My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

Look at the first two subheadings:

> 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person

> 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game

The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.

I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).

Maybe the takeaway I'd try to give is to read this as an interesting peek into someone's mind, but not necessarily great advice for anyone else's situation or a healthy way to view relationships.

It was less sleazy than I expected from the title. It actually had a lot of points about being genuine, being a good listener, showing respect to other people's opinions, admitting when you're wrong, being sincere, and so on. Decent advice, really.

A side benefit of reading it is you learn how to spot when other people are insincerely trying to use the tricks in the book against you. Once you see it, it's hard not to miss.

If I take a helicopter view of the main themes they make sense, but I will admit feeling a little sleazy by reading the book.

Reading is subjective however, so I’m glad it didn’t make you feel this way.

This is consistent with my conclusion above: This post should be read as one person's retrospective, not as a guide for connecting with people. By the end, he realizes that playing social interactions like games and putting on personas that target other people's mental state is not healthy.

At least with something like adultery, there's a pretty obvious ill consequence of someone finding out what's going on behind the scenes. But if I looked behind the curtains of someone like OP and found out that the reason they're so charming is because they thought about people a bunch: I couldn't be burdened to care.

> I was going around dangling the possibility of emotional connection indiscriminately, ignoring the fact that it’s entirely reasonable to interpret this as flirtation.

I am still struggling to understand the way in which many people naturally form casual connections with others. In this example, a casual connection might be a hookup or a makeout session without it turning into a relationship. In another case from their article, it may be exchanging some personal stories at a house party without it turning into a four hour ordeal, or following up and developing a close, meaningful friendship. I perceive a lot of confusion here - and in my own life - about personal wants and needs being met, meeting someone else’s needs, where one’s personal boundaries lie, and how we effectively communicate them - or not.

In consent-forward spaces you get a lot of neurodivergent people using explicit verbal negotiation and agreement on everything, but this is a consent style that very much may not land well for people outside of one of those subcultures. Therapy and other trauma-informed modalities carry similar problems. It’s fine and great to develop subculture norms for the people participating in them, but it may not help them navigate the rest of the world. And yet, I’m not sure what else can be done. My social development mirrors the author’s, and I’m still unsatisfied with my results, even though I have more meaningful connections now than I used to, so this is not all without merit. It may just be the best that some people can do.

A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Except because they are not conscious about it, we give them a pass. One of the characteristics of autistic-spectrum individuals is that they must make a conscious effort to achieve goals that are achieved unconsciously by most of us. If we prevent such individuals from learning all that rarely-written-down stuff consciously because it seems "distasteful" to us, then we are disadvantaging such individuals socially.

I see why you'd think this, but I disagree. In my opinion it's two sides of the same coin, and the key moral question is whether you use those skills in a moral way. I've seen both well-meaning and charismatic people and not so well-meaning charismatic people, and at the end of the day I believe that charisma is a powerful tool, but it's not fundamentally good or bad.

Social interactions have always felt like a game whose rules I don't intuitively understand, and I've always envied people like my wife who handle it much more naturally and fluidly. The same way that I'm comfortable and capable in analytical settings, they navigate social settings with just as much finesse. I've personally spent a big chunk of my adult life trying to learn to navigate social interactions more comfortably and more intuitively, so I can see some parallels with what the author writes about. (For the record, I'm neurotypical, just awkward.)

For most people I don't think it's about charming, manipulating, or gaming social interactions, I think it's about wanting to make connections and friends because that leads to being happier.

Many people hear music and can put together some moves without thinking about it, others have to deconstruct, learn, and rebuild... it's still dancing either way.

the person was so bad in thing, and had to build relevant part of the brain manually. that part you got automagically.

there is no difference except awarness. over time he will loose awarness too.

That’s all the same thing. What is being friends with people other than essentially manipulating them into liking you by being likable and a good friend?

What’s important is why you’re doing it.

Though the "God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence" was funny and I can relate...

but otherwise, I wouldn't want to live in a society where people are secretly hating you but "speaking ill of no man" a.k.a. "not criticizing."

I liked the book Winning by Jack Welch more, which advocates for "candor," and is essentially the opposite of How to Win Friends.

If someone is influencing (actually) other folks can take it or leave it, and someone is willing to own it - because it’s something they actually believe.

Manipulation is non optional, and if rejected causes attacks of various forms because people are doing it not because they believe it/it will help the ‘target’, but because they are trying to extract something or control the target.

It’s the difference between ‘follow me if you’d like’ and ‘do what I want you to do or else’.

Doing it on purpose - even if you don’t have bad intentions - still feels selfish, you make them like you for your own benefit first and foremost as you want them to be your friends.

Jack Welch the sociopath?? Or is there another author with that same name?

I think this is a really interesting question. Speaking just from my perspective and experience, casual connections can form naturally from the basis of having no specific intention to connect. You simply give your attention to the other person without any preconceived needs or wants. Maybe the interaction is brief and superficial, maybe it goes somewhere deeper, who knows. But either way you get to experience the real, rubber-hits-the-road connection of being present with the other.

An important understanding is that it's possible to genuinely connect without being entangled in any way.

He got away with “candor” because he was at the top and anyone who disagreed with him was removed.

Honestly any self help books from people in unique positions in society trying to tell the common man how to improve always read to me as “my top 10 tips for winning the lottery: tip one buy a winning lottery ticket”

Not criticizing is about - you see someone slipping don’t call them stupid just move on.

