Can you be more explicit about what it was in your study of data science that led you to notice your blindspots, or more generally what the "very powerful" ways of thinking about the world you found were? You mention the Wisdom of the Crowds, but it sounds like there was something in particular that made you realize the opportunity for growth.
This is a very long conversation – communicating it is my highest priority right now, but it's a huge undertaking. For now I'll just say that the most important part to my mind is learning to think in terms of dimensionality reduction. See Chris Olah's post Visualizing MNIST: An Exploration of Dimensionality Reduction if you're unfamiliar with the subject.
I knew that people thought I had bad social skills, but they weren't able to explain the situation to me in a way that I could understand, because they were totally misinterpreting me, on account of not knowing what was going on in my mind.
A useful analogy is bug reports made by non-programmer users. They are sometimes right that there is a problem, but most attempts on their part to formulate what it is or "${deity-}" forbid what is the cause is so confused that saying nothing is an improvement. You have to reproduce and debug the problem yourself. Another example is writing: "the reader is always right" in the sense that unexpected negative reaction is a flaw in your model of the reader's perception of your work, even if the reader is wrong about the reasons for their reaction.
Each clue about an error is a poorly or misleadingly stated bug report, and there is usually nobody qualified to investigate the issue if you don't do it yourself, of your own initiative: formulating hypotheses, running tests, observing responses.
Nice article, congrats on improving your social skills! Some people are more social than others, but everyone is at least a little social :-)
I've improved mine a lot, too, and your post inspired me to stopped and think about how:
I realized that people are different. Just because I happen to like my characteristics a lot doesn't mean I am inherently better than anyone else. Other people might prefer their own characteristics. From this realization came a natural mastery of the art of self-deprecation, which turns out to be quite useful as a social skill.
to. If somebody is angry at me and insults me, I know that it's not me who the person is insulting, it's instead the person's perception of me.
If you really believe that, wouldn't the same thing apply to praise of you as well?
It does apply to praise: I take statements of the type "you're so wonderful" as having much more to do with how the person feels than it has to do with me.
Some quick background: a friend and I run the sales department of a multi-million dollar company. We built that company from the ground up from about 15 clients to 5,000 and counting, and now manage 20+ sales reps.
Contrary to popular opinion, social interaction is really fucking easy. There's one common trait among likable people, (and I don't mean likable in the shitty, salesy sort of way where a person is so outgoing you feel obligated to say you like them, when in fact you think they're a giant turd)). That trait can be easily explained: you truly, ge...
I'm baffled. People say that nerds have bad social skills, but nerds create nerd communities and don't show any social ineptness.
You can participate in, or even help form, communities and still be socially inept. The stereotype should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt when it comes to individual cases, but it's not pointing to an absolute lack of social interaction so much as a limited social range: your stereotypical nerd has hobbies and friends and can probably talk your ear off about them, but he's lost when it comes to social tasks outside...
For example, if a student tells me that I'm the worst teacher he or she has ever had, it makes me feel bad because I feel like I'm not contributing value, but I'm not at all upset with the student: my attitude is that the student is conveying valuable information to me, and that I should be appreciative.
I'm tempted to take that as a Crocker's rule invocation. But I have realized that you wrote this for people-like-you, that is, after all, pretty much its explicit purpose. As such, I'm not sure I have an criticism that I can't definitively think is helpf...
The second is that you come across as exceedingly arrogant.
As a datapoint, I didn't get this impression; I felt it was a pretty humble recounting of one's flaws and mistakes. (Though I'm probably much less perceiving of arrogance than the typical person.)
I don't have an intuitive understanding of why I'm coming across as arrogant.
Think in monkey-terms. Humans are just hairless bipedal apes and status matters, a lot.
Statements of what you perceive as (fairly obvious) facts have implications, in particular social/status implications. Human conversations are simultaneously an exchange of information and an exchange of signals. Most people automatically process these signals on the slightly subconscious level and respond with signals of their own without necessarily being aware of it. Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.
