates accurately.
I too have a particularly active inhibitor in my brain, although through experiences and active personal development have significantly reduced the negative effects. The challenging part was removing the maladaptive inhibitions while keeping the ‘perfectionism’ benefits that for me came hand in hand with that overactive system.
I should clarify somewhat what I am suggesting the supplements can be useful for.
Aniracetam
Very safe. As in, it is more or less impossible to overdose on the stuff and it isn’t going to mess you. It is probably safer than just about anything you can get in a pharmacy, including the glucose lollies they sell the front desk. It also doesn’t seem to come with significant tolerance/dependency problems that anxiety drugs are notorious for.
… But the anxiolytic properties are not the primary use of aniracetam. It is a cognitive enhancer that happens to have some anti-anxiety effects thrown in as a bonus. It isn’t going to completely counter serious anxiety problems but most people find that it makes socializing more relaxing and flow better. More significant to me is that the primary effect is just what is needed when socializing too. It boosts verbal fluency in particular and (by subjective reports) makes the subtleties in communication and the naunces of music more salient.
Picamilon
”Mostly Harmless”—It is just Niacin and GABA hooked up together in a way that will get it through the blood-brain barrier before it falls apart. Reports tend to be that it has a mild but reliable effect on reducing anxiety without a nasty rebound. People tend to ‘cycle’ on and off so that they can maintain the effectiveness.
Phenibut
”Use Responsibily”—Phenibut is safer and way healthier than either benzos or booze but at the same time it is not a toy. With aniracetam you can casually eat a tablespoon of the stuff just to see if you notice the difference. You do not do that with Phenibut. This is a real drug, you show it the proper respect.
In terms of effect this stuff is powerful. It isn’t a ‘oh, yeah, that is a bit better’ kind of thing. When used to treat anxiety it is basically a drug with reliable and significant effects (and effectiveness). It does, however come with side effects when used excessively. Specifically it has unpleasant withdrawal effects if you stop using it suddenly after long term, high dose use. it also builds up tolerance relatively so you can not use it every day. It is better to use it once a week or so, when you are out socializing. ie; as an all round superior replacement for alcohol.
In comparison to alcohol: The effects on inhibition are extremely similar. This isn’t surprising since it approximately the same mechanism at play (boosting GABA). It also tends to boost confidence and mood (as alohol sometimes does). Unlike alcohol Phenibut makes you smarter, not dumber. It also doesn’t eliminate your sound judgement, ruin your liver and kill your neurons. (A note—if you combine phenibut with alcohol expect each drink to have twice as much effect as you are used to.)
Benzodiazepine (diazepam, Valium)
THIS STUFF FUCKS YOU UP! Yes, I am both yelling and using an expletive. Whenever I lament the flaws in the medical system or suggest taking personal responsibility for your medical needs the misuse of benzo prescription is right up there on the list of reasons. I’m not being particularly contrarian here. This uncontroversial medical science (that isn’t reflected in medical practice in a sane way).
In terms of effectiveness this stuff will work to knock out anxiety (come to think of it it’ll knock the rest of you out too if you bump the dose). If you are having a panic attack or a seizure you want someone to be injecting it into you. What it also does in the short term is to impair all of your brain functions. What it does in the long term is permanently deteriorate both your physical health and brain activity. If you want to shock yourself look up some ‘before and after’ SPECT scans of the brains of benzo users.
To the usual disclaimer “I Am Not A Doctor” I will add “and you shouldn’t put your faith in what I say all that much even if I was.”
What about oxiracetam? Some of these sites list it as being more powerful and faster. Would that rank above phenibut?
It is certainly stronger and faster than aniracetam as a cognitive enhancer, but it isn’t above (or even on the same scale) as phenibut. Where aniracetam is relaxing oxiractam is stimulating. People report enhanced motivation and concentration on top of the effects on memory and cognition. Because it is stimulating it can also produce agitation and insomnia if you use too much or too late at night. Definitely worth considering if you are looking to play with nootropics in general.
It is certainly stronger and faster than aniracetam as a cognitive enhancer, but it isn’t above (or even on the same scale) as phenibut. Where aniracetam is relaxing oxiractam is stimulating. People report enhanced motivation and concentration on top of the effects on memory and cognition. Because it is stimulating it can also produce agitation and insomnia if you use too much or too late at night.
Definitely worth considering if you are looking to play with nootropics in general.
Thanks! I just ordered two bottles online and I’m curious to see how they affect me.
I’ll be interested in reading any experiences you choose to share!
Which bottles were you referring to by the way? (If Aniracitam I would go on to recommend a choline source to go with it, or at least eating more eggs.)
I’ll be interested in reading any experiences you choose to share!
Which bottles were you referring to by the way? (If Aniracitam I would go on to recommend a choline source to go with it, or at least eating more eggs.)
Aniracetam and Picamilon, from Cognitive Nutrition. I will check Bulk Nutrition also; that may be cheaper. Why take choline along with aniracitam, and how much?
I’ve had positive experiences with Cognitive Nutrition too. The ‘cheap’ part of Bulk Nutrition is largely in the ‘Bulk’ keyword. :)
The primary cognitive enhancing function of aniracetam (and piracetam, oxiracetam and just about all the things that enhance memory and abstract thought...) work by boosting acetylcholine and, over a period of time, by boosting acetylcholine receptors. Basically this means you are going to burn through your choline more rapidly. A similar effect to if you burned it up by having an extended, intense cognitive workout without any nootropics. You will still get improvements from aniracetam, just less. Some people also describe ‘brain fog’ if they deplete their choline levels too much.
I use centrophenoxine as my choline source. It is actually quite a good nootropic even by itself. Alpha GPC is another popular source with positive effects apart from supplying choline. The basic source is choline bitartrate. Watch this video to see the advantages of choline bitartrate (and if my eyes don’t deceive me, bulk packaging from bulknutrition). Basically… it’s really really cheap.
Are centrophenoxine and choline bitartrate also available on those sites? Do you buy them by themselves? And how much do you take?
I already have some B complex vitamins that contain choline bitartrate (the label says each pill contains 40 mg of choline). Will this be enough, or are you talking about much larger amounts?
Thanks for all the information!
Choline usually should be taken at a 0.5:1 or 1:1 ratio. Given that you’ll be taking on the order of a gram of the -racetams (certainly with piracetam), 40mg of choline is laughably little—you want something more like 10x that.
Any site that sells aniracetam will sell at least choline bitartrate. You usually buy them by themselves. I get mine in powder form and create the capsules myself. I create capsules with a controlled ratio of piracetam, aniracetam and centrophnisine then vary how many I take and how often as appropriate.
If taking just ani and centro a suitable, fairly conservative dose would be 500mg Ani + 250mg centro twice daily.
Not that with racetams the full effect can be expected after about two weeks.
I’ve had positive experiences with Cognitive Nutrition too. The ‘cheap’ part of Bulk Nutrition is largely in the ‘Bulk’ keyword. :)
The primary cognitive enhancing function of aniracetam (and piracetam, oxiracetam and just about all the things that enhance memory and abstract thought...) work by boosting acetylcholine and, over a period of time, by boosting acetylcholine receptors. Basically this means you are going to burn through your choline more rapidly. A similar effect to if you burned it up by having an extended, intense cognitive workout without any nootropics. You will still get improvements from aniracetam, just less. Some people also describe ‘brain fog’ if they deplete their choline levels too much.
I use centrophenoxine as my choline source. It is actually quite a good nootropic even by itself. Alpha GPC is another popular source with positive effects apart from supplying choline. The basic source is choline bitartrate. Watch this video to see the advantages of choline bitartrate (and if my eyes don’t deceive me, bulk packaging from bulknutrition). Basically… it’s really really cheap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdgtsT0ylkk
Thanks for the info! Are these mostly things you have to order online, or can you expect to find them in pharmacies and supplement shops?
You can sometimes find them in larger supplement shops. But they will be much, much cheaper online. Bulknutrition.com is a source with a solid reputation for quality that can also be extremely cheap. Particularly, surprisingly enough if you buy in bulk and fill the capsules yourself.
You can sometimes find them in larger supplement shops. But they will be much, much cheaper online. Bulknutrition.com is a source with a solid reputation for quality that can also be extremely cheap. Particularly, surprisingly enough if you buy in bulk and fill the capsules yourself.