Like if someone makes a typo in comment here on HN, no one writes how stupid they are because they might be on the phone having autocorrect breaking their typing. You don’t really show off how smart you are pointing out small mistakes.

Hating someone requires that they somehow wronged you. There was nothing in the book about being nice for someone who is swearing at you or punched you in the face.

People influencing others are trying to manipulate their emotions or thoughts into feeling a certain way about something...

We can look to the definitions themselves...

influence: the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.

manipulation: control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.

influence is literally there in the definition of manipulation

It's pretty much in the title of the book already: it's an ironic title because "influence people" sounds like a shady goal to have, but the book is fully focused on self improvement without ulterior motives. It makes constant reference to authenticity, for instance.

Just because something can be used for nefarious purposes doesn't mean that it shouldn't be studied or learned.

Why do I get the impression that this book is very much in line with Charlie Sheen's personal philosophy?

Almost all honest signals are about a similar tradeoff.

To really get the best out of this book, you need to realize that it was written in 1936.

I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much without regularly having this fact top of mind while reading it.

90 years ago, think about how different the world was then. This is before WWII!

> There are two reactions that one could have to the previous section. “Wow, that’s cool, how he developed the ability to create a lot of deep connections in this lonely world.” And: “that is a weird and creepy thing to want, sounds kind of vampiric.” I believe that both reactions are correct in some proportion.

> Here is the thing about going around the world in a state of emotional openness and presence. Many people are hungry for that kind of attention. They might dream of getting it from a parent, or a mentor, or a lover, but might never receive it. Maybe never in their lives. And if you just walk up and give it to them, for free — but you aren’t actually interested in a deep relationship — then they might, rightfully, feel manipulated, or at least confused. You are writing them emotional checks you can’t cash.

This post actually kind of blows my mind.

Somehow you feel like someone who’s socially awkward would not just go on a 4 hours super deep conversation, as some form of experiment.

I wonder what this person is like irl. I did like this piece.

Your proposed course of action would leave me with no friends or relationships.

To me, the phrase "relationships take effort" - means literally that. Because every single interaction takes effort.

Perhaps this is one of those "introvert vs extrovert" things.

Manipulation is non-consensual and controlling influence, yes. That part is important.

Just like the difference between a house and a jail is essentially if you are being forced to be there against your will or not.

They both are structures people live in and that provide a degree of structure and protection, but one is generally considered okay or even good, and the other is considered pretty bad and terrible. Largely because one you can choose or do things to change, the other you get stuck in against your will and the environment is outside your control.

Most ‘influencers’ also cross pretty strongly into manipulation many times, so using the title is about as accurate as ‘Democratic Peoples Republic of z’.

When you have a real indication of dealing with a master manipulator, it's very understandable that you should use an abundance of caution. That's probably an instinct in us at this level.

Of course everyone is at least a little aware that they're putting on a bit of a ruse with their public persona, but that needs to be tethered to some level of authenticity or you'll just be sending out Patrick Bateman vibes.

That was when he was in his, as he accurately describes it, performative NPR phase of reading difficult modernist novels and having opinions about Barthes or whatever. I found him very very smart, as he clearly is, and also incredibly obnoxious (though I was obnoxious too). Part of that was because it was extraordinarily apparent how contrived his persona was to be superficially charming, and part of that was jealousy; then and now I wish that I were so smart and so charming, superficially or otherwise.

Of course, in many ways making friends is all much easier than either I or the author was making it out to be. But I suspect we were both burdened with some unrealized oddities, and, unable to directly identify or compensate for them, sought other, more elaborate ways to fit in.

No, that’s not a friendship. That’s just a relationship built on insecurity. You can only hold up the facade for so long. Imagine manipulating a romantic interest in to liking you, or vice versa. That’s not a very nice thing to do. It never ends well.

It's okay to dazzle people though. I'm not sure you have to make it a core part of your personality but like, maybe as a hobby, a little razzledazzle here and there.

    > When you have a real indication of dealing with a master manipulator

If you're reasonably socially skilled, you can usually see it coming a mile away and react accordingly, but what gets you in trouble is the not-so-common case where you actually fall for it, since the consequences can be quite bad. None of this is describing ordinary social interaction, tough; these are really two entirely separate topics, and there's little reason to conflate them.

If you dig through the weeds of it you can argue just about everything we do socially is manipulation. We are social because we're social animals and will die without help from other humans (well, particularly thousands of years ago). At the end of the day, we are nice to people to get things from them that we need - food, shelter, knowledge, strength. It's always been like that. But because it makes us feel fuzzy and good, apparently that's not manipulation, that's being nice.

I was terrible at this stuff until I learned how to do it, working in a customer facing tech support call centre.

I actually like being part of society and don’t need to feed delusions of grandeur to feel content.

Also I want to point out how I referenced his opinion as being like tips on winning the lottery. Getting to a unique position of power like that requires so much luck and other input that you have no control over that I view the “advice” on how to achieve it as useless and just the result of those people grappling with the cognitive dissonance of thinking they got to where they are on their own vs the actual reality

I knew a guy that was such a f-up but he was so easy to get along with he just floated his way to upper mgmt anywhere he went. Then inevitable got fired and simply floated his way to upper mgmt at the next company. Meanwhile many highly effective tech people get held back on promotions for being "too realistic"(usually pronounced as "negative") at least thats my life experience.