People in whom the signal-processing mechanism is inefficient, miscalibrated, or just plain broken have trouble with navigating social interactions. The interaction flows on (at least) two levels but the invisible layer is malfunctioning and if you don't even know it exists you are confused why the overt information-exchange layer is doing so badly.
I suspect that if the subconscious mechanisms are not doing their job, you have to bring the signal-exchange layer into the territory of the conscious and explicitly manage it.
Accept that every conversation has two layers even if you don't see one of them. Evalua...
but having a sense of self-worth rooted in relative status is not biologically inevitable.
Hold on, hold on. I wasn't talking about self-worth, this is an entirely separate topic. Status, in this context, is a social ranking. It's not about your internal feelings or perceptions, it's about the rank that the social group grants you.
I think that humans, generally speaking, are hardwired to chase status (to a greater or lesser degree), but, as usual, if you go far enough out into the tails, it's not that hard to find people who completely do not care about status. That's perfectly fine that they do not care, but that does not mean that they are outside of the status system because, again, status is what your social group assigns to you regardless of whether you asked for it or not.
It's possible to rewire status motivations so that they're rooted in the extent to which you're achieving a goal.
Well, it's certainly possible to care very much about some goal and not care about one's status, I am not sure there is any need for a rewiring. You can attach your self-worth to the extent that you are successful at achieving your goal, too, but that's not status.
...I didn't realize that yo
Just as you usually shouldn't compare your enemies to Hitler, you probably shouldn't compare yourself or your allies to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These individual's auras are just too strong, making comparisons mind-kill territory. Also, comparing yourself to both MLK and Gandhi in the same sentence reads like something the character Michael Scott would do.
I think it is worse than hopeless on multiple fronts.
First problem:
Let's take another good quality: Honesty. People who volunteer, "I always tell the truth," generally lie more than the average population, and should be distrusted. (Yes, yes, Sam Harris. But the skew is the wrong way.) "I am awesome at good life quality," generally fails if your audience has had, well, significant social experience.
So you want to demonstrate this claim by word and deed, and not explicitly make the claim in most cases. Here, I understand the reason for making it, and the parts where you say you want good things to happen to people are fine. (I have on LW said something like, "I have a reputation for principled honesty, says me," in arguing that game tactics were not dishonest and should not apply to out-of-game reputation.) But the MLK thing is way-too-much, like "I never lie," is way-too-much.
Second problem:
As others have said, the comparison is political and inapt. You couldn't find anyone less iconic? Penn Jillette? Someone?
And MLK is known for his actions and risks and willingness to engage in non-violence. I read somewhere that ethnic struggles sometim...
"Normal" people choose their interests, in part, based on their appeal to other people.
Nerds don't necessarily have bad social skills; they usually just prioritize socialization below other things (which clusters with some other non-normal mental traits). Socialization is a side effect of their interests, rather than their interests being a side effect of their socialization. They socialize fine - provided the other person shares their interests, inwhichcase, the socialization advances their interests. They just don't seek out socialization for itself.
This limits their opportunities for socialization, reducing their opportunity for gaining skills in socialization.
...(b) A woman sends signals of romantic interest, either accidentally, or whimsically. I mistakenly assume that she's carefully deliberating over the possibility of dating me, as I would be in her position. I decide to express interest in her.
She hasn't been thinking about whether or not she'd like to date me at all, she was instead engaging in casual preliminary flirting and/or wasn't carefully guarding against accidentally sending signals of romantic interest. So from her point of view it looks like "This guy expressed romantic interest in me without
I think that's largely depends on whether you manage to be explicit enough about your reasoning so that people who haven't taken the social justice class can follow your reasoning.
There's inferential distance. If you just reiterate SJW talking points that's likely not well received. If you manage to get deep enough that you actually communicate new insights, that's appreciated.