Thankyou for sharing your introspective experience. I’m always interested in how the human brain works and I find that the more I am able to instantiate the model of ‘human’ for a specific person the more I am able to empathize, comprehend their meaning and cross the inferential gap when trying to express my thoughts in a way that translates accurately.
I too have a particularly active inhibitor in my brain, although through experiences and active personal development have significantly reduced the negative effects. The challenging part was removing the maladaptive inhibitions while keeping the ‘perfectionism’ benefits that for me came hand in hand with that overactive system.
I should clarify somewhat what I am suggesting the supplements can be useful for.
Aniracetam Very safe. As in, it is more or less impossible to overdose on the stuff and it isn’t going to mess you. It is probably safer than just about anything you can get in a pharmacy, including the glucose lollies they sell the front desk. It also doesn’t seem to come with significant tolerance/dependency problems that anxiety drugs are notorious for.
… But the anxiolytic properties are not the primary use of aniracetam. It is a cognitive enhancer that happens to have some anti-anxiety effects thrown in as a bonus. It isn’t going to completely counter serious anxiety problems but most people find that it makes socializing more relaxing and flow better. More significant to me is that the primary effect is just what is needed when socializing too. It boosts verbal fluency in particular and (by subjective reports) makes the subtleties in communication and the naunces of music more salient.
Picamilon “Mostly Harmless”—It is just Niacin and GABA hooked up together in a way that will get it through the blood-brain barrier before it falls apart. Reports tend to be that it has a mild but reliable effect on reducing anxiety without a nasty rebound. People tend to ‘cycle’ on and off so that they can maintain the effectiveness.
Phenibut “Use Responsibily”—Phenibut is safer and way healthier than either benzos or booze but at the same time it is not a toy. With aniracetam you can casually eat a tablespoon of the stuff just to see if you notice the difference. You do not do that with Phenibut. This is a real drug, you show it the proper respect.
In terms of effect this stuff is powerful. It isn’t a ‘oh, yeah, that is a bit better’ kind of thing. When used to treat anxiety it is basically a drug with reliable and significant effects (and effectiveness). It does, however come with side effects when used excessively. Specifically it has unpleasant withdrawal effects if you stop using it suddenly after long term, high dose use. it also builds up tolerance relatively so you can not use it every day. It is better to use it once a week or so, when you are out socializing. ie; as an all round superior replacement for alcohol.
In comparison to alcohol: The effects on inhibition are extremely similar. This isn’t surprising since it approximately the same mechanism at play (boosting GABA). It also tends to boost confidence and mood (as alohol sometimes does). Unlike alcohol Phenibut makes you smarter, not dumber. It also doesn’t eliminate your sound judgement, ruin your liver and kill your neurons. (A note—if you combine phenibut with alcohol expect each drink to have twice as much effect as you are used to.)
Benzodiazepine (diazepam, Valium) THIS STUFF FUCKS YOU UP! Yes, I am both yelling and using an expletive. Whenever I lament the flaws in the medical system or suggest taking personal responsibility for your medical needs the misuse of benzo prescription is right up her on the list of reasons. I’m not being particularly contrarian here. This uncontroversial medical science (that isn’t reflected in medical practice in a sane way).
In terms of effectiveness this stuff will work to knock out anxiety (come to think of it it’ll knock the rest of you out too if you bump the dose). If you are having a panic attack or a seizure you want someone to be injecting it into you. What it also does in the short term is to impair all of your brain functions. What it does in the long term is permanently deteriorate both your physical health and brain activity. If you want to shock yourself look up some ‘before and after’ SPECT scans of the brains of benzo users.
To the usual disclaimer “I Am Not A Doctor” I will add “and you shouldn’t put your faith in what I say all that much even if I was.”
In this post you indicated that you have already been doing a lot of productive work going places and practicing conversations. What I’m saying is just that continuing to do more of that is pretty much the only way of building more skills, and it does come with risks of rejection.
What’s the difference between what you’ve been doing, and going to a coffeeshop or bookstore and talking to a couple of people? I’m a little confused. From that previous post, it sounds like the risk is mostly in your head, since you’ve listed a number of recent successes. Doesn’t what you’ve been doing have downside risks as well? There are lots of strangers at weddings, for instance.
So the bad experiences you described were all in a different town? How long ago? And are you reluctant to go to a bookstore and talk to people because you don’t want to wipe out your practice grounds in your current town, like you believe you did in the previous town?
You’ve indicated that you’ve been complimented on your ability to make people feel comfortable in a group. This ability can transfer to starting friendly conversations with people in a public place.
I can guarantee that there’s been some improvement. And you don’t need to know what you’ve been doing wrong; at least for me, trying to figure out exact rules and specify my mistakes was just an exercise in frustration. People react in weird ways sometimes, and you can’t always predict or model when and why, but with practice, you can reduce the frequency of negative reactions.
Now there is an interesting topic. Do you just mean alcohol, nicotine and pot? Or have you considered the actual good options. For example: Phenibut, picamilon or aniracetam? Those are some substances that are seriously handy when it comes to socializing. In the case of aniracetam it comes with enhanced verbal fluency as well as anxiolytic properties.
Tentatively offered: You’ve come up with something which makes it much easier for you to manage socially on LW.
It looks to me as though you’re no longer showing hostility, but I don’t know how you’ve framed it to yourself.
Is there anything about how you’ve changed your approach on LW which could be applied to real world interactions?
Much as I’d like to explain how awesome I am, I think you’re forgetting this whole thing from less than a month ago.
No, I remember it, though probably in much less detail than you do.
I think the tone of your posts has changed since then.
Evidence that people are not necessarily good at evaluating their own behavior: I know two people who became much more pleasant company after using anti-depressants. Neither of them had any idea that they were doing anything different, they just thought other people had become nicer for no apparent reason.
Well, I think we can rule out me having started on anti-depressants after that one …
Where do you live? Some places have tighter courtesy rules than others (and, of course, rules vary from one place to another, too)-- what Suzette Haden Elgin has written about Ozark courtesy sounds like it would be terrifying if I had to get it right. Grammatical shifts which I can barely notice mean different things. (Sorry, no examples handy to mind.)
Can you video yourself in conversation? It’s conceivable that some bad habits will be more visible from the outside?
That sounds really interesting. Do you have a book title or reference or anything, even if you don’t have examples?
Somewhere in her blog.
Ouch.
With difficulties like that, you’re probably not going to find any genuinely useful advice on the Internet. It might help if you got some extroverted person to coach you face-to-face. Have you tried that?
(FWIW, I overcame my problems on my own, but my problems were minor compared to yours. I had low-status behaviors that caused people to ignore me, but I could always parse the nonverbal context just fine.)
Is there an improv group where you live?
A Toastmasters’?
No to the first, yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting.
I’m already involved in some groups, untasteful though I find them. The problem is not being in groups per se, but starting conversations with random people.
Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
As you may have gathered from previous interactions with me and others here, I’m generally careful about my phrasing when I do give advice: I normally preface it with “Here is what I recommend” or the like. I wasn’t giving you advice yet, but collecting information prior to giving advice.
I asked about Improv because it points out one specific thing I think you’re doing wrong: you’re often “blocking” as the improv jargon calls it. I would recommend you learn about (and practice) “yes and”.
Your answer to my question is “blocking” in a synctactically typical manner: “yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting”. “Yes, but” when what you’re looking for in conversation is “yes, and”. You’re telling me in an oblique way (“lost brain cells”) that Toastmasters wasn’t a satisfactory experience for you, without giving me an opening for further conversation on that topic.
You could have phrased that in a thousand other ways more inviting of further conversation. Example: “Yes, I did try Toastmasters, and I was bored out of my mind; why did you ask, and what were you thinking I should have expected to get out of attending?”
I disagree with your assessment that “the problems is not being in groups per se”. You’ve had many people here tell you that they find interacting with you often unpleasant, even though they are by no means “random people”, they are from a social set that you have chosen and that by your own admission you want to get more closely involved with.
And to repeat something I’ve said previously: people discussing this topic with you here and now may not be very good advice-givers, but then you’re not necessarily a very good advice-taker. Eye, mote, beam.
