Cayenne

Karma: 403

Cayenne May 4, 2011, 5:29 AM
0 points
in reply to: JohnH’s comment on: On Being Okay with the Truth
The only normal thing is change, perhaps?

Our cultures may be ‘normal’, but as you point out human culture is incredibly diverse. I wonder if we’re not seeing the beginnings of a major cultural shift in the US as well.

Edit—please disregard this post

Cayenne May 4, 2011, 5:20 AM
12 points
on: A Delayed Epiphany on Motivation
It might be beneficial for people to articulate what it is about the things they like to do that makes them like it. Perhaps one person’s motivation can spark something similar in others.

I enjoy cooking, and the act of taking ingredients and turning them into food is pleasurable, especially when I cook for others. It seems almost magical even though I know exactly how it’s done, possibly even because I know. My motivations are the anticipation of the taste of the food at the end, and when cooking for others the feedback I get on my cooking.

Edit—please disregard this post

Cayenne May 4, 2011, 3:34 AM
4 points
on: Ethics and rationality of suicide
I’ve been diagnosed with chronic major depression as well, and I find that I agree with most of what was said in the linked argument. In the last several years I’ve gotten to be less bad, and I do have hope of a sort that things will eventually be bearable or even good. However… if easy euthanasia was available, I would have used it as soon as I hit majority or earlier if possible.

I don’t know how many other people are like me in this regard. I don’t know what the future will bring. I have hope, and sometimes I hate that fact.

Edit—please disregard this post

Cayenne May 2, 2011, 9:43 PM
2 points
in reply to: EchoingHorror’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
I highly recommend deodorants but I think that scents should be much more subtle. I’m fairly sensitive to perfumes and fragrances, and getting a nose-full of Axe is like being hit with a club. If I can smell someone’s perfume/deodorant/aftershave/cologne from more than a meter away then I’ll usually try to avoid getting any closer than that. I have met others with the same sensitivity.

This advice is totally personal opinion, not a rule of any kind.

Market research reflects people’s preferences better than social memes.

I think that it reflects people’s exploitable biases more than preferences in a lot of cases. The marketer’s job is to convince you that you need his produce more than you need your money, and when it’s true it’s good… but a lot of times it isn’t.

Cayenne May 2, 2011, 4:43 AM
0 points
in reply to: Prismattic’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
A good technique is to not concentrate on any one feature, but keep looking at their face. I don’t mean defocus, but instead focus alternately on different features.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 11:22 PM
1 point
in reply to: KrisC’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
You don’t have to achieve the most optimal fluency. I think that learning basic social interaction is much like learning typing, in that it reduces the amount of time you will spend performing tasks and correcting mistakes related to it by many times the time spent learning over your lifetime. Becoming locally-optimized may very well be good enough for most people.

Avoidance works well some of the time, but when it fails it’s nice to have at least a small amount of ability to fall back on.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 8:39 PM
−2 points
on: Harry Sue and The Methods of Rationality
Given its popularity on FF.net, you should be able to empirically state that whatever it is about Mary-Sue-ishness that people dislike he has avoided including. Isn’t that really enough? Most of the people reading it are doing so for fun, after all. You might feel differently personally, or perhaps you wandered into a trigger without realizing it, but people are enjoying it.

I don’t downvote for anything, so I won’t downvote this.

Edit—please disregard this post

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 8:19 PM
1 point
in reply to: KrisC’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
I remember there being a communication rule of thumb: ‘accept sloppy input, but transmit strict output’. It would be nice if all people were more permissive, but in any case having to conform to the output protocol/social norms is desirable.

...I know that in a lot of cases the rules seem unnecessarily complex when you can get people to articulate them at all, and having to learn this isn’t easy. I wish there was an easy way to fix this. I was rather socially awkward as a child, and really only started learning how to handle myself socially after I reached majority. It involved a lot of trial and error, and frustration.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 8:00 PM
1 point
in reply to: playtherapist’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
Perhaps watching people taking acting lessons might help? Those people are trying to learn body language, vocalization, and effective communication, so seeing what they do when they get it right may help with learning how to read others.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 5:45 PM
0 points
in reply to: Dorikka’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
Edited in.