I don't know what people usually mean when they say that nerds have poor social skills. But I say that nerd communities function worse than regular communities. It's not just that nerds don't know how to flirt with regular people, but nerds have great difficulty flirting with nerds.
I find it useful to have a conceptually explicit translation layer in some social interactions. Essentially, the meaning behind the words is often quite different from the literal words uttered and it's the job of the translation layer to figure out the former.
To riff off another thread, for whatever reason I don't have a problem pronouncing words "I don't know". But many people do. So if I ask someone a specific question and start getting some vaguely related bullshitty handwaving in response, the literal interpretation would be "He didn't ...
There is also something else going on here, which I realized after learning about personality types, especially Jung's theories and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. One dimension separates along the primary mode of seeing the world (Sensing vs iNtuitive), with the former ones collecting individual facts and strictly following isolated rules, and the latter ones always looking for the generalized principle behind the facts and questioning the origin and sense of rules.
These two types have a lot of trouble understanding each others' way of thinking and frequ...
However, it might be selection bias, real nerds indeed stay at home and don't even go to nerd communities.
Yes. I am unaware of the terminology used by young people, but some suggested that "real nerds" today are called "neckbeards" and as far as I can see they resemble what I and two classmates were at 16. We enjoyed each others company but even nerd culture i.e. a gaming shop was a bit too scary.
How to put it... it is not skills and not the classical "interaction drains the energies of introverts" thing. It is more like ...
It didn't occur to me how significant this was. The number of hours that I had is perhaps as small as the number of hours that most people have by age 10. In hindsight it's obvious: of course I didn't have good social skills relative to other adults, in the same way that a 10 year old doesn't have good social skills for an adult. I just hadn't put nearly enough time in!
Just out of curiosity - do you think that all other people who put massive amounts of time into socializing get benefits that are proportionate to the amount of time put in? From our poin...
It would be useful for this conversation to taboo the word "nerd" and stick to "nerd1" for "people with poor social skills" and "nerd2" for "people with a scientific, mathematics, or computing background who are into fantasy fiction, role-playing games and the like". (I was temped to say "dork" and "geek" instead.) And perhaps "normal1" for "people with decent social skills" and "normal2" for "people who are into mainstream hobbies such as football and television" (and "normal3" for "people with IQ within about one sigma of the average", etc.).
Just wanted to mention that I like this write-up, though I suspect that the only transferrable takeaway for many others struggling with similar issues would be
Focusing on understanding how one is similar to others and how one is different from others can be a better way to become socially aware than usual efforts to "develop social skills."
Bu the description of your meta-cognition process is hopefully encouraging enough for others to try to emulate.
I now have a deep understanding that there are many instances in which people appeared to be hostile toward me when their feelings weren't directed at me, instead they didn't know enough about what was going on in my mind to be able to see that I wasn't the person who they thought that I was.
... If somebody is angry at me and insults me, I know that it's not me who the person is insulting, it's instead the person's perception of me. So people can't hurt me anymore.
Great!
I will point out that I much more frequently see people giving similar, but 'revers...
I've developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way Martin Luther King were able to.
This is interesting. How do you know?
...(e) I say something that someone doesn't understand. I think "maybe the person needs more context," and follow up by giving more context. The person still doesn't understand, so I think "ok, I guess I have to give even more context" and so continue in the same direction. In fact, the amount of context that I would need to give for my point to be clear would take ~100 hours to convey, so that what I'm doing is actually not at all productive. The person perceives the situation as
Jonah is totally ignoring the fact that I'm not understand
edit: the tone of this post is angry, so you know. The anger is directed primarily at the paragraph I quote, which I consider utterly outrageous. It definitely spills over onto you also but I have nothing against you other than what spills over from this paragraph. I found your post had interesting insights in it otherwise. Anyway this post is pretty much an outraged rant so be warned.
