Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.
"Be yourself" is not wrong, but it's not specific enough.
You can be perfectly authentic, but that doesn't mean being socially uncalibrated.
Get good at being sociable, then blend that with your personal tastes and preferences.
I thought "be yourself" was fine until I grew up and learned I was just being rude to most people and called myself introverted when I didn't make friends.
"Be yourself" works when you're awesome already (and keep performing).
So it's not useful advice for most that need to build yourself up to something that performs decently, nicely or awesomely (the most you can).
And Fake it till you make it is an awful expression (encourages posing and faking is legitimate when is not by definition) to communicate that you just need practice to obtain a level of performance.
What are you trying to make though? You're pretending to want the same things the people you think you need to fit in with want, but if you don't actually want those things, what point is there to be in a competition to get them?
Social skills is moslty compromises. It’s kind of a protocol that signals that you’re not unfriendly, and if you’re part of a community, that you’re ready to pitch in, when someone or the entire community needs help.
Surely it would be simpler to identify who in the community actually needs help, help them, and gain a reputation thereby? Honest signalling works well among humans, in my experience.
it may be. But how are you going to identify who needs help? And if that someone is willing to accept help (pride and/or shame can be powerful blocker)?
Humans are social creatures. If you truly don't have the same desires as most - friendship, companionship, even career gain - then sure, it's purposeless. But why are you even in this thread then? If you clearly are actively dis- interested in this topic. Otherwise, skydhash is correct - it's about compromise.
Part of being truly social (and being emotionally mature) is to understand and apply the difference between manipulation and being mindful about behavior and speech. Same as honesty - honesty doesn't need to be brutal honesty. One can be authentic without being hurtful.
>Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation
Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The actual meta-skill that is being developed by maturing emotionally and using soft skills appropriately (for the benefit of the situation and the participants, not for manipulation) is tact. Same as how people learn to apply just a little pressure when handling glassware, and a lot of pressure when lifting a heavy weight.
> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.
I think if someone is already not taken by any of their inner things entirely, then they are already doing this regulation thing. The social skills that are described in the article (and soft skills in general) are just a next step on the same path, focusing on getting along, rather than completely internal regulation.
I too have wildly different area of interest, level of interest, and approach to things than most people around me do. Soft skills helped me to connect anyways, for at least two reasons:
1. With them I can approach, and connect to the interest of others.
2. I can explain to people my interest, and make it more interesting to them as well.
Also, these are not for all time, all the time. The healthy thing is to vary the guardedness in different contexts. The flexibility in this is a skill in itself, and again, something that connects to, and can raise, emotional intelligence.
There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.
Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".
Yes, that seems part of it, as long as all you know is "yourself without social skills". With social skills, and leaving some of that "yourself" behind, you will discover that don't just change, or reduce yourself, in a social setting, but become more yourself as a whole. The very definition of "yourself" changes, broadens because of this added experience.
> All openings and responses must be calculated and faked
Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
If you just blurt out anything with no filter, that doesn't make you authentic, it usually makes you an asshole.
Not all thoughts are productive, many are bad and many are stupid. You should delete those or revise them. Not only when talking to other people, but even to yourself.
I can tell myself that I'm dumb or I'm fat or whatever, but that isn't true and just because I thought it doesn't mean I have to internalize it. No, I filter those thoughts, I tell myself "that's not true". Over time, I think them less.
Your own brain is not reliable. It does not operate on truth, or what is or is not productive. So tune it. Not for the sake of others, but for yourself too.
Being an asshole to others is bad, but being an asshole to yourself is arguably worse. The goal is to, overtime, build better thought procedses and mental models. Not to fake it.
> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.
But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?
You can solve this by reapplying attribution elsewhere.
Instead of blaming the methods / soft skills / whatever, which can be used for good and bad, blame the people who misuse these tools for personal gain: politicians, salespeople, conmen, pua, what have you.
Which is fun and great if you came out as a happy cool human.
If you made it through the weird unadjusted side without any gimmick you just loose.
No one has to force you to stay what your surroundings made you. It's not your personality it's just a reflection and you can change it and make it better for you by adjusting and reflecting.
Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.
You severely underestimate the biological side of things regarding social interaction. Neurodivergent people are what we are not just bc "surroundings made us so"
Then I don't understand what you are arguing about. If you're neurodivergent, you would always require self awareness and masking, faked as op rightfully stated. You could never natural, no matter what circumstances were.
Changing is possible even if you're neurodivergent, but you'll always have some barriers that neurotypicals don't. To interact with them, you will generally need some degree of masking.
After COVID, I stopped caring and trying to fake being a normal person, and choose just to be me, alone.
I wasn't good at trying to be normal, and it's so much nicer to be free to not bother to make the effort and not be me. But I have no friends or good relationships with family (who don't understand or tolerate who I am).
I think OP is thinking about covering the sphere of directions in 3D space, not just directions in a 2D plane. No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area, so any finite amount you draw will cover zero percent of the area of the two-dimensional sphere surface.
> No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area
The object doesn’t matter, using pencil as the example was what threw you off - it’s not about what the pencil “draws”. Consider a thin cylinder, or rectangular prism, or just a stick - if you spin it around, its endpoints trace out a circle whose diameter is the length of the stick. You can move and spin such an object in another way where the shape traced out by its endpoints has smaller area than that circle.
> They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise.
Static site generation and Github pages. Start with the Jekyll generator Github supports out of the box and roll your own if you need something it doesn't provide.
So you're saying that it's naive to suppose that everybody being much smarter than they are now would transform society, because any wide-scale societal change requires ongoing social cooperation between the many average-intelligence people society currently consists of?
