Beautifully written. And visibly practicing what you preach.
 

I was not, however, socially adroit, so what I said was “why do you care about something boring like horses?”

[...]

This is a pure tactical mistake.

I didn’t get more information this way. I wasn’t more honest by being more graceful. This is not a linear scale.

I don't think you could have conveyed this without taking away from the clarity with which you demonstrate your thesis, but I also think you undersell the point here.

It's easy to read this and think "Oh, so social skills and grace are kinda orthogonal to epistemic virtue, at least in cases like this", and that alone is sufficient to justify "Maybe notice the possibility of practicing more grace so that you can do it when it is socially helpful and not epistemically harmful".

It's much deeper than that, because what she was pissed off about is epistemics. Back in your less skilled days, you were being a jackass by making your epistemic vices a social rationality problem. She was forced to either accept falsehoods into the social epistemics, or push back and engage in social conflict.

I'll explain.

So, "horses are boring" asserts that horses are boring. It implies that if someone thinks horses are interesting, they're wrong -- like her. She's wrong. This assertion presupposes that her interest in horses is not meaningful evidence about their interestingness that could change your mind -- but is this presupposition justified? If it was, why the heck would he be asking her in the first place? If he really knew something she didn't, why not just explain it to her so she can realize that horses aren't as interesting as she thought?

Her fascination with horses is evidence that horses are or at least can be fascinating. Your desire to ask her about her interest, presuming that you're being genuine, is evidence that her perspective is meaningful evidence to you. Noticing this, we can take a step towards improved epistemics by noticing what this does to our confidence in the idea that horses really are boring, after all. Because now it's no longer "Horses are boring". It's "Huh, I always thought horses are boring, but she obviously finds something about them to be really interesting. What might she see that I do not?".

And what comes out once you have that realization?

How about "What do you find so interesting about horses?"

Or, if you're going to reference your initial perspective at all, it's going to come out like "Huh, I always thought they weren't interesting" or "I never was able to find anything interesting about horses" -- not a presupposition that they are boring, as if anything she could possibly say would be wrong.

The "grace" here, is specifically in not pushing forth one's ignorance as fact in direct contradiction to the evidence you're responding to. It's epistemic humility - an epistemic virtue, not merely a virtue of social harmony.

It's a great example because it's both relatable and not abusing an edge case to make a point. I think it's central. It's an easy case that we can all look at and say "okay, failing socially isn't epistemically virtuous", and there are harder cases where it's harder to square social grace with epistemic virtue. But those are just that -- harder.

Still a skill issue.

At least, more often than not.
 

I feel like I agree with almost everything that is said here, while finding myself concerned about the overall feeling of the post and the effect on LW if applied as is.

I think this stems from the title which isn’t quite what the article argues for. 

I think that the article persuasively argues that:

1. The play off between social grace and honesty can change with skill at social grace
2. With high social grace skill the cost of being socially graceful is lower than you might think
3. In many circumstances being socially graceful is worth it

This doesn’t quite add up to Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill.

This is especially true in critical situations. If I acknowledge that being socially graceful creates even a slight loss of honesty/accuracy then this could have very large costs if the implication of the decision is critical enough. 

If LW conversations are intended to be more often about critical situations then we should hope that our conversations are closer to the bottom right of our own Pareto front than the top left.

I think without specifically acknowledging this and with the title as it is the post could easily end up pointing people in the wrong direction.

I'm worried I'm unintentionally creating a motte-and-bailey in the comments, so I'm going to try and split a few things out. Here's four things all of which I believe are true, but which people could reasonably agree or disagree with separately.

1. It's possible to make strictly better statements in the Graceful / Honest spectrum. "You gotta tie your shoes idiot" is less graceful than "Do you know your shoe's untied?" without communicating more information about the shoe. It's even more syllables. More grace doesn't actually always mean less honest.
2. Communicating gracefully takes effort to learn, but once learned, can be close to free on most per-statement cases. It's like learning a language; it would take me a long time to learn German, but a bilingual English and German speaker wouldn't find most conversation hard in one language.^[1] 
3. Communicating gracefully is worth effort to learn. It is better to have this skill than to not have this skill.
4. There are instrumental circumstances where giving up some honesty is worth getting some grace, especially if the rate of exchange is favourable. (Please don't take this line as advocating for outright lies in the name of momentary preservation of social harmony. I think I'm more honest than the average person even when I'm making these trades.)