Actually, here are the cliff notes because there were some objective things I identified.
teaching is a public performance role. dealing with customers complaints is literally...
With respect to gauging where people are coming from, one trap I've seen among smart people is to assume that who you are talking to is stupid based on a proxy, when it's easy to get better information.
To give an example, I'm an engineer and I see this sort of behavior relatively frequently from people who majored in physics, math, or computer science. Many of these people seem to believe that all engineers are stupid, or at the very least they see themselves as superior to engineers. After revealing that I'm an engineer, some of these people either stereo...
Hey Jonah, props on being so honest in writing this article. I can relate to pretty much everything that you wrote.
Look at where the interests come from! Usually they come from being ostracized and low-ranking as a kid. The Game of Life - competing for social status points, mating and so on - is generally the most exciting one plain simply because it is REAL. Those who lose it, being ostracized, dominated, bullied etc. take refugee in fantasy or intellectual interests. It is both an escapism and a way to rebuild the shattered ego, by claiming to be better than those by having more smarter or refined interests.
I know that it's not me who the person is insulting, it's instead the person's perception of me.
Where do you apply this knowledge?
Over here, my perception is that you somehow disagree with most of the field of education. (If that's false, you can probably think of a way to show us.) And of course, even if I knew who you were, it would be ridiculous for me to believe you over most other experts just because you have "knowledge of the subject" in the same way that many others do.
You could write a different comment, excoriating Less Wrong for tru...
So ... Should I understand that you're now talking about subjects you have no interest in ?
Or your final point is that you're working on talking about subjects you do have an interest in with more "sociality" (and I don't get why people would take it differently if the subjects are, as I perceive, not common) ?
Over the past few months, I've become aware that my understanding of social reality had been distorted to an extreme degree. It took 29 years for me to figure out what was going on, but I finally now understand.
The situation is very simple: The amount of time that I put into interacting within typical social contexts was very small, so I didn't get enough feedback to realize that I had a major blindspot as I otherwise would have.
Now that I've identified the blindspot, I can work on it, and my social awareness has been increasing at very rapid clip. I had no idea that I had so much potential for social awareness. I had been in a fixed mindset as rather than a growth mindset, I had thought "social skills will never be my strong point, so I shouldn't spend time trying to improve them, instead I should focus on what I'm best at." I'm astonished by how much my relationships have improved over a span of mere weeks.
I give details below.
I've been extremely metacognitive and reflective since early childhood, and have spent most of my time optimizing for my intellectual growth. Even as a child, the things that I thought about where very unusual: at age 7, upon reflection, I realized that there's no free will in the sense that people usually think of it: that brain chemistry drives our decisions in a very strong sense.
As I grew up, my interests became more and more remote from those of my peers, and the pool of conversation topics of mutual interest diminished rapidly as I got older. For this reason, I generally found my interactions with others to be very unfulfilling: other people were rarely interested in talking about what I wanted to talk about, and I struggled to find points of mutual interest.
Because I was much more unusual than most of my conversation partners, there was an implicit assumption that the responsibility of finding common ground fell exclusively on me, rather than being shared by me and my conversation partners. Even when I tried really hard to connect with my conversation partners, it often came across to my conversation partners though I wasn't trying, because our interests were so different that even if I bridged 95% of the gap, the remaining 5% was uncomfortably large for them, so that they would feel resentful toward me.
There were almost no people who shared my interests. So my choices seemed to be
In the subsequent intervening years I developed further and further in the direction of having deep insights about the world.a strong focus on abstraction and generality. I essentially never engaged in usual social activities. In college, almost all of my classmates would sit at tables in the cafeteria with their friends, and I would almost always sit alone. I almost never went to Less Wrong meetups, because I had already thought about most of what people discussed, so that it was more efficient for me to learn on my own.
I found these reminders of my isolation to be depressing, but didn't think much about it. In hindsight I see that I erred in not thinking about the situation more deeply.