I think emulating things that a serious person discards is a step backwards.

I.e. biology gets what it wants... We want to survive, mother nature wants us to survive, society wants to survive.

I am absolutely not suggesting that outright jerkish behaviour is acceptable (although to suggest jerks have no social success is probably untrue; plenty of people who are attracted to jerks). I am arguing that if there was no personal advantage whatsoever to being social and nice to people, we wouldn't do it. We'd be lone animals, spread out across the land rather than concentrated in towns and cities. There's a spectrum of selfish behaviour, right? We are somewhere in the middle because it's advantageous to be.

It is also autism vs psychopathy. Patrick Bateman is nowhere close to someone autistic trying to learn those socially successful behaviours. Patrick Bateman is a terrible human being not because they are inauthentic, he is a terrible human being because of the acts he did and wanted to do.

I think sometimes this is when we find our way to the middle of two relatively simple drives: "be an orthodox group member/ avoid being a social outcast" and "avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance / admitting hypocrisy".

If there aren't immediate consequences for inaction (especially if there ARE costs and/or social consequences for action) were very good at convincing ourselves to ignore it (or tell ourselves we will EVENTUALLY deal with it but just not right now)

So here is the skill of being able to cherrypick data to give the best representation of yourself as opposed to true average honest overview of oneself. Then the skill of avoiding answering questions you don't want to answer to by answering by talking about what you want to talk about (think politicians).

Same is with real life interactions. Among 1000s of things you could say or do there is always some that are more effective than others in reaching a certain goal, whether it is getting a job, making a sale, convincing someone, making a friend or whatever.

Is it manipulative only if you make up something or if you are able to get people to do what you want by being able to cherrypick the most convincing ideas, arguments, facts etc.

There are lots of things I am not content with. Some I think are reasonable and won’t change my mind are. Others are irrational and I believe an aspect of maturing is becoming content with the fact that those feelings are irrational and I shouldn’t be unhappy because of it.

The example I use in conversation with friends in this topic is that when I am hungry and pass by someone with a nice steak, I don’t get in a tizzy about not having it myself the same way I would when I was 5.

And other similar things that increase someone's odds of being liked or convincing or getting someone to do what they want more likely?

Doing those things is not BSing, not lying, yet people can consciously be doing those to increase the likelihood of getting what they want.

Many people will obviously do it naturally. I personally have to make a conscious effort every time for such things.

Does having to consciously decide to do those things make me a sociopath? I certainly wouldn't bother saying someone's name if I didn't think it mattered for reaching my life goals. Extra same with small talk.

Then what about memorising some funny, self deprecating stories from my life to make people laugh so they would like me more?

Then what about asking questions, keeping up conversation etc, etc, even though I would rather be in my own thoughts doing my own thing?

I do it all consciously and intentionally for my own self benefit. Some to avoid bad things happening to me, some to make good things more likely to happen to me.

If I didn't do those things people might think I am awkward, weird, silent, boring, pass me on for promotion at work, etc.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to what’s describe in this blog post.

The writer describes taking on different personas and trying different tricks with other people portrayed as subjects of some sort of experiment.

The casual mentions of how they tried some conversational trick and got someone into full on sobbing was particularly striking because there was hardly a mention of concern for the other person. The only discussion was about the trick used to elicit the response.

That is what I do not agree is consistent with normal interactions. Most people would feel some degree of guilt or dirtiness, for lack of a better word, if they used some of these tricks to lure random interactions into a false sense of connection and feigned friendship, especially if for no other reason to experiment on the other person.

I suggest re-reading it from some different perspectives. Consider that the narrator may not be entirely reliable. They way they talk about being able to read other people and manipulate them into a sense of openness and connection has some hints of behaviors that are associated with people who view themselves as superior to others and view others as mere targets for their superior intellect to manipulate.

In this case, it’s worth considering that maybe the blog post itself is yet another chapter in their experimentation with manipulating others into a sense of connection, and the text is written in a persuasive way to leave the reader thinking that they have been blessed with some openness and revelation from the author. In other words, it’s crafted in a way to generate some of the same false sense of connection describe in the article, with the stories and claims crafted to target what the target audience wants to hear.

Something to think about when reading it, at least.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

It’s typically not done quite so intentionally, but this sounds like most folks’ junior high and high school years. Sometimes also college.

I know I totally changed in those years, and it was mostly by noticing what “worked” and leaning into it.

There are also white lies. Are you manipulating children if you are claiming santa exists? Are you manipulating a person if you either omit a truth or do a white lie because you know truth at that moment in time would be worse for their life.

I guess I don’t believe this behavior actually leaves the targets better off.

Doing a lot of experiments where you feign connections and openness with other people is going to leave a lot of the targets feeling unhappy when they realize they were tricked into opening up to someone who was just using them as a target for their experiments.

Take, for example, the section of the post where he talks about getting someone to open up into “cathartic sobbing” but displays zero interest in the person’s problems, only wonder about how he managed to trigger that through yet another technique.

My takeaway was distinctly different about the net effects of these social connection experiments. It was fine in the context of waiting tables where everyone knows the interaction is temporary and transactional, but the parts where it expanded into mind-reading people’s weaknesses and insecurities and then leveraging that into “connections” that he later laments not actually wanting.

And as a socially awkward individual I found it quite interesting.