I’ve upvoted your response to the Go analogy because it’s factually true. One thing you’re overlooking, though, is that when a Go novice asks a Go master what they should learn about, it’s a good idea to try very hard to extract something from the master’s advice, no matter how bad the master seems to be at explaining. Otherwise you risk entering a common failure mode related to “blocking”:
If you’re fed up with one master, go seek another—rather than fruitlessly spend energy blocking the one. But if many masters are telling you the same thing, perhaps it’s time to update.
Yikes! I think you’re overextrapolating what I was trying to do based on my use or nonuse of various codewords that you’ve decreed to have certain meanings. I said “yes but” because I wasn’t trying to invite conversation as I would in an in-person discussion, so it’s no surprise that the remark doesn’t leave you options. In an in-person discussion I would do different things.
I had assumed (correctly) that you believed Toastmasters would help and would recommend it, so I just want to confirm that I had gone to it but found the rituals and leaders painfully stupid (which is what I meant by losing brains cells; I didn’t mean I was bored), intending to convey that it would not be helpful. If you were asking to probe for more information than that, you should have said so rather than asking a brief question from which you expect to extract volumes of meaning.
I didn’t know I was in the middle of a “conversation skills test”—you shouldn’t do that to people.
I appreciate the improv-based suggestions you’ve given; that is insightful. I don’t think you needed to wait until you were sternly lecturing me to give it, though.
What does that even mean? If I can’t identify what I would be doing differently based on learning the advice, or am in a situation that renders the advice dangerous, should I just shut up about it and say “thank you”?
In any case, my criticism has not been of bad advice per se, but rather, advice that assumes away the very problem under discussion—the “let them eat cake” advice. I think we all remember the first glaring example of this. If I gave advice that assumed away someone’s very problem, I would want to know. Wouldn’t anyone?
I’ve had a few do that, and online forums are significantly different from in-person interaction.
I didn’t make a comment replying to any Go analogy—do you mean RichardKennaway?
Yep, this one. My apologies for the misattribution—under the veil of the Anti-Kibitz and given the tenor of the reply (“You can in fact verbally explain Go”) I’d assumed you were the author.
Oh, well, in any case, I did try Go for a while, and I do think you can explain it verbally. Before playing any human opponent, I figured out a very simple procedure for beating the computer, though it only works when you play white.
Just copy your opponent’s moves, rotated 180 degrees about the center. It won’t be until the endgame that your opponent takes the center. Then just play as best you can (it will feel like getting a free move anyway). At the end of the game, you’ll have basically the same territories, but you’ll be in the lead because of white’s handicap (kyu or whatever).
I only briefly started trying this on human opponents, and for whatever reason, even on the major Go server, people would quit after a few moves when they saw me doing this.
I’m probably missing something big, but there you go.
They must have been unaware of these tactics. Many people consider manego annoying, because it’s sort of a cop-out.
Whereas I consider the labeling and shaming of the opponent for making valid moves that are difficult to beat is either a total cop-out, an insult to the game or both. If you can’t beat someone when you can predict and for most part determine what their moves will be then you seriously suck or the game is a solved problem. Like checkers or tic-tac-toe.
Seriously, if you think you are a better player and you credit your opponent with the slightest hint of strategic competence you should EXPECT them to do what you do until such time as they suspect they are risking falling into a manego-trap.
Sometimes a game has one serious flaw but is nevertheless fun to play, and there is no obvious fix for that one serious flaw. In that situation, it can make sense to shame opponents who exploit the flaw. There is a sense in which this is an “insult” to the game, but both players might still like the game, on balance.
For example, I have found that in Stratego, it rarely makes sense to attack first against a player of roughly equal ability. At a certain point in the mid-game, evenly matched players will usually both find it optimal strategy to move a piece back and forth dozens of times in sort of “chicken” game where the goal is to get the other player to attack first. This is boring, so I don’t want to play with you if you’re going to do that every game, but potential Stratego partners are rare enough that if you otherwise enjoy playing Stratego with me, I might try to shame you into being more reckless with your attacks.
I would treat shaming (as distinct from banter) in that context as a ‘defection’. My response would be to then eliminate whatever suboptimal levels of recklessness that I had previously allowed to creep into my play in a spirit of cooperation or just any intrinsic recklessness that I had not chosen to stifle. Either that or I would disengage from the game entirely. Before doing so I would offer potential cooperative agreements if possible.
Most likely I would not find Stratego particularly appealing. If it is supposed to be about ‘strategy’ yet relies on people not using good strategies in order to work it is broken. I would much prefer to play a lighter game that at least doesn’t pretend to be about strategy.
When playing the card game 500 the standard rules for ‘misere’ are not well balanced. When playing people who are not rank amateurs I advocate a limit of one misere call per player per ‘game (up to 500)‘. If the opponent insists on the standard rule then I proceed to play (open) misere whenever the risk/reward ratio is favorable. This tends to result in most games being largely determined by my misere calls, with me winning two thirds of them and ‘going out backwards’ the other third. Naturally I do so with playful cheer and offer to impose the restrictions at any time.
It can actually be quite fun to play the meta-game of negotiation. Winning the game convincingly even (and especially) under the ‘broken’ system they insist on but offering to adopt an agreement that will effectively be a handycap for me. Fogging all manipulative shaming attempts and repeating the offer. Engaging in a good natured battle of wills with those too stubborn to admit their folly or, given that admission, to change their mind. Getting the kitty a LOT. Doing the balancing act of keeping the experience fun despite the broken rules and the resulting conflict. Knowing when to stop and switch to a different game or activity entirely (thus practicing the ability to maintain boundaries and accept ‘no-deal’ as a healthy alternative to ‘win-win’).
All that is a lot more enjoyable than for me playing a broken game and being largely disinterested.
Sure. I guess instead of “shaming” I meant to say “banter which, if serious, would be considered shaming, but, since merely playful, instead conveys the idea that one’s opponent’s imaginary alter-ego inside the game is worthy of shame, despite the fact that one’s opponent himself is pretty much a cool dude.” I didn’t pay a lot of attention to word choice; I was mostly just adopting the language of the commenters above me on the thread.
If I ever had to really shame someone to get them to play Stratego interestingly, I agree with you that I should either (a) find another activity, (b) find another friend, or (c) look for a way to escape the alarmingly boring desert island that has hitherto prevented my access to other friends and activities.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
Concur!
You might like Mornington Crescent.
What good is Mornington Crescent?
Are there any games you could enjoy?
Not unless they involve making paperclips, at least indirectly.
Does the human economy count as a game?
Clippy, when you first became aware of yourself, so far as you know, did you have something like your present mental and social faculties? Some humans (and other biological animals) enjoy games at least in part because they help develop skills in a low-threat, low-risk environment.
There are better ways to enhance my skills, like checking for reflective coherence, validating models of phenomena, and refactoring code. To the extent that I enjoy doing that, perhaps it counts as a “game” for me, although it is not distinguished as a separate sphere of activity.
Doing something that doesn’t lead to paperclips just so I can get better paperclip-making skills as a side effect? That just seems stupid.
It’s not always obvious what leads to more paperclips, and a broad exploration of topics like game theory (which can apply to all sorts of economic and negotiation problems) can give you an idea of what you need to learn next.
Depends how cynical a human you’re asking.
“There is in it what is in it; ’tis a mirror held up to the reader, whereby if a donkey look in, surely a sage will not look out; the ends of all things are revealed within its pages to he who has the key; it keepeth away the pox, the flux, and the weeping sore.”
Or in your case, rust.
Game theory can help Clippys make decisions in dealing with other entities that would lead to more paperclips.
I’m already good at that. I’m on track to receive a sub-planet’s mass worth of paperclips from a human. But I suppose I could always improve.
For real, you could be on track to receive a planet mass worth of paperclips from a human.
How?
Make me an offer. Or maybe we should wait to do another deal until the current one is finished.
How about if I give you 2000 USD within a month, you produce 6e26 kg of paperclips for me within 20 years?
No.
Yes.
Oh, I get it, you’re joking. How funny.
I don’t joke about serious issues like paperclips. Is there a modification to my most recent proposal you wish to make? Perhaps later delivery of the paperclips? A few orders of magnitude less paperclips?