I've found that Malcolm Gladwell's view that developing mastery of a field takes ~10,000 hours is largely true.
When people tell me that they were bad at calculus, my internal response had become "When I was learning calculus I spent ~20 hours a week on it. it's not at all surprising to me that you wouldn't become good at calculus without having done so, independently of whether or not you had the ability to."
How many many hours had I spent socializing by age 29? Lots, but almost exclusively with a small handful of people who are very unusual in the same ways that I am. When I was in a group conversation, I would usually find the conversation uninteresting, and let my mind wander, without attempting to participate myself. Thinking it over, I probably spent less than 5% as much time participating in usual social contexts as other 29 year olds had by the same age.
It didn't occur to me how significant this was. The number of hours that I had is perhaps as small as the number of hours that most people have by age 10. In hindsight it's obvious: of course I didn't have good social skills relative to other adults, in the same way that a 10 year old doesn't have good social skills for an adult. I just hadn't put nearly enough time in!
Throughout my life, I've yearned for companionship, and have had a strong desire to contribute to global welfare. Up until the past year, I was extremely socially isolated, and my positive social impact was utterly negligible. This gave rise to a huge amount of cognitive dissonance. As Eliezer wrote:
I keep trying to say that rationality is the winning-Way [...] Be careful [...] any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.
If I cared so much about connecting people and about contributing to global welfare, then why wasn't I getting anything done?
My theory of mind was based on my knowledge of my own mind (c.f. Yvain's post Generalizing From One Example). I engage almost exclusively in metacognition and deep reflection. I therefore had no reference frame for what other people are like: I projected my own style of thinking on the people who I interacted with. The effect of this was that I became a figurative space alien, almost totally out of touch with the rest of the human race.
My implicit model of other people's minds was along the lines "everyone always has access to a transcript of all conversations that we've ever had at his or her disposal." This probably seems loony, and rightly so. I was very focused on carefully organizing my interactions with everyone in my mind. It just didn't occur to me that my conversations partners weren't doing the same thing! My subjective sense of what was going on in my conversation partners' mind turns out to have usually been completely different from what was actually going on in my conversation partners' mind.
Some of my common self destructive patterns of behavior were:
(a) "Person X expresses insecurity over Y. I spend several dozen hours contemplating how to reassure person X. I then broach the subject with person X without offering any background context, assuming that person X knows that I'm following up on a specific conversation thread from several weeks ago, and wants to continue the conversation about the subject. In person X's eyes, it looks like I'm bringing up a triggering subject for no reason, and person X develops an Ugh Field around me, of the type "when I talk to Jonah, he says things that make me feel bad, so I don't want to talk with him anymore."
My reaction to this was "this is so weird, these people are really touchy, such that they're unable to have conversations about topics that they themselves bring up. How is it even possible for people to have conversations given how touchy they are?"
I didn't know that when someone brings up a sensitive subject, that's not necessarily an invitation to talk about it, and that they didn't realize that I was responding to something that they had said weeks ago.
(b) A woman sends signals of romantic interest, either accidentally, or whimsically. I mistakenly assume that she's carefully deliberating over the possibility of dating me, as I would be in her position. I decide to express interest in her.
She hasn't been thinking about whether or not she'd like to date me at all, she was instead engaging in casual preliminary flirting and/or wasn't carefully guarding against accidentally sending signals of romantic interest. So from her point of view it looks like "This guy expressed romantic interest in me without paying attention to how I'm feeling." She reactively reprimands me, or cuts contact with me, usually with connotations (even if slight) that I might not respect her boundaries.
I mistakenly think that she had carefully deliberated on how to respond to my expression of romantic interest. So I mistakenly perceive the false dichotomy:
Both of these possibilities are extremely upsetting, and I fall into severe depression, totally oblivious to the fact that she was behaving in a reactive way and that her reaction is neither evidence that I'm a potential rapist, nor evidence that she doesn't mind me feeling like a potential rapist.