I have a friend who is somehow super good at that, it is fascinating to me. But he can't be bothered to do actual work. He performs extemely well in interviews, gets high paying job, and then stays there for 3 months, gets bored. Of course he doesn't put that on his resume. He doesn't really lie, but he definitely cherrypicks, embellishes etc. I am kind of the opposite of him. I have stayed at the same place for years and am naturally passionate about software eng, but troubled socially. He is very confident and has no shame.

But job applications aren't the same as normal life so this is probably a tangent. In normal life, though, I kinda assume I'm seeing what people want me to see. But if it looks really good it probably means they have good sample of experiences to cherry pick from.

Two different people can have the same achievement and one thinks it is the most awesome and special achievement ever, and embellishes it, the other thinks it is not even worth mentioning or words it completely differently.

E.g. for job interviews when are you considered to be "mentoring" someone? Someone might do few code reviews and claim they have mentored juniors, other one can have 1 on 1s giving valuable career advice, tech advice, but still not think of themself as a mentor.

That doesn't mesh with normal human behavior. It feels weird. But the corporate world and the private social worlds are disconnected. For me at least. So it's weird. Actually ... That's a weird concept.

I guess I recommend having two minds... One with friends and one with the corporate world. And they don't play by the same rules.

This makes trying to figure out social cues difficult. After enough failures to connect, or being picked on to the point of feeling constant betrayal, we go to the safest place we can to try to play out interactions to avoid being hurt: our imagination. We make systems to predict behavior, we take to shallow taxonomies and try them on like tinted sunglasses. We are so masked, so protected, so... hardcore avoidant of the shame we feel just for existing, and we lean on this until we finally figure out that what we went through was really, really hard, and we find again the threads of our things that we never got a chance to develop, and start to grow them from the level they are, not where we pretend they are.

There's a lot of ways away from that, and those who instrumentalize might still be on the pathway upwards. Its hard to know where someone is from.

Repeated exposure. The first "relationship", or deep conversation, or jam session, or whatever, is always way more intense than the 500th. For virtually everyone, neurodivergent or otherwise.

Statistically, your first time is likely to be their 100th time, and so there's a perceived bias towards casualness, even though everyone has been a rookie. This can be daunting but the only real answer is to push through and go to the next interaction with an open mind.

I have to say this strikes me as a very distorted perception. I don't know about 'normal,' but a socially successful person isn't intuiting their behavior subconsciously, they have learned it, and are actively mindful of it as they engage in it. Otherwise I think socializing would be excruciatingly boring. I think the distinction is that they had the capacity to learn from interacting with others, and had the confidence to iterate until they became comfortable with their social skills (which to others may appear 'unconscious').

I also don't think normative social interaction has much tolerance for manipulation. Maybe in the scope of a night out socializing or a business transaction, but in the context of actual relationships, those people are often ostracized or avoided in my experience.

Basically I think a lot of people's issues with social stuff starts with something analogous to a boy who never asks a girl out for fear that she'll say no. People don't engage in interactions, or try to be overly pleasing, to try to appeal to other people.

But that's never going to lead to a good relationship, because it's fake, and it'll feel exhausting. By contrast when you stop caring, you might be surprised to find people like you even more, it becomes even easier to form "real" relationships, and suddenly social interactions aren't tiring at all.

This becomes even easier after having kids because you're probably not really seeking relations in any meaningful way, so you completely genuinely just don't care. And then paradoxically it becomes so much easier. Well, at least it becomes wisdom you can hand down to your own kids, or random anons online.

As I recall, the section this came up was when they were coaching.

This does feel like another instance of how people have a deep instinctual grasp of social interactions, but a shallow ability to articulate the moving parts in detail.

I think the analogy was “everyone know how to use the flush, but they can’t explain the mechanisms behind it”

It isnt hard to engage on a deep level with people but most dont for a reason. It is exhausting and can send the wrong signals.

Or, were allowed to learn it from others.

>and had the confidence to iterate

Or, the safety to iterate.

This seems to be just shifting where socially-successful people received uncommon benefit-of-the-doubt.

If you do care what other think, you alter your behavior to make them think what you prefer, and it becomes inauthentic on your part and manipulation of others. That's not to say that all things for others are manipulation; if you find out that you don't listen to people well and improve that, they might like being around you more because being heard is an important core part of relating.

For instance if you wanted a security guard to help you find your way in a shopping mall, there would be approaches that are more effective than others. For instance making it sound more like you have something important to do and they'd save your day by helping isn't specially abusing the person. They might feel pretty good about helping you, it's still somewhat part of their job so you're not tricking them either.

Personally I'd prefer that "spectrum" individuals just be themselves. I take it as my own shortcoming if I can't establish a dialog. I like the challenge of interacting with someone who does things very differently. This of course assumes there's a genuine desire to connect. I knew someone who had some techniques like this, and it was weird interacting with him. The techniques put up a barrier and it didn't feel authentic.

Maybe I'm jaded but I see it as a failure of the "normal" person if they can't deal with someone who communicates differently. All their issues just get triggered, not the fault of the spectrum individual, and not their responsibility to overcome. As a practical measure for just dealing with these people, I could see using techniques. But not when you actually want to relate with someone.

Really?

My most enduring friendships seem to just sorta happen, meeting people at random in various ways, figuring out you're into a lot of the same stuff, just sorta rubbing along well... and now we've known each other 25 years, how the hell did that happen? Ha.