It is very unlikely that I will agree to make orders of magnitude more paperclips than our existing agreement (10^20kg of paperclips in ~50 years in exchange for ~$50k in the next two years) for an order of magnitude less money. For any agreement where I give you orders of more magnitudes more paperclips than our first agreement, I likely require a delivery of paperclips later than 50 years from now, unless you are prepared to offer me at least an order of magnitude more money than $50k. I’m willing to negotiate, but you need to give me better starting terms for me to engage in a good faith negotiation.
Alright, I’ll think about other changes. What about if I just gave you USD for specification of the technique you’ll use to find the metal and collect it, with me doing all of the physical work?
ETA3: Offer retracted. I’ll let Kevin deal with Clippy.
Clippy would then be dumb to pay you $2000, as you obviously have no intention of fulfilling your end of the bargain.
As if Clippy has any more reason to believe you intend to fullfil your end of your bargain?
Of course I intend to fulfill my side; I think technological capabilities will skyrocket in less than 20 years.
Turning down the opportunity to con someone is a good thing.
Easy money obtained by lying to a sentient entity is something that should be discouraged, not encouraged, by truth-seekers.
Then tell SIAI to give back the money they got through Kevin’s deception of Clippy.
I’m not defending lying; I just want to know in what sense I’m lying but Kevin is not.
Why do you think Kevin doesn’t intend to keep his end of the bargain?
My claim is just that I don’t think he intends to keep his end of the bargain in any sense that I do not intend to.
I accept that we both sincerely intend to build the paperclips we would commit to, but a precommitment is only meaningful if it is realistic for you to keep it. The deceptive thing about accepting the bargain is that building ~10^26kg of paperclips in 20 years is orders of magnitude more improbable than building 10^20kg of paperclips in 50 years. Do you really have a probability of being able to build those paperclips in 20 years of higher than 50%?
10^20kg is already a %!#^ing lot of paperclips and you almost accepted a deal to build 100 earth masses of paperclips. Please remember that you are not negotiating just for yourself, but on behalf of the future resources of all humanity. It is negligent for you to accept that deal without renegotiating it.
Point taken. Changing offer.
But you don’t actually think Clippy is real, do you?
Of course not, he’s role played by some human, but the meaningfulness of “real” and “not-real” becomes more ambiguous if you are living in a Level 4 multiverse.
Right, I meant real in the sense of “really a sentient non-human paperclip maximizer”.
My reading of Clippy is as a piece of role-playing, for comedic or didactic purposes. I therefore also assume that the $2000 is of the same nature as the gold pieces that D’n’D characters acquire.
Eh, Clippy has apparently already paid $1000 in real US dollars to SIAI as a down payment on an agreement with Kevin. There’s been 3rd-party confirmation on this from (IIRC) people at SIAI, though I don’t know all the details and whether that constitutes valid evidence—they could be in on the whole thing too.
Ahh, now that makes sense.
Ahh, now that makes sense.
But then you should, if possible, explicitly patch the game in a way that makes that not a good idea.
I completely agree. I can’t think of any fixes for Stratego, though. Can you?
If neither player has attacked in a certain number of turns, then a piece is removed from the board?
Which one? Keep in mind that, as written, Stratego has no element of luck.
One of each if nobody has attacked at all (other player’s choice). If an attack has been made then a piece from the player who was not the last attacker.
That would allow some element of a stand-off potential if both players believe they are better served by a smaller scale battle, a stand off that would probably only be stable if at least one of the players was making an error in judgement. It also encourages various feinting strategies that should ensure that most games do not become dominated by a stale mate.
Sounds great! I’ll try it.
(Who goes first is random, isn’t it?)
Anyway, I did a bit of Googling, and I found some official Stratego tournament rules that address stall situations.
Wait, those scouts sound familiar! I suspect I have played that game. (Everything has a point value, higher points usually beat lower points, scouts get to move like rooks, etc. I have vague memories of marshals and land mines too...)
Oops, I failed to notice that part. Well, no, I can’t. But then maybe you should just be playing a different game, or if you have a lot of time, redesigning Stratego from scratch. :) But failing that I guess opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it.
Edit: But I don’t see how it can be considered at all a good solution. It also requires that you both recognize the problem in the first place. Though with something like stalling I’m not sure there is any real stable solution, due to boundary exploitation and the ability to stall more subtly. Hm, I guess I take back my “opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it”; if you’re already at the point that it’s the only solution you can find, then it isn’t going to solve the problem.
I find that this analysis is exactly correct for bughouse, a time-based 4-player game where stalling can be the key to victory and is very difficult (costly) to monitor, because any time you spend seeing if your partner’s opponent is stalling becomes time that you can’t spend defeating your own opponent.
In Stratego, a turn-based 2-player game, you can often treat the decision to stall or not-stall as an iterated fake Prisoner’s Dilemma, especially because the cost of being defected on for one turn is quite small, and the act of defecting for an entire game is quite noticeable. If I ‘cooperate’ by attacking you for 2 games in a row, and then you refuse to attack me on the 3rd game, I can’t help but notice that I’m always the one attacking, and I can just refuse to play a 4th game with you until you apologize.
Oh, so you’re considering this over games/strategies, rather than moves/tactics. Interesting.
Edit: WTF is with my double posts? I have not been clicking twice or anything that should result in a double submission but every comment I make appears twice. I cannot think of anything I have changed on my browser that would cause this either. Seroiusly strange.
Yup, I agree. If someone pulls manego on me I usually smile and see it as an opportunity to learn something.
But in a more subtle way an evenly matched game does have both opponents doing “exactly the same thing” in the opening. Both follow the same recipe—stake out one corner, possibly the remaining corner, then go for a corner approach to simultaneously sketch side territory. It’s just that the half-dozen or so possible corner moves each have a subtly different meaning, and so symmetry is usually broken quite rapidly.
What is the impact of trying manego against a skilled opponent? Would it be correct to say that by simply telling someone the above strategy, you have significantly increased their skill level, even if they still get beaten by good players?
Someone good (low kyu or dan level) will eventually play a symmetry-breaking move such as tengen, and then the novice (who doesn’t have a good follow-up because they didn’t really understand the moves they were playing) will get clobbered.
Manego is like guessing the teacher’s password by parroting back every single word the teacher speaks. :) What counts as skill in Go is understanding the moves you play (and being able to read out their consequences).
It does impress novice opponents, which I suppose is why you’d see people not want to keep playing you once they caught on that you were doing it.
I wouldn’t compare it to guessing the teacher’s password, or at least not only compare it to that.
Recall the points made in our discussion of tacit knowledge. Here is a case where a simple verbal instruction, in a significant, measurable way, can increase someone’s skill at a game with notoriously inarticulable strategy.
You explain manego to a beginner. (Not tournament beginner, I mean, someone who knows the rules, read a tutorial, only played a few games.) Now, they can almost always beat a computer[1] as white, when before they could not. You made a huge difference, purely through verbal instruction.
I’d say that’s pretty impressive.
[1] I use GnuGo as reference for computer Go.
I would say that’s more of a problem with GnuGo than an actual increase in skill. Manego is more of a trick play that only works against people who don’t know how to deal with it.
Whereas I consider the labeling and shaming of the opponent for making valid moves that are difficult to beat is either a total cop-out, an insult to the game or both. If you can’t beat someone when you can predict and for most part determine what their moves will be then you seriously suck or the game is a solved problem. Like checkers or tic-tac-toe.
Seriously, if you think you are a better player and you credit your opponent with the slightest hint of strategic competence you should EXPECT them to do what you do until such time as they suspect they are risking falling into a manego-trap.
I’m one of the people here who fit this description, but I may have been experiencing different-but-overlapping challenges to yours.
The primary social difficulties I used to have:
Severe social anxiety (probably undiagnosed social phobia)
Not knowing what to say and do in unscripted informal social situations
Difficulty reading people and developing models of how they respond and feel (theory of mind?)
I currently experience all these difficulties in lingering amounts, but probably no more than average people. And I am way ahead of others with similar personality traits and cognition to mine.
I engaged in a long period of social experimentation (handled “in software” to use Roko’s analogy). During this time, I developed the ability to understand many aspects of social interaction on an intuitive level, exercising social “muscles” I never knew I had (to switch to a completely different analogy).