Here’s a simpler way to put it: intelligence and social cooperation are not the same thing. Being good at math or science doesn’t mean you understand how to organize complex political groups, and never has.
People tend to think their special gift is what the world needs, and academically-minded smart people (by that I mean people that define their self-worth by intelligence level) are no different.
Yes, because you need to spend a lot of time doing social organization and thinking about it to get very good at it, just like you need to spend a lot of time doing math or science and thinking about it to get very good at it. And then you need to pick up patterns, respond well to unexpected situations and come up with creative solutions on top of that, which requires intelligence. If you look at the people who are the best at doing complex political organization, they'll probably all have above-average intelligence.
I don’t agree at all. Charismatic leaders tend to have both “in born” talent and experience gained over time. It’s not something that comes from sitting in a room and thinking about how to be a good leader.
Sure, some level of intelligence is required, which may be above average. But that is a necessary requirement, not a sufficient one. Raw intelligence is only useful to a certain extent here, and exceeding certain limits may actually be detrimental.
When it comes to "charismatic leaders" I like this quote from Frank Herbert:
"“I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: "May be dangerous to your health." One of the most dangerous presidents we had in this century was John Kennedy because people said "Yes Sir Mr. Charismatic Leader what do we do next?" and we wound up in Vietnam. And I think probably the most valuable president of this century was Richard Nixon. Because he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example.”
Edit: Maybe what we really need to worry about is an AI developing charisma....
> Edit: Maybe what we really need to worry about is an AI developing charisma....
That is the most immediate worry, by a wide margin. It seems to be dangerously charismatic even before it got any recognizable amount of "intelligence".
Not really a good example, honestly. Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam was the culmination of the previous two decades of events (Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Taiwan standoff, etc.), and not just a crusade he charismatically fooled everyone into joining. If anything, had Nixon won in 1960 (and defeated Kennedy), it’s possible that the war would have escalated more quickly.
Yeah - I really meant to only copy the first part of the quote - I agree that it is a bit unfair to Kennedy who I think did as much as anyone to stop the Cuban Missile Crisis becoming a hot war.
Someone with IQ 160 might have trouble empathizing with what IQ 100 people find convincing or compelling and not do that well with an average IQ 100 population. What if they were dealing with an average IQ 145 population that might be much closer to being on the same wavelength with them to begin with and tried to do social coordination now?
I guess it’s possible, but again I don’t think empathy and intelligence are correlated. Extremely intelligent people don’t seem any better at navigating the social spheres of high-intelligence spaces than regular people do in regular social spaces. If anything, they’re worse.
All of this is just an overvaluation of intelligence, in my opinion, and largely comes from arrogance.
The prisoner's dilemma is a well known example of how rationality fails. To overcome requires something more than intelligence, it requires a predisposition to cooperation, to trust, in faith. Some might say that is what seperates Wisdon from Knowledge.
Why will it never be? If the adequate intelligence is what something like 0.1 % of the populace naturally has, seems like there's a pretty big difference between that level of intelligence being stuck at 0.1 % of the populace and it being available from virtual assistants that can be mass-produced and distributed to literally everyone on Earth.
Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Stephen King's stuff up until the early 90s (I later found out the point where the books turned boring was when he'd stopped using drugs), short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and The Destroyer pulp novels, particularly after Will Murray started writing them.
You could call it an incorrect answer if there was a correct answer to division by zero, but it's undefined instead with no correct answer. Sounds pedantic, but in math pedantic stuff matters, and apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math, https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/
> apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math,
You really can't though.
> If x/0 is a value, then the theorem should extend to c=0, too.” This is wrong. The problem is not that 1/0 was undefined. The problem was that our proof uses the multiplicative inverse, and there is no multiplicative inverse of 0. Under our modified definition of division, we still don’t have 0⁻, which means our proof still does not work for dividing by zero. We still need the condition. So it is not a theorem that a * (b / 0) = b * (a / 0).
This is like saying there's nothing wrong with defining 2 + 2 = 5, and addition will still be associative because (a + b) + c still = a + (b + c) unless b = 2. Like, sure, you can redefine division to not have the normal properties that it does, and then argue that your redefinition is sound because the theorems only apply to things that have the normal properties of added numbers. But that's not what + means!
If these people really believed the arguments they're making, they would actually define x/0 = 5, or 19, or something on those lines.
Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning? You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero". Then everyone just goes on to do math as usual, unless there's something inconsistent in the new formalism that makes mathematical reasoning break down.
> Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning?
I'm saying that's a false distinction, because as soon as you have that deviation from expected meaning, you have valid theorems that silently stop being valid and your formal system quickly breaks down. And while you can redefine your way out of each individual instance of this, everything you redefine just means more and more theorems that don't have their normal meaning which in turn means more things that you have to redefine.
> You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero".
This would be a much better approach, because then existing theorems that use or refer to division are obviously not necessarily true of zivision and if you want to use those theorems to talk about zivision then you have to check (and prove) that they're actually valid first.
It's more "nobody else is interested" than "it's not out in the open", but I've made my own structured data format implemented as a Rust serializer https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm and am using it for a growing collection of command-line tools for managing personal notes written as outline files https://github.com/rsaarelm/idm-tools and to run a static site generator https://github.com/rsaarelm/blog-engine . I'm also writing a game that uses IDM as the data serialization format.
Idea for the format was that you can write structured data with a really minimal syntax if you have an external type schema running the parsing, and the syntax emerged from the line-and-indentation based outline note files I'd started writing for myself. It took some months of work and planning and a couple rewrites to get the core IDM library working right. The tools and site generator were simple and straightforward in comparison.