I wonder if it might not be worth it to try to make a wiki out of this, like ‘writing the unwritten laws of social interaction’ or something. It would be a huge project. I don’t really consider myself an expert in these things, just someone willing to try to articulate the rules as I see them.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 5:16 PM
1 point
in reply to: Dorikka’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
(I may try too hard sometimes to not manipulate people. I think that it’s possible that I may use manipulative tactics without realizing it myself, so I worry about things like this. I might be persuading people that the proposition ‘what I am saying is something you value highly enough to pay close attention to me’ is true, for example.)

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 5:11 PM
3 points
in reply to: XFrequentist’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
Learning to interpret body language and avoiding transmitting unintentional signals are very good skills to have. Attempting to then manipulate someone else into trusting you with any of the more common PUA techniques like anchoring or mirroring I view as dark arts. I have read about PUA, though it was to be able to identify any techniques being used on me and not to practice them myself.

tl;dr: Studying the techniques seems useful. Actually using them to manipulate is Dark Arts.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 5:01 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
This is true. If the other person moves close enough that you end up wanting to back away, this might be what is at play.

Note that it is natural for people to move slightly closer to each other in an active conversation as well.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 4:59 PM
2 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
You may want to try to write one down as you say it, getting the structure of your speech onto the paper, and then look for annoying patterns. A couple of the patterns that I’ve found the most annoying are multiple digressions and narcissism.

Multiple digressions can be easy to make as you realize that there is a part of your story that depends on information the other person won’t have, and so you digress for a moment to fill them in, and then realize that that too requires more information, and so forth. Imagine the other person in the conversation as a stack machine with a very small stack limit and a very low memory size, where too many digressions will overwrite either the point you were trying to make or even what the conversation was about at all. The best thing to do in this case is eliminate unnecessary information in the story to simplify it.

An example would be something like: “I had a roommate Steve, that oh wait, did I ever tell you about Steve? Well, (digression of length). Wait, what was I going to say?” The proper way to fix this would be something like: “I had a roommate that used to do , and used to happen every time.”

Narcissism is harder to deal with. All of your stories are of course ones that you are in, but focusing solely on yourself when telling them can turn people off. My advice is to avoid stories like this unless they are very on-topic, and even then try to emphasize what was happening around you more than your actions.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 4:44 PM
3 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
You might try to add nonverbal cues such as leaning forward or a slight hand gesture to draw attention to yourself when you have something to say, before the current conversational chunk is done. This will help warn others that you would like to speak. Watch other people in the conversation to see if you can identify other cues, since people probably are more receptive to cues that they use themselves.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 4:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
This is one of the things I have planned for my IA meetups, when the random walk takes us to a crowded area.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 9:25 AM
3 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
Ah, I seem to have conflated your argument with the one that you linked to, referenced on Overcoming Bias, that suggests ‘sans douche’ days. For someone trying to internalize the practice of being clean, skipping days seems detrimental. I didn’t write this for the people that already know these things, but rather for the people that find them a mystery.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 9:09 AM
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness

I’m not sure this is helpful (or news), but I’ve been wondering if problems with “natural” social skill aren’t due to exceptionally bright people letting their intellect interfere with what might run somewhat normally if it weren’t being looked at through an electron microscope.

Does this version flow better?

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 8:34 AM
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
I’m not arguing effectiveness, simply ease of use. A simple daily routine is much more resilient to schedule interruptions, and it’s important to have this be as easy as possible.

Cayenne May 1, 2011, 7:39 AM
3 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Mitigating Social Awkwardness
I didn’t say that it was the person that had rancid oils that was sensitive.

Using the words ‘soap junkie’ seems like a deliberate attempt to reframe this issue. We do have hundreds of millions of people that do shower and use soap daily, and have for years, without their skin peeling off.

I would rather see people err on the side of stinking less, and this is easier to do with soap.