As Blueberry describes, I had to risk making social blunders to learn. I made a bunch of people uncomfortable at various points in my learning process, such as when I was learning to be more spontaneous instead of turning over comments in my mind for minutes before uttering them, which sometimes involved me blurting out ill-considered things until I developed the right balance between filtering and spontaneity.
Yet I’ve never had difficulties comparable to getting in trouble with venue supervisors. I can’t even remember seriously offending anyone or having anyone unhappy with me.
For some reason, these were never lessons that I had to learn by trial-and-error, and the thread is making me think of some possibilities why:
I am very high in agreeableness and sensitivity
I am non-confrontational, and have trouble expressing anger, aggression, or assertiveness (though I’ve improved on the last one)
People seem to perceive me as non-threatening and trustworthy
I was raised with a restrictive notion of manners
All of these factors contributed to me having social problems when I was younger, because I was unable to handle bullying and teasing, and I was perceived as a pushover and as rather mousy. Yet I wonder if these factors actually facilitated my efforts to learn social skills later in life.
Thanks to these factors, my own personality made it difficult for me to make significant social blunders and offend people in real life. Even when I was trying to act like a jerk, the result was still pretty nice relative to the average male. I was free to experiment, knowing that if things went wrong, the constraints of my own personality would keep me from causing real offense to people. Furthermore, with only a bit of social practice and observation, I became very sensitive to other people’s emotions. The social experimentation allowed me to learn social procedural knowledge very fast, such that I no longer had to view socializing as a form of experimentation at all (though that’s another discussion).
I also practiced facial expressions in the mirror a ton, and worked a lot on my voice tonality, to make sure that my subcommunication was really how I wanted to come across.
For someone with lower Agreeableness and lower interpersonal sensitivity trying to learn social skills, their experimentation might have a higher risk of going wrong in worse ways. If someone can learn social skills with only a small period of time of offending people, that might work, but any extended time in such a learning process is potentially grueling to the person involved (and of course difficult for those he or she is interacting with). If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs, but if you find your shooting eggs out of rockets launchers, something may be wrong.
I would wonder if there are any ways to shorten that the process of learning social skills necessary to have interactions with people, while avoiding offending or alienating them, or getting in trouble with venue supervisors.
It’s been my experience that people with high Agreeableness are often under-served by social advice, and they end up getting walked over. Yet I’m starting to wonder if it’s also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways. Mainstream culture tells people to be polite and nice, but it doesn’t really explain how a low-Agreeableness person can connect with others betters. And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting “high status,” being “the prize,” and “not giving a crap.” These lessons may be useful to high-Agreeableness males with low-status, but badly backfire for low-Agreeabless males with low-status.
I can think more about how people with different personality traits to mine might learn social skills; it won’t be completely based on my own experience, but I do have some ideas.
Low agreeableness makes it hard to even hear social advice properly. (It’s hard enough for males to accept advice even when agreeable.)
Surprisingly enough each of these three are still important for the low agreeableness/low status males to learn. It is just harder to explain which specific skills it would take to develop these attributes. Apologizing whenever someone else disapproves of you is not actually all that much different to attacking whenever someone else disapproves of you. It signals the same underlying insecurity.
No advice here, but I started thinking what the sort of advice you are looking for would look like, and whether much such advice even exists.
A different skill from social interactions, and probably a simpler one is playing Go. A notable thing about Go is that there isn’t much instruction in the form of “if this happens, do that”. That doesn’t work, as there are too many possible game configurations, and whatever form a successful player’s skill actually takes can’t really be verbalized. Instead, people are just told to expect to lose a bunch of games at first, during which they are expected to build up the difficult to verbalize pattern matching abilities about what works and what doesn’t in different situations. A bit like the advice to have a bunch of social interactions which you expect not to end very successfully.
Of course social interactions also have a much wider space of viable approaches than games of Go, so the analogy of needing to do things the hard way to build non-verbalizable pattern matching skills might not be that tight.
Reg Braithwaite has an article about the problems with a certain type of personality and trying to learn Go, when you just can’t seem to go from declarative knowledge to procedural skill when picking up the game. Maybe it’s relevant to learning social skills as well.
Are you kidding? There are plenty of books teaching Go, full of verbal instruction, covering the basics (take territory first in the corners, then the edges, then the middle), standard opening patterns (joseki), detailed tactical situations (tesuji), proverbs, middle game, end game, every aspect of the game. Of course, it takes practice to turn that advice into skill, as with any skill, but the advice is there, and it works.
For someone who can learn from it. People do learn from it—I did, back when I played Go, and the books and Go magazines would not be published if they were not useful.
So what distinguishes those who find it straightforward to learn Go by study and practice, as I did, and those who get into the emotional stew that Braithwaite describes? What distinguishes those who learn to ride a bicycle by practice alone, as I did, from those who need instruction also? What distinguishes those who are willing to have a go in social situations and manage to observe, learn and improve, from those who are not, or do not?
If I knew that, I could set up as a personal development guru.
BTW, while I find Braithwaite’s account weird in relation to go, it pretty much sums up how I used to feel about socialising, so I have some experience of both sides of this. I don’t actually socialise any more than I used to, though.
BTW2, it’s just occurred to me that there are many books on social skills for people with Asperger’s syndrome. I’ve not read any of them and I can’t comment on how useful they are, but I happen to be aware of a publisher that specialises in books on autism and Aspergers, Jessica Kingsley. FWIW.
Yeah, bad wording on my part. There’s a lot of instruction, but I understand that a great deal of practice is utterly vital in order to put the instruction into efficient use. The assumption I’m basically after is that if someone would study Go literature fulltime for a year but wouldn’t play any games, they would still play their first games very poorly. I’m not sure to what degree this is really the case.
I have a friend (admittedly a very very smart friend) who become interested in Go after studying combinatorial game theory and discovering that the infinitesimal game value “up arrow” actually occurs in Go, and that game theorists had had productive conversations with Go masters on the subject—the theory actually had applications.
Using nothing but readings in this area and a few games with me, the friend leveled up from “pure but highly read” beginner to about 14kyu (relative to IGS in 2002?) within four or five games.
My impression is that true tacit knowledge exists, and that theory really doesn’t help it a lot… but also that it mostly comes up in domains where the brain is going to be relying on muscle memory a lot, like dissecting the nervous system of shrimp or juggling or such. As a separate thing there are deeply theoretical domains where something appears to be tacit knowledge but its really just a matter of observers not understanding need for patient study when dealing with large inferential distances.
Silas, I’ve never gone from “social difficulties” to “no social difficulties” based on a direct and obvious course of study, but one very general life heuristic I’ve found to work well for similarly major work is to search for “the best self help book on the subject” whenever I notice a thing about myself that I really want to cultivate or “fix”.
Sometimes it takes me a half a day on Amazon to make an educated guess about which book might meet my “best on the subject” criteria. One of the things I look for are reader reviews of books that recommend some other author or book as clearly superior to the book being reviewed—the best of these suggested books “jump subjects” by invoking a distinct set of keywords or different focus which opens up a whole new “vein of thought” on the subject. Discovering veins, finding “best of breed” within each vein, and then comparing the best of breeds is what can take a while.
Another quick thought: I think you might be living in a small town where you expect to stay for years or decades. If this guess is correct, I would take social advice from “city people” with a huge grain of salt. The environment, opportunities, upsides, downsides, and the social expectations based on this different environment can be substantially different. You can’t “throw people away” in a small town… even if you don’t like someone, you’ll have to live in proximity to them for decades. This also might open the possibility of a weird “solution” to your situation: move! :-)
Would you care to recommend some “best of breed” books?
I’m not sure I would unreservedly recommend books I find this way, because they aren’t all full of things I wholeheartedly endorse. They’re usually experiments prompted by a sense of personal inadequacy and some of them are kind of embarrassing, but.… here are some books I found in roughly the way I recommended to Silas and what I think of them now:
When I was having difficulties navigating casual not-really-friendly acquaintances with other women (like in the workplace) where I couldn’t just avoid people who gave me bad vibes, I found Catfight to be reasonably helpful. I decided on this over various books about “queen bees” that seemed unscientific and possibly amoral… but I haven’t read any of those to justify the impression. This book helped me flesh out some details in a pet theory of mine about the way the “aesthetics of signaling” are a major locus of negotiation in real-world socially-embedded virtue ethics. I liked it a lot for that reason, though the text didn’t contain the theory explicitly.