People who don't feel resonance between their label, treatment, and self-concept will question why that is, up to questioning aspects of their identity themselves. Once unmoored from a proscribed identity, people can find the ambiguity uncomfortable and untenable, and may adopt a concrete identity that fits more closely.

That doesn't make the adopted identities any less true, of course. Identity is socially-constructed, so deciding that you feel more comfortable presenting as a woman isn't any less justifiable than being assigned good ol' football-playin', roughhousin', English class-hatin', red-blooded American manhood at birth. Calling yourself a wolf or an orc is probably more extreme, especially in general contexts, but at a convention where you're surrounded by a thousand other people who find it easier to connect when they've thrown on a (literal or figurative) bear sark? Go ham.

In the end, of course, you're just you. All of the labels - even the ones you internalize and externalize - are just ways of trying to communicate, and to make being around you easier for other people, in part by giving them a box to put you in and to understand you by, because that's what our pattern-matching ape-brains like. The mask is a mask; it's a cover, not a substitute, for the totality of a person's being.

Even the “zen openness” bit is mimicry of people whose vibe they liked, and they were surprised by the results.

You can gain a lot from the article and see it as both manipulative, or as insights for working through your own social anxieties. You could bring both attitudes to the article. And one of those is obviously healthier than the other.

I thought the article was more about leaning into their own style, becoming more intuitive over time.

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820444-the-elephant-in...

Still, agree with others, seems like you're generalizing what is good for the average person is also good for those with personalities that are more at the extremes. Yeah, know a couple of people who just don't understand what people are thinking or feeling, ever. And so they have to learn a system of cues to look for to figure out whether a person is angry or sad or happy... These people need to create systems to make socialization work.

Persuasion is honest. "Hey, I think you should do this thing because of reasons a, b, and c, there are some downsides like y and z. It may mean something to me peronally, so I may also to appeal to you to do it for me as a favour. I may even play up how important I think it is."

Manipulation is dishonest. "Hey, I'm going to use an underhanded technique to make you feel like you're missing out on something, or are inadequate, to get you to do this thing. Maybe I'll go overboard on flattery and inflate your ego to achieve my end. I also might lie or omit some of the downsides to give a distorted view of the risks"

Even if it's a win-win situation, it's still manipulation if you're seeking to bypass someone's agency.

> Are you manipulating a person if you either omit a truth or do a white lie because you know truth at that moment in time would be worse for their life.

Yes, certainly, and that's why people often get upset about "little white lies" too. Maybe you are doing a good thing, maybe you're not, but removing agency from someone by keeping the truth from them is always manipulative.

The wiser question may be "is manipulation always wrong?" And I'd argue that if it gets your kids to calm down and go to bed on Christmas Eve, maybe not ...

Socials skills are “skills” like any other and if you aren’t getting the desired result with your current skill set, what better way to improve than purposeful practice?

My own view is that it's about giving generously to other people without expecting anything in return. People are surprisingly reluctant to do this, but if you do, most people will like you. What are you supposed to give? Well it can be just about anything, time, attention, compliments, money, ideas, a shoulder to cry on, you name it. But probably the most powerful thing if we're talking about building social relationships is to give them your personality. Think of it like there is a big empty jar out there which represents the social environment and we're all wired to not want it to be empty, well go and fill it up with your personality, provide examples of who you are instead of standing off in a corner silently and going unnoticed. Instead of being forgotten you'll be remembered, many will like you, some will love you and some will hate you, the ones who respond most positively are the ones you make an effort to engage with in the future.

Sasha starts figuring this out when he starts working at the fancy restaurant with waiters who would do really odd stuff and it would work. The best waiters were for the most part just displaying a lot of personality. Working at restaurants might have skewed his perspective a bit because when you work as a waiter you're putting on a performance, the goal is to do a job, entertain, get compliments and get tips, beyond the food this is why people go to a nice restaurant. Being authentic and building lasting relationships is secondary to performing a commercial service at a restaurant, but not in real life (and perhaps not at the highest levels of certain commercial services for that matter, the line starts to blur). I think he's realized all this by the end of the article.

Identity is a lookup for a custom zlib dictionary, so communication compresses better! Which means we can pick and choose per communication channel. :) Thanks for that thought!

And that is part of the problem, because the underlying reason why people connect when you do the mentioned things is that these are usually signs that you are in fact an empathic person, that can put themselves in their shoes and thus care to some degree about how things will pan out for them, meaning they may think they can open up to you, etc. This is in a stark contrast with the phrasing of "playing their game" that frames this type of behavior as a superfluous, silly endavour, when in fact it might be the polar opposite:

In a society of social apes (humans) one of the biggest danger to your and your kins life, bodily autonomy, freedom has historically always been other humans. Meaning that judging the intentions of others is not some silly game, but a survival mechanism of existential importance. And not only that, many people derive a lot of ehat makes their lifes worth living from these feelings of mutual understanding and empathy.

So to most empathic people the idea that a seemingly empathic person could feel nothing at all underneath and potentially sell them down the river is something tingling a gutural fear. Many media depiction of evil serial killers will play on that exact fear (among others).

Master conmen, manipulators, cult leaders (so generally horrible people) are all good at understanding the internal processes (thoughts and feelings) of their victims. This understanding is also essential for true empathy, the way it is applied is very different. If a hacker finds a weak point in a system they can exploit it for their own gain, or they can deal with it in a way benifiting all. The skill of understanding the internals is one thing, the skill of understanding what these internals mean and what are the right actions to derive from that knowledge is something else entirely.