I think 4 is true, but I'm on board with LessWrong in particular being a place where we don't give up units of honesty in order to get units of grace no matter the exchange rate. I'm less cheerful about existing in spaces where we give up 1.

1. ^{^}

   Note: I'm not trying to say every single sentence is close to free to say in the other language, or gracefully- there's detailed German words like Schadenfreude that are harder to communicate in English, and there's it takes effort to gracefully fire someone for non-performance.

Some suggestions for followup topics:

Why do we have politeness in the first place? (I don't think the answer is as obvious as it may seem.)

Is there such a thing as "too much politeness" in a person or, more interestingly, society?

Isn't learning to gracefully deal with "rude" comments/people just as important a skill as learning to not emit rude comments?

I am extremly sympathetic to this and indeed am putting skill points into being smoother. But the problem I have is that at the tails of prediction ability, social smoothly does trade off quite strongly against prediction ability—at least at the current local maximum of skills.

Strong upvote.

IMO, the portrayal of 'smart' characters in media, can do damage to the way people who grow up thinking they are intelligent, will interact with others. E.g. Dr House, House; Rick, Rick and Morty; Sherlock Holmes, Lots of things.

This happened to me growing up, and I was a nihilistic prick as a teenager. For me, the remedy was engaging with media created by real-life intelligent people. The Podcasts "Cortex" and "Dear Hank and John", have majorly shifted my personality in a positive direction. I wouldn't have predicted that they would make me a better rationalist, but I think they have done that too.

TLDR: Absorb the personality traits of intelligent and kind people, for a possible easy fix to the problem detailed in this post.

Social grace cannot co-exist with truth seeking, they're at conflict. But some truths can be communicated gracefully. "Saying something nicely" is often just stating the truth with a lower magnitude. "I hate that -> It's not really my cup of tea". The vector is the same, the magnitude is smaller. It's like whispering rather than yelling.

Edit: People here are rather mathematical, and truth seeking doesn't see much resistance in math because it's so neutral. Try digging up human bio diversity research or any other controversial topic. What, you think I'm just a bad person? That would imply that all unpleasant conclusions are false, and that people who hold them merely have unpleasant values. As if moral thinking is a good heuristic, and ad hominem not a fallacy? That I'm agree downvoted already proved my point. 

But the lack of social grace is not a lack of skill - well it is, but more precisely it's a lack of sensitivity (and therefore granularity). One is socially tone deaf in the same way that they're musically tone deaf. The more different tones you can differentiate, the more subtle differences you can pick up.

People who lack social grace lack this subtlety. Their social landscape is more coarse - perhaps some dimensions are even missing from it. If something registers weakly for us, we assume it registers weakly to others (people who have poor hearing often speak too loudly). But one can also ruin their sensivity (their social taste), by calibrating it poorly. This damage is often done by strong stimuli, which reorder the scale which is compared against (If more bits are used for the exponent of a floating point variable, less bits can be used for the precision).

Somebody who drenches their food in chili-sauce is less likely to be able to taste if they're drinking cheap wine or expensive wine. Porn addicts often judge the appropriateness of sexual behaviour poorly. If you're used to people who use strong language, the baseline of what you consider rude speech may be out of sync with others. I also imagine that watching too much anime might ruin somebodies calibration, since a lot of things in anime are exaggerated (down to facial expressions - which may be why a lot of autistic people are drawn to anime).

More general intelligence is less restrained (that's what general means), but social grace, manners, norms, etc. are primarily restrictions. For instance, the overton window is the acceptable space of ideas. Intelligent people can often "emulate" bounded behaviour, but they're at a disadvantage within the bounded area (which is why being street smart might outperform being book smart). Finally, many intellectuals don't get the importance of context (they prefer the world to follow general rules which are true in all contexts)

Every time someone on LW claims that honesty is incompatible with social grace, I have a strong desire to post a comment or reply consisting only of the string 'skill issue' (or, if I'm feeling verbose, 'sounds like a skill issue'). This would be an honest report of what I think about the other person's claim, but it would not be kind or helpful or likely to result in a productive discussion. So I don't do it.