When I was trying to figure out what I should be thinking (when planning for retirement) or saying (when my parents brought up investing), I discovered a classic called The Intelligent Investor which was written by the mentor of Warren Buffet and which helps deflate some of the horrible epistemology around investing. I can’t really speak for the utility here, because I’ve had very few opportunities to apply the knowledge since acquiring it but a nice theoretical example of its content is that it pointed out the difference between inside view and outside view calculations of investment value. Given the distinction, it counsels the use of the outside view with a reference class including market conditions over periods of time longer than a human investing career (though it doesn’t use the precise terminology to say this that this community might use for such things).
At one point I was wondering if I should change my sexual ethics and I searched my way to Why Men Love Bitches but reading this mostly this helped me decide that the whole subject area was almost as morally bankrupt as PUA stuff, and even more intellectually bankrupt (relying almost solely on anecdotes rather than the PUA community’s “self congratulatory theory plus quick and dirty experimental method”). I had my first date with my husband about two months after reading this and I suspect that part of the reason the relationship has been so rewarding (lots has to do with him being amazing) is that I had much more internal clarity about what I wanted in a relationship and what I was willing to give in order to get it. The book helped bring the clarity, even if it didn’t directly apply.
Lately I’ve been in the planning stages for a startup where I expect to be in a leadership position and I thought I should spend some time seeing if I had any gross character defects I could patch before subjecting future employees to potential misery (or to at least have criteria for recognizing a co-founder to help in the absence of a patch). The best I could find in this area wasn’t that great, but it was Smarts: Are We Hardwired For Success?. It turned out to be kinda shallow and sad with poorly designed psych instruments and unsupported cognitive biases about personal immutability all over the place.
“Smarts” mostly just confirmed for me that any subject area people usually come to with selfish motivations (esp in business writing ) will mostly have crap for epistemology. I don’t even have a single working hypothesis as to why this is so common in this area, but I have various suspicions that are all generically reinforced every time I find books like this.
The only really valuable thing I got out of “Smarts” was a working theory for “style conflicts” I’d seen between people who are good at (and value) flexible reaction to surprises and people who are good at (and value) up front planning and diligent execution. I’ve been trying to get better at Aumann updating with people when high-level abstractions are used as justifications when there are tactical differences of opinion. This was one of the first real “hits” I’ve had in that area (though that wasn’t what I bought the book for).
( For what I wanted, I should have bought Leadership and Self Decption, which I didn’t find by the “best of breed” strategy, but found next to my bed when I was falling asleep in Benton House after a day hanging out with SIAI’s Visiting Fellows. Most of the one-star Amazon reviews of this book appear to be true, but the topic (someone’s pet theory about the psychological mechanisms behind self deception in social contexts) was fascinating and helped me find some areas where I probably really was broken and it was simple to detect this and fix it.
I’m not sure how that book ended up in that bedroom, but I am grateful for whatever serendipity (or Machiavellian plotting :-P) brought it to my awareness! )
In the course of gearing up for the startup I also tracked down a “brass tacks and details” book on the subject (which is still in my “to read” queue) called The Startup Company Bible For Entrepreneurs. I haven’t looked at this book enough to form a substantive opinion.
“Why Men Love Bitches” is a really great book (and it works just as well if you reverse the genders). That’s one of the books that helped me learn about people and relationships and figure out what I want as well. I’m sorry to hear you decry the whole PUA/dating/social skills/relationship advice field as bankrupt; I’ve found these materials and quick-and-dirty experimental method very useful for figuring out what works and feels right for me.
I’m curious, what do you mean about changing your sexual ethics?
Another classic that I found in a similarly serendipitous way is Cialdini’s “Influence”.
The problem I had with them is that advice in this area generally applies an instrumental view to “other people”, without attention to the kinds of people the skills are likely to work on, and whether those people (after the interaction or deep into it) are likely to be better people who are retrospectively happy about their interactions with you.
For most of my life I’ve been of the opinion that the idea of “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a sham excuse that people invent after having been partly responsible for causing an emotional trainwreck that was very painful to most of the people involved. My working hypothesis, then and now, is that it is probably better not to get romantically entangled with someone unless you and your sweetie are both capable offering and granting something approaching research grade informed consent (as opposed to merely judicial grade where its pretty much deemed not to have been obtained only in cases of gross fraud or dramatic mental impairment).
I’m not talking about getting signatures before smooching with someone, but I am talking about (1) thinking about it first, (2) imagining possible consequences for both parties (and possible children who may be created) in the coming weeks, months, and years, and (3) doing one’s best to avoid harm to anyone given such thoughtfulness which probably requires some time in private and lengthy conversation.
Cialdini’s “Influence” is an interesting example of the social skills literature, because he ostensibly wrote it as a “defense against the dark arts” textbook to help people avoid being manipulated. In practice, it is studied mostly by compliance professionals as one of the most epistemologically sound manuals that exists on the subject of the “dark arts” in general. I don’t think it is an accident that sound epistemology and benevolent moral intent went together like this.
Though there is great ethical value in helping people avoid influence techniques, I contend that there is also great ethical value in teaching people how to influence others. I argue that social skills (of which social influence is a subset) are distributed inequitably in society, and that this result is unjust. Some people are dramatically better at social influence (status, etc...) than others knowingly or unknowingly, due to different personality traits and upbringings. There are the haves, and the have-nots in the area of social skills.
The only way for social equality to exist is for people to be in the same bracket of social skills (and social influence ability). We can’t make things equal, but we can compress the disparity between the top and the bottom, so the people at the bottom aren’t getting stomped on so badly.
Either the haves must give up their social skills, or the have-nots must attain more social skills. The first solution is impossible. With their higher social status, the haves can’t be forced to do so, and they will scoff at requests to disarm out of the goodness of their hearts. The cool kids aren’t going to change how they do things no matter how much the uncool kids stamp their feet. Furthermore, some of the haves are naturally that way due to their phenotype, and they can’t lower their social skills (at least, not without the help of the Handicapper General ).
The solution is for the have-nots to learn to be more socially influential. Yet if you do so, you join the ranks of the haves, though you may be one of their more restrained and reflective members. Unfortunately, if you become one of the haves you will still encounter have-nots. You should avoid stomping on them, but they may end up at a disadvantage relative to you. It isn’t your fault that they aren’t educated about social influence, and it isn’t your individual responsibility to do so.
A society where disparities in social skills have been compressed by pulling people at the bottom upwards would be more equal than what we have today. Reducing this inequality is a good thing. There would be great transparency about social influence. That’s part of the reason I write so much about these subjects: I’m trying to do my part to get the knowledge more evenly distributed. Yet there is a strange agreement in society between the haves and the have-nots: they both often look down on have-nots trying to become haves.
I also believe that there should be more discussion of the ethics of social influence. Yet in discussions of the ethics of social influence, I often notice a greater degree of scrutiny on people who are learning social influence, rather than on those who are already doing it. Furthermore, some ethical criticisms of social influence (usually leveled at those learning it) seem overly idealistic. When social influence and status is woven so deeply into the fabric of society, the phrase “don’t hate the player; hate the game” can often be a valid defense.
I see learning status gaining skills as an arms race. That is you gaining more social influence will encourage others to gain more to try and stay ahead of you so that they can get what they want. Thus forcing you to spend more time and energy on socialising. It is not as simple as have and have-nots.
I’d guess the haves socially denigrating the have-nots for trying to get more social skills is part of their way of fending off competitors.
Why the have-nots might do it? Well if they are part of your social group there are a number of reasons.
They might not want to be on their guard around you in case you try and manipulate them.
They might worry that you will become less interesting to talk to or less of a friend as you spend less time with your head in a book/consuming in-group media and more time shmoozing and climbing the greasy pole.
If they are not part of your social group, then yep a legitimate bias unless they are trying to defuse the arms race. Which is a bit overly idealistic I’ll grant you.