That being said, I think the personal journey the author is on is certainly one that may benefit both them and the people around them. I can just imagine how hard parsing all the complexity of human behavior must be if you can't feel it yourself. This is already hard for people who can, as countless cultural artifacts from all of humanities history proof.

When someone uses my name in conversation, it makes me think less of them, because it's so unnatural and clearly they might be doing it to manipulate me.

Names are dumb - we are people, not labels

If so, I missed all references of him bullying other people.

Society at large teaches them this is not safe and they will be excluded (e.g. no friends, no dates, etc) if they do not adapt.

- yes, I was consciously trying different ways to fit in

- yes, I felt uncomfortable that it was forced and unnatural

- no, it didn’t occur to me at all this was a deeper issue; I had all kinds of naive explanations: oh I’m not as confident because I because I started school a year earlier than the other guys; girls don’t like me because I’m not as handsome as other guys; I’m not as social because I don’t have an older brother to learn it from, etc.

- over the years, as I got better at what I now know to be “masking”, I just subconsciously embodied the idea that consciously working on every little aspect of social interactions is “normal”

- it took me 30 years to realise, wait a minute, it’s probably not normal that I had to put so much effort into all of this, and got myself a brand new shiny autism diagnosis at 40

It's no coincidence that people always judged and shunned such overt manipulators, as well as tried to downplay the underlying mechanisms of manipulation in general (outside of the sales types, which are often looked upon as slimy and not deserving of trust).

A low-trust society is not fun a place to live in

It's the same with genetics. Getting lucky with looks is fine but working for the same goal (eg surgery) is somehow bad and people often hide it.

As a neurotypical person (I don't think the term "normal" is appropriate) I'm probably doing or did the same things the article is talking about. And I never thought about negative consequences, except when I was extremely anxious.

If anything, people on the spectrum, introvert, or just awkward are probably thinking about the consequences (positive or negative) way more than someone like me.

I also agree with the sibling post. The failure of most (?) neurotypical people to accept people on the spectrum as-is shouldn't be a burden on them. If society can't make them safe, they should do whatever is best for them. "Authenticity" (which is just an illusion anyway) be damned.

And what if no one likes me?

The people doing the judging certainly aren't gonna reproduce with 99.99999% of the people being judged, and I'm being extremely generous here.

Oh man, I always find it so slimy when people do that! I've also noticed it's mostly HR people or sales people who do this, so clearly it's a phony technique they learned somewhere. But I suppose it gets taught because it works, maybe for people who don't pick up on the fact that it's so forced?

How you go about figuring what bugs people is perhaps the hard part.

There is no "rule" in life that says that people have to be judgmental assholes to each other. Using a card game to justify the behavior is just a rationalization.

We also tend to hide how hard we work to make our success look natural, but we reveal how hard we work on the extremes of success. For example, if I work hard and take a score of 17 out of 20 in a test people will say "I barely read last evening, phew", but if you're consistently scoring 19-20/20 people may even approach you to learn your studying methods and for tips, because they assume there are important takeaways that they can adopt.

It's my pet peeve with how society recognizes that someone is talented, which is blatantly flawed because all you can do is see what they're capable of doing. Someone may be talented yet unable (or unwilling?) to tap into their talent, but since we recognize talent by the output you can't really tell the existence of talent unless it's at the extremes of success, like the 8 year old who can solve mathematics that are a grade or more above the current grade.

I see talent like a genetic predisposition that can be appropriately cultivated to attain success. It's not much different than my height, because I didn't choose it, yet I can guess that there are men out there who hate the fact that I have their desirable height yet I never hit the gym, cultivate my social skills, or take advantage the fact that I look younger than I am. I am willing to bet everything that I met at least one person who thought of all of these things the first moments they looked at me.

But at least genetic predispositions like height are visible to the naked eye and no one can dispute the differences. When it comes to differences in the brain it's where we ignorantly proclaim that things are obscure therefore they can violate the very facts of observable nature.

In sort, not only I fully agree with you, but I also agree with the obvious double standards in society around it. If I take ADHD medication and that helps with my focus to improve my performance in school or work then I deserve that success as much as someone who naturally had no problems with ADHD. Why is this different for looks (like hair transplants, etc.) is beyond me.

That's definitely not true if we include "work" as a "social interaction".

Once again this is just a rationalization for horrible behavior.

Of course that's not as bad as people who try to rationalize bad behavior behind a veil of pseudo-intellectuality.

Once again: rationalizations don't make something true.

When we win, by being a better collaborator with others, it isn't operating in a shallow or selfish sense.

It isn't treating others like instruments for our benefit over theirs. It isn't manipulation.

If you steelman the argument you can see the point, but it’s also unreasonable to assume that a person is living the steelman version of life (and being a deceptive person) just because they had a facelift.

OTOH, if you are admiring people’s genetics using their appearance as a proxy, I can see why it might seem like “cheating”

I can see why someone not understanding the “dance” could easily mistake it for “innocent” manipulation… but when it’s basically a scripted give-and-take that serves as a symbolic representation of a persons willingness to cooperate and their advertised intentions, it isn’t really manipulation at all, but rather a type of communication that allows (hazy) inferences about a person’s character and intellect in the guise of insignificant banter.