Sometimes when this happens, and I ask myself if there's an actually-good comment that conveys the same thing, and there are two things I notice:

1. I'm not skilled enough at writing to flesh out what I mean in a more productive way without significant time cost.
2. I feel noticeably less inclined than usual to engage in disagreement with people who make this claim. This is both because I lack skill at internet fights to not come out of it feeling like I got wrecked, and because, as you put it "Some skills are hard to appreciate unless you have some prerequisite amount of the skill yourself". So I anticipate an uphill battle.

Anyway, I think the actually-good response is this post, so thank you.

Not all skills should be mastered, since many involve the practice of dark patterns. 
Mastering the skills of an executioner/hit man/torturer/etc would require practice, which isn't good.
Many social skills do push the Pareto frontier out, by enabling coordination & effective Coasean transfers between parties.
Some current practitioners of skillful social management have used their powers to manipulate, mislead, and maliciously channel hostility instigated by their own evil intentions.

I was not, however, socially adroit, so what I said was “why do you care about something boring like horses?”

She complained to the teachers about me being rude, which in hindsight was entirely fair.

How normal would you rate the reaction? While you were being rude, I find it strange to complain to the teachers about just that. In my experience, not many people would do that past elementary school.

learning what a computer scientist means by space and time

nitpick: "time complexity" is "a complexity", not "a time" - one is measured in asymptotic classes, the other in seconds (and memory space is measured in gibibytes even when marketed as gigabytes)

It’s a little like being colour blind; the skilled designer is wincing at ... the low contrast background and foreground of your website

hmm, why is the designer holier than though in this story? If the developer literally has deuteranopia, the designer should have deferred to the literal expert on the topic of contrasting colors (at least sonnet 4.5 was not able to produce any counter-examples - see the generated pairs on https://peter.hozak.info/contrasting%20color%20pairs if someone is able to test it with real people / better tools)

There is an interesting but uncommon adjective ‘bluff’ (crucially different in meaning from the noun & verb) which describes someone who is honest and lacking in grace, but in a pleasant way. Which highlights the small distinction between being graceless and unpleasant. You can imagine some children or uneducated adults being bluff - plain-speaking, but clearly not trying to be, nor particularly seeming, rude. It would need more thought to figure out just how this works.

I’m not saying I advocate being bluff, but I can see some things in its favour. Being honest and clearly understood while also being graceful is indeed a difficult skill, often involving culture-specific subtleties that don’t always work.

Graceful yet honest communication between Britons (such as me) often involves a level of subtlety and indirectness, such as understatement, that is lost on foreigners. Eg ‘It’s not ideal’ can be used to describe anything from a lukewarm cup of tea to the outbreak of World War 3. 

Bluffness is more direct than this, and so more likely to be understood.

Great points. I think a lot of people yearn for some ultimate form of communication that is unmoored to and unencumbered by social norms and Overton windows and emotions, and thus much more efficient at transmitting information.

But that form of communication is (a) simply inhuman, and (b) not that much more efficient.

Wrapping your ideas in a thin veneer of politeness is similar to encoding them in words. It's fuzzy and non-optimal, yes, but it's just how humans transmit information. It's not possible to fully mentally separate idea criticisms from personal attacks, even for those who try very hard to do that. So if you want to communicate more effectively, you put in a little extra effort to make it clear that you're talking about ideas and not people.

The cost of the veneer varies depending on the social acceptance of the idea being transmitted but it's really not very costly most of the time, especially when you weigh it by how much it improves your transmission ability. If you want to get better at convincing people of your out-there ideas, being polite about them is the lowest hanging fruit.

As you rightly point out, it is a skill that one can train, but also genetic (charisma, public speaking, and general insensitivity to the 'spotlight' effect, etc.). Predicting and keeping track of meta-frames in one story, accurately reading people, and the capacity to adjust are all very valuable skills. 

However, it is quite energy intensive; so I get why people are called rude; dealing with people is tough; ask service providers.  And when people are tired, they make mistakes (I'd wager it is the most social people that are called rude etc.; and we get the 'bad boy' paradox). OTOH, like with all skills, practicing fundamentals is a great start.