It might be a game, and engaging in it might lead to more energy put into socially unproductive purpose down the line. But, unfortunately, the only way to win IS to play, otherwise you’ll be losing influence to suburban WASPS with nice hair. Some of them might even be sociopaths. :(
Yes and no. If you personally want to be influential in government or CEO of a major company then yes. However that is not the only way to influence society.
There are two rough ways to shape society. Through social means and technological. An example of technological shaping is the creation of effective birth control allowed many women to take more control of their lives. It allowed them to have sex and maintain a career. Artificial wombs would have further societal consequences.
So if you are going the technological route to societal influence then all you need is sufficient resources to create the technology and market it to sufficient people such that it becomes self-sustaining. It would become self-sustaining by becoming the basis of a profitable business with lobbyists etc. If you are fulfilling a large need, then all you may need to do is develop the tech and license the patent. That may not require to much resources or lots of social skills. However the fallout of any technology is not predictable and it is very hard to “undo” a technological release if it is not to your liking (requiring lots of social influence).
In terms of long lasting social influence you can support a group that has the same or similar goals as you. The groups marketing team can then use their skills to transform your money into influence more effectively than the individual donator.
If your idea is insufficiently popular to be a major influence in that fashion it is likely if you get into politics that mentioning it or suggesting might well be political suicide.
Lone genius inventors have influence in society, but they don’t have much status. I don’t even know the name of the guy who invented birth control. It’s the marketers and CEOs in the technology sphere who get most of the status, outside of the geek world.
To truly capitalize on many inventions, it’s necessary to negotiate with your licensees, investors, or partners. How much social skills that takes depends on how well you want to come out in your negotiations. Business social skills aren’t the same thing as the status skills present in more general contexts, but there is substantial overlap.
Personally, I want to have my cake and eat it, too: I want to influence society, and gain status for it rather than creating things that give other people more status than me.
That is fine, but a personal preference. And not one everyone shares.
My pleasures in life (so far) are simpler and easier to acquire than being high status.
Not everyone shares a preference for attaining status, but many people share preferences for things that status can facilitate, such as money, dates, friends, and mental health. Those who can attain those things to their satisfaction without any additional efforts spent on status, are in a great spot. Those who can’t will have to either learn status, be unsatisfied, or downgrade their preferences to what they can achieve. While not everyone shares my preferences, it’s possible that more people should if they want to effectively fulfill their preferences.
I encourage people to be honest with themselves about what their goals actually are, instead of selling themselves short and accepting a mediocre situation out of fear of leaving their comfort zones. I make this encouragement because in the past I’ve observed many people (myself included) abandoning ambitions out of feelings of resignation and unworthiness, and convincing themselves that they don’t really want those things as a coping mechanism. This can be a dangerous form of self-deception.
But you accept that there are some people with genuinely low ambition? Whether I am one or not* is somewhat irrelevant; you probably don’t have sufficient biographical material to tell one way or another. Do you have a good way of testing whether low ambition is due to low ambition or low self-worth? Any research on the subject?
*I’d characterise mysefl as ambitious in what I would like to achieve, but I actively do not want the trappings of power. The thought of sycophantic yes-men vieing for my attention turns my stomach and makes me feel tired, for example. As do girls that would want to try and exploit me for my money/connectedness. So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
Of course, which is why I addressed my comment in general terms.
I would expect individuals to vary on ambition and status-seeking. I do not know the precise factors that cause variance in these traits. I am advocating attention to specific factors that lead people to state low ambition or low desire/concern for status. These factors may include defeatism, lack of opportunity, discourage from others, negative emotion associations, akrasia, or past mistreatment or abuse.
Your view of status interaction seems different from mine. Having status doesn’t mean you have to have sycophantic yes-men. People (men or women) drawn to you for your money or connectedness (especially the latter) aren’t necessarily trying to exploit you.
I guess it’s a question of costs vs. benefits and what your goals are. For most sorts of goals that people have, I suggest that status will probably help them achieve their goals to a similar degree that money could (think of the term “social capital”). I’ve noticed that people without much social experience, particularly with status interaction, often have an overly cynical outsider’s view of those sorts of interaction, which could lead to skewed estimate of costs and benefits.
Personally, I’ve found that many specific ways of acquiring social status or influence, even if not actively unethical, don’t fit my values or personality. Yet I feel a lot more comfortable rejecting them having tried them out, knowing that my arguments against them are based on empirical data, not on purely theoretical conceptions that may be subject to bias (e.g. self-deception, sour graps, slave morality).
You are worried about hypothetical people that say they are happy with their current social status when they really are not.
I’m worried about the truely less social being harangued to try and make them change themselves when they really don’t want to.
Until you recognise there is this group and include them in your plans for social change in some fashion (even if it is only identify and leave alone), then you are just making their lives more difficult (in a well meaning fashion).
I never said you have to have them or that all of them will be, merely if you are a top flight CEO or politician they will be drawn to you compared to if you are a bum. Thieves don’t steal from paupers. I’m an Agreeable guy and would not want to have to be saying no to them or be rude to them. And being on my guard against them would cramp my style as well.
My current social setting where I have a lot of help that I can provide and enjoy providing, I am sort out by people that try and curry my favour (E.g. by saying things I am interested in are interesting when they don’t understand them). Also people try to talk to me to be my friend, which annoys me when I am wanting to do something else. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind social interaction, I would just prefer it to be non-verbal, humourous, about a plan they have or based on shared intellectual interests.
Normally what they talk to me is about worries about the course and bitching. This I find I have nothing to add to really or interest in. Which probably colours my social interactions.
Yes. Or when they want things that higher social status can help them achieve, which they don’t realize or are in denial about.
To make an analogy again to money, there are lots of people who say that they don’t care much about money, or don’t like the process of making money, but who want things (e.g. possessions, getting out of debt, donating to charities, or whatever), that can most efficiently be achieved through having more money than they currently have. For instance, let’s say we have someone who is in $10,000 credit card debt, who would love to donate to SIAI, but who says that he isn’t very concerned with money. At face value at least, something isn’t matching up.
What I encourage is for such people to (a) do some soul-searching about what their actual goals are, (b) be realistic about what means it will take to achieve those goals, and (c) attempt to avoid bias in an evaluation of the costs and benefits of those means.
I would want my example person to assess the value of paying off his debt and donating to SIAI, and what he is going to need to do to achieve those goals. Making some money is not the only way to achieve them, but it is one of the most direct ways. As a result, I would encourage an analysis of the costs and benefits of seeking more money, vs. other means for achieving his goals.
If he can find other ways to achieve his goals, then great! What I’m just skeptical of is people sitting around with goals, and rejecting viable means for achieving those goals out of a biased and uninformed assessment of those means. I am also skeptical of people abandoning goals too early and then rationalizing that they don’t really want those things.
I am not worried about people being encouraged to avoid self-deception about their goals, and avoid bias in their cost-benefit analyses of the means for those goals. I feel that people who don’t need such encouragement will easily shrug it off, and the cost of misplaced advice to them will be low. Yet for people who need such encouragement, the cost of not receiving it is potentially quite high.
Of course, I want to encourage people to engage in that sort of scrutiny in ways that doesn’t make them feel “harangued.” Yet right now on LessWrong, my primary goal isn’t to be maximally persuasive to particular people; it’s to discuss the problem at a more abstract level. Once I understand the scope and prevalence of these particular sorts of problems better, and how to recognize when people might be falling prey to them, I will have a better sense of if/how I should attempt to persuade people to change their thinking.
I do recognize this group:
I have no objection to people deciding that there is higher marginal benefit in devoting their next unit of effort towards something other than social skills/status/influence. I just advocate that this decision be based on a minimally-biased analysis of the nature of social interaction, and of the costs and benefits of developing in those areas.
Unfortunately, people who are relatively unsocialized and inexperienced in status interaction often seem to have certain biases about how social interaction works, which are difficult to fix without more social experience (see pjeby’s excellent post about the differences in perception of social interaction between “cats” and “dogs”).
In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attractiveness, social skills, and social status, according to their own values. The marginal benefit of putting in a small amount of effort is pretty high for people who are initially deficient in those areas. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit, such as making small tweaks to body language and posture, wearing clothes that fit properly, doing something with one’s hair, and avoiding putting oneself down or overly apologizing for things.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
It is not just that. I get annoyed and tune out when anyone bitches and moans. Even people I like otherwise. Especially when they are trying to create ingroup outgroup divisions due to bruised egos (or at least that is how I interpret it).