Either way, if you aren’t content with your situation in this regard, I would recommend study, introspection, and perhaps therapy. Dale Carnegie produced some excellent work in this regard, aiming towards win/win interactions. He’s more business oriented, but that context is easy to strip away, and the principles stand on their own.

The problem is clearly with the bullying. And the assumptions around character. And basically using "changing yourself" as a proxy for hallucinating all sorts of completely unrelated bad characteristics. And the rationalizing around it.

It's the same for behavior: people are fine with the behavior of "naturally charming" people but as soon as someone mentions "learning how to do it" people immediately jump to conclusions and call it manipulative.

Like you I was disgusted to see OP's link posted to these hallowed grounds, a bunch of filthie normie jibber jabber waxing poetic about how great it is to have cracked the normie code

When autism meets sexism.

That's why the title is "My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person" and not "My story of being a perfectly socially normal person from the day I was born".

When you're learning social skills because you don't have them naturally, it usually starts with "reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them".

So I'm not sure what your point is. That this sounds calculated and mechanistic? It is. That's explicitly said there in the article. And the progression of the author's stages is towards doing less of that.

Lots and lots of, if not most, social behaviors are intuited subconsciously.

And that's even if the person has actively studied and learned them (and most are picked up by osmosis, not consciously learned anyway).

>I also don't think normative social interaction has much tolerance for manipulation. Maybe in the scope of a night out socializing or a business transaction, but in the context of actual relationships, those people are often ostracized or avoided in my experience.

That's either oblivious to 90% of social interactions out there, or just understands "manipulation" at the con artist or sociopath level.

Even wearing nice clothes to make a better impression is a kind of manipulation. Same for using different manners of speaking and language in different social contexts, and lots of other stuff.

Someone better tell the makeup and fashion industries...

(Don't approve doing this or anything, just pointing the blind spot in your dichotomy, interested in the argument on a purely technical manner).

Apparently there is, which is why this judgement you speak of happens.

It just happens to be a social rule, and you don't like it, but it's a rule nonetheless. Doesn't have to be an official rule, agreed upon, and signed by each participant, or some physical law.

Hence, the card game metaphor has some merit. Like people think you shouldn't cheat in a card game, many people also think you shouldn't cheat with cosmetic surgery.

On the contrary, since many (if not most) people do it, they're on the social side.

>Once again: rationalizations don't make something true

When it comes to social truths, what most people do make them so.

If most people think X bad, X is bad is a social truth. Doens't matter if you think X is "not bad in reality". Reality doesn't care about good or bad anyway, it doesn't have a morality.

Parent says that "identity is socially-constructed", they defend trans people, they say it "isn't any less justifiable than being assigned good ol' football-playin', roughhousin', English class-hatin', red-blooded American manhood"

- but the fact they said "presenting" as opposed to "being" a woman is sexism, as if they're some "chauvinist pig"?

That's why we can't have nice things...

I guess is also about if you care about the other person or you are just pretending, unfortunately in my opinion there is no way to know, because some people are really good at pretending to care, and even supporting you with a hidden score tracking board, basically they are investing.

And then there are people that really care about you and because they know they can't do anything or don't know what to say, they won't reach to you.

I guess we are only left with our instinct and that is something that you learn to calibrate with time.

Same for the motivation of surgeries. You might not be comfortable with yourself, and want to change something, and that's perfectly fine, but again to changing appearance signal something to benefit you and harm others with less effort, it's immoral again.

And, I believe, if you need to change how you behave or look to get acceptance from a circle, this means the circle is toxic and you'll be far happier elsewhere.

I don’t think collaboration, altruism, and other pro social traits are exclusive of instrumentalizing.

Whatever word you want to use that encompasses pro social behaviors, let’s use that word if you don’t like instrumentalizing.

I am not sure I like what it does to my experience in the world to view all human communication as selfish manipulation. Although I recognize the pull to do so can come from an attempt to protect oneself based on past harm.

If I wear nice clothes and make a good impression on someone, I am creating an outcome we both wanted at the outset. If we are meeting socially, they probably wanted to like me, and I wanted them to like me. That was the shared goal. That is cooperative, not manipulative.

Interestingly not current corporate banking work, where this would be true but then this is highly sociopathic environment with dominant culture that doesn't do direct honest feedback generally. But generally finance attracts the worst of the (smart) crowd so thats not in any way a reference of mankind.

So its cultural quite a lot. I presume you meant some rather extreme situation of above by describing it as autistic-spectrum.

The linkage isn’t as strong for unconsciously or subconsciously developed ulterior motives. Hence the huge gap in how people behave towards that.

Most people don't care, and I'm willing to bet that the ones rationalizing the behavior here don't go out of their way to care or talk about any of this.

Also this post has the classic logical error of assuming that because something is a certain way, it should be that way.

> Reality doesn't care about good or bad

Likewise: What you call "social truths" are real in that they shape behavior and consequences, but they’re conventions, not objective moral facts, and they can be unjust or oppressive.

Being better at socialization is virtually demanded by society. "Not looking good" is also punished. There is nothing ulterior about anything.

The fact that a certain chunk of society demands both perfection and authenticity already makes it necessary for people to not be transparent about such things.

That's a modern dellusion.

Sociology (and common wisdom) tells us that judgment "that shames, excludes, or hurts" is necessary for the development of morality, social cohesion, and cooperation.

Note: not any random judgment "that shames, excludes, or hurts" has this possitive role, but plenty of judgements that "shame, exclude, or hurt", meaning that judgement that "shames, excludes, or hurts" is a useful social tool.

The world isn’t just. People like people with good genetics, because being friendly with the strong gets you benefits more than it gets you costs. Especially if you’re able to influence (or even pathologically manipulate) them.

Most people just know this, subconsciously. So they would probably even deny it. But it’s transparently easy to test, and even easier to see evidence of by just looking around.

Also, most attractive people work to be attractive because it’s often mutually beneficial (assuming they can counter manipulate or influence appropriately). Having people attracted to you gives you the ability to use other people’s resources for your benefit.

Most attractive people just know this, subconsciously. So they would probably even deny it. But it’s transparently easy to test, and even easier to see evidence of by just looking around.

This is generally kept covert, because like most covert power, it attracts negative attention if brought to conscious awareness - as then it’s perceived as manipulation, not influence, or encourages more jealousy, etc. as it’s not fair.

But life isn’t fair, except where we make it, and making something fair requires power.

And acquiring and maintaining power is fundamentally unfair.

Or do you think anti-social assholes do not exist or are not common? Or that any system of identification of people should not attempt to understand them?

I'm just saying I can call a spade a spade.

If anything, it's the rationalizations around certain behaviors that are claiming the world is perfect and just as is.

I'm just saying that there is no game anywhere, except in the head of people who are pretending to play a game.

So this is about you?

Refusing to be an asshole to someone being an asshole just enables them being an asshole.

Refusing to judge if someone is being an asshole, ensures that someone being an asshole will see no consequences for being an asshole.

But to be fair I'm mostly criticizing useless HN post-hoc rationalization.

> Refusing to be an asshole to someone being an asshole just enables them being an asshole.

I have nothing to do with this.

> Refusing to judge if someone is being an asshole, ensures that someone being an asshole will see no consequences for being an asshole.

I also have nothing to do with this.

Nay, artificial physical attractiveness is also a signal of reproductive fitness. It isn't a given. It's the subject's genes that made a brain that was able to design (and to arrange to pay for!) the improved attractiveness.

It's not qualitatively different from brushing hair.

There is surely nothing wrong with being charming.

The "manipulate, and game", just per dictionary, would mean in this context something close to "control or influence unscrupulously". What social norms exactly do you see broken/bent by the OP? Because I see none.

Are you trying to influence this comment section unscrupulously?

Good point.

These words are unfortunately loaded. "instrumentalizing" is so close to "instrument" for me to see them as unrelated in meaning. But lots of similar words drift in meaning, or have several interpretations.

I don't have any issue with people doing things for "natural" reasons, vs. realpolitik analytical reasons, when the motive is still benefit-neutral, or benefit-benefit relative to ourselves-others.

This has gotten a little off-track into pedantry though, I agree.

The parent post's assertion that the author of this post is somehow using "tricks" and that it is unhealthy, is what I take issue with.

It's a bit of unfair framing to claim that people who naturally develop these "tricks" are somehow superior to those who have to learn them. By that reasoning people with poor social skills would be doomed to poor outcomes for the sake of some trick-free "pure" personality.

Or another way... if I take elocution and debate lessons to make my point better and use that to get what I want in life, is this "unhealthy"? I don't think most people would say so. In my eyes this is no different.

You speak as if you are an expert on everything in the universe at all times. Way too much black-and-white thinking. And many people often strongly disagree with your statements... a great deal of your comments are quite often downvoted and/or flagged.

There is a reason you have been banned from several different platforms now. Disagreeing/arguing with their actions is not how you improve yourself, and you can't explain your way out of it, you have to want to change how you act, and work hard at it. You have to be ok with being wrong. Your weaponization of logic has destroyed your empathy. You are craving validation through technical dominance, but this just further isolates you/alienates others.

I think real intelligence by definition requires empathy and humility, which is typically the opposite of such dogmatism in my opinion. "As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."

The Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to smart people. You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly. As you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self estimates.

Also you seem to like to claim that almost everything is illegal and then not back up your claims with any useful sources, instead telling people to look it up themselves or give vague non-answers like "it's in the German law code". That and most of your comments are just plain negative in general, and I think this ultimately stems from some kind of childhood trauma that you have not dealt with.

And yes, it is horrible, but if you want to solve a problem, you must first understand the problem, and ‘some people are just born with Evil in their hearts’ is not a very good sociological model.

Isn’t that…. Every game?

Which the author says are stages he grew out of. He's not saying that those things are what connecting with people is actually about.

That being said, saying presenting instead of being is not ideal indeed.

I was more talking about judgement of people who did just to still look normal but better, similarly to the judgement of people who learn "social skills" like the TFA discusses.

If I get sad or angry when a friend tells me a story, this feeling is a expression of my inner state, not a strategic choice I make to get to a certain place. And this inner state usually translates into how people act later. So if I am enraged how my friend was treated I may be inclined to take steps that help them get even, for example.

Manipulation, however, is when I (feeling nothing), pretend to feel a thing with the goal of getting a certain response.

The border between the two is of course not totally clear-cut and people can manipulate themselves into truly feeling things without following through with any actions etc. So a complex topic, but the reason why the manipulation works in the first place is because the feelings people express towards us are more often than not an expression of how they will act towards us as well. If a guy on the street screams at you, your #1 interpretation won't be that he does it to manipulate you, but that that person is experiencing an actual feeling that may convert to physical action pretty soon.