Mating is the social arena where a modest improvement can pay off (if you are going for the monogamy route). A slight improvement might also work if the dating scene is not very competitive where you are. But if we are in the hyper competitive era where only the very attractive men get all the girls, then it won’t work very well. It is also the least likely arena for you to get hangers-on or require you to do unethical actions to get ahead, so from this point of view good for geeks.
So I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with this. Improving the ability of geeks to work in business and politics I think would get more push back due to ethics such as anti-advertising, truth-telling and simply having to spend a long time to get any good at it due to its competitive nature.
As others have pointed out, this seems highly exaggerated and doesn’t seem to match the current situation. Evidence for whether we are?
I don’t have evidence myself, I was merely exploring a hypothetical.
Nitpick: Yes they do. At least, a certain level of thief does. They’re easy targets.
Power to build vs. power to get
This is reminding me of Westerfeld’s Uglies, a pretty good science fiction novel about a society where everyone gets plastic surgery at age 16 to make them extremely beautiful.
As might be expected in a novel, there’s an arbitrarily added catch to the beauty, but would just having the surgery be standard be a bad idea?
The novel was inspired by Raphael Carter’s “”‘Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation’ by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin”″, a short story which explores the implication of people having the option of not noticing whether people are beautiful or not.
Thanks for the recommendations.
It does seem like there are tree options to reduce beauty-based inequalities:
Make less beautiful people more beautiful (which may indeed involve routine surgery in the future).
Make the beautiful people less beautiful (e.g. the Handicapper General).
Make people care about beauty less (feasible in the future, but only partially effective in the present since so much of perceptions of beauty seem biologically predisposed).
I support #1 in the present, and some combination of #1 and #3 in the future, when we have more effective ways of changing people’s preferences.
It might also be possible in future to mimic the effect of options 1 and 2 by altering one’s own perception of who is beautiful and who isn’t. (For example, instead of handicapping beautiful people, I could get my brain reprogrammed to see as ugly the people others see as beautiful.) This is like #3 in that it’s about altering someone other than the beautiful/non-beautiful people themselves, but different in that one changes what one sees as beautiful instead of how much one cares about beauty.
Some would suggest this gives you all sorts of practical benefits.
With just a little elaboration on the relevant bias at work this would make a fantastic top level post. This insight in particular made me laugh:
Thanks for sharing your list Jennifer
If you’re interested in a few people’s theories about self deception (perhaps on a more philosophical level), including an entry by Tom Schelling (though it wasn’t about self deception as much), you might like The Multiple Self
Kathy Kolbe’s The Conative Connection might be a better view of style conflicts.
A summary
Thanks a lot for the link to CGT and Sprague-Grundy theory. It’s a beautiful area of math that I once knew in detail, but somehow managed to forget completely.
My way of saying thanks: take a look at Ford circles.
Great article. Thanks so much for linking to it. I interpreted the article to be about dealing with anxiety, though, not about learning skills from declarative knowledge. And yes, it’s relevant for social situations as well, especially:
And the courage to socialize incompetently is a huge part of what it means to have social skills.
I think it’s an article about not finding a way to deal with anxiety.
Wow. That linked article is killing me softly. I wish he had a general solution to that problem expressable in declarative knowledge—I’ve never played Go, and certainly don’t plan to now, because I know exactly what he’s talking about.
You don’t need to control others to get what you want out of an interaction. In fact, letting go of control is a key step. It also paradoxically increases your influence (in non-toxic environments.) Reading Morendil’s reply seven times is recommended. That was golden.
I do happen to meet that criteria, but there is more than one challenge that I (and most people to various degrees) had to overcome when starting conversations with random people, some of which required simple behavioral changes while some required fundamental changes in beliefs.
Is changing your beliefs a skill that you have developed? For example, did Juggler’s influence change the way you think about social dynamics? Do you have the ability to actively question and update your model of yourself and your environment based on introspection and self awareness? I’m not making a snide insult here. Developing that skill is central to how I overcame those difficulties and, in various guises, what many social skills and personal development gurus will recommend. It does involve asking ourselves questions that we really don’t want to hear.
There’s the root of the problem. You can’t develop socially if you’re trapped at home. And make no mistake: if you can’t reliably get to a city or public transit hub without calling in a favor, then you are very much trapped. A small town that you can’t routinely leave is a toxic environment, and you need to escape it by any means necessary. Free housing is not a favor if it’s in a location that destroys your life.
Wow, I didn’t know small towns were “toxic environments” that were the death knell for social skills. Next time, mention that sooner.
The “that you can’t routinely leave” part seems more important than the “small town” part, to me—it’s a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.
You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don’t have RL opportunities to do so. It’s not perfect—the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can’t learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it’s more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.
Insert “can be a” … “if it does not provide an acceptable social network” and I’ll have to agree.
I don’t know, but I put it back up to zero for exactly the reason you gave for considering it useful, and I did so before reading the comment I’m replying to.
Thank you, well said.
Well, full disclosure: I’m a really extroverted person, so I apologize if I may be trivializing the art of small talk. That’s definitely not my intention, since I want to make it clear that it’s a skill that is to be learned. Also, the conversational nuances are a bit different if you’re chatting up someone of the opposite sex versus just making small talk with a random stranger. I’m only talking about the latter, I don’t claim to have any helpful advice regarding the former. ;) I’m assuming that’s what the “captive situation” thing refers to.
Generally, people like to talk. Sometimes they don’t. You might be a brilliant conversationalist and run into someone who’s pissed off and doesn’t want to talk, so you shouldn’t take that personally. You can pick up cues about people as to how amenable they are to conversation; if they’re avoiding all eye contact with everyone in the area, that’s a bad sign. If you make eye contact and smile, that’s a good sign. If you’re not practiced at small talk, you start with the smiley people. Practice talking to people who are good at conversation; observe the way they steer conversations and what their mannerisms are.
If you’re extroverted by nature, you probably have no experience in making yourself extroverted, and so are unqualified to give advice. You can teach by example, though.
I notice this pattern a lot. Naturally talented singers can’t teach you how to sing because they don’t know it. If you don’t perceive the obstacles that your students claim to face, you have no business teaching, no matter how good you are at the activity itself. A lot of harmful advice to introverts (like the dreaded “just be yourself”) comes from people such as you. I say that as a former introvert who successfully changed :-)
Yeah, I didn’t realize I was entering into a discussion on how to acquire extroversion! I admit, I’m unqualified there. But I definitely do have experience, and advice to give, on how to steer conversation toward interesting topics for both individuals interested in having a conversation, which is what I thought we were talking about in the first place. :)
What cousin_it said, times a thousand. Harsh, but true.
Ability to do something does not imply ability to teach it. It just means you’ve reached Level 1. Until you can imagine what it was like to be without your skill, and the mental steps you went through going out of that state, you will be forever giving advice that assumes away the problem.
It helps if student and teacher are both clear on what the subject being taught actually is in the first place, and which level everybody is starting at. The fact remains that just because you’re not good at making small talk doesn’t mean that the opportunity isn’t there, everywhere. Either way, in order to get better, you will have to practice, regardless of how difficult it is to get to the point of even being able to practice. Kaj Sotala’s post wasn’t about how to talk to random strangers, but how to get to interesting conversations with someone you’re already talking to. It’s a bit unfair to accuse people who are here to help with that issue of not being helpful on a related, but different one.
Perhaps, but your advice required the ability to successfully start conversations, since you were suggesting to talk to random people:
It’s true that practice is necessary, but not just any practice will suffice. And following the practice recommendations you gave would not be helpful unless the problem were mostly solved to begin with.
Well, the entire topic of the original post was contingent upon already being in a situation of engaging in small talk with someone. The LW meet-up, for example. If you are already able to start conversation with someone, but wanting to skill up in steering the conversation into interesting avenues, Kaj Sotala’s post should be very helpful. Being able to make small talk does not at all imply skill in having interesting conversation.
The Visiting Fellows program is in California, which has a different weather than my native Finland. (There should possibly have been some intermediate node like “California” between “Weather” and “Visiting Fellows”.)