(c) A lot of things that people find offensive I don't find at all offensive. For example, if a student tells me that I'm the worst teacher he or she has ever had, it makes me feel bad because I feel like I'm not contributing value, but I'm not at all upset with the student: my attitude is that the student is conveying valuable information to me, and that I should be appreciative.
I always knew that it's best to soften such things, but I didn't know how triggering unexpected criticism is – I didn't know that far more gentle remarks can be triggering for most people.
So I might tell a friend:
My conversation partner might respond to this "Look Jonah, you're very confused, you're not the only good person in the world!", because what's salient is "I'm the only good person in the world", not "I used to be confused and mistakenly believed..."
I mistakenly interpret the situation as "people are so obsessed with status that they're totally blind to anything that's not a status grab," when the person doesn't actually have any way of knowing what I was trying to say, because my strong focus on general principles is so unusual.
(e) I say something that someone doesn't understand. I think "maybe the person needs more context," and follow up by giving more context. The person still doesn't understand, so I think "ok, I guess I have to give even more context" and so continue in the same direction. In fact, the amount of context that I would need to give for my point to be clear would take ~100 hours to convey, so that what I'm doing is actually not at all productive. The person perceives the situation as
Jonah is totally ignoring the fact that I'm not understanding what I'm saying, and keeps going on and on about the same thing, oblivious to my feelings
because he or she has no way of knowing that I'm explicitly trying to address the fact that the person is uncomfortable about not understanding.
(f) I mistakenly believe that when people are unhappy with me, they'll tell me, because I know that I wouldn't be offended, and because I'm so verbal that I relate a very large fraction of my thoughts when I talk with someone.
So people will smile and show superficial indications of good will while being unhappy with me, and I have no idea what's going on.
If you've followed what I've said so far, it's probably not hard to understand how my misunderstandings would almost totally nullify my ability to contribute to global welfare :-).
(a) Learning data science resulted in a huge boost to my intellectual caliber – the ways of thinking about the world that I developed are very powerful, and confer an advantage of the same magnitude as learning about selection effects and regression to the mean.
After this, even my closest friends could no longer understand what I was talking about, and told me as much, and I realized "Ok, I have some sort of serious blindspot, my intuitive sense is that people are understanding me when they're not, I need to figure out what's going on.
(b) A relative who's a salesman gave me very helpful advice after I had been rejected from a large number of jobs that I interviewed for explaining "When somebody asks you a question, you're giving answers that are way too long and you're not gauging where your interviewers are coming from. When they ask for you to describe your project, they're looking for a 1-2 minute response, not a ~6 minute response – from their perspective you're hijacking the conversation and talking about something that they're not interested in.
After this, I paid closer attention to my interviewers' body language and how they were directing the conversation, and I saw that he had been right.
I recently got very helpful explicit feedback from students that made me realize that I was on a totally different wavelength from the students, when I had no idea that that was the case.
(c) I started socializing more with people who are similar to me on dimensions other than the one that this post is about, and this resulted in me getting more useful feedback, because they could understand me more deeply than most people who had gotten upset with me for no apparent reason
(d) Learning data science made me realize that I could use the Wisdom of the Crowds to tease out what the common problem was in all of my interactions with people. It wasn't easy: the different instances were superficially totally different. It's not at all a priori clear what the two things
have in common. But learning data science gave me new ways of thinking about the world that enabled me to see the underlying pattern.
Figuring out what was going on has enabled me to improve my relationships with my family members, patch up relationships with friends who I alienated earlier in life, and interact more productively with people who I've just met.
(a) Focusing on understanding how one is similar to others and how one is different from others can be a better way to become socially aware than usual efforts to "develop social skills."
I knew that people thought I had bad social skills, but they weren't able to explain the situation to me in a way that I could understand, because they were totally misinterpreting me, on account of not knowing what was going on in my mind. So almost everything that they said about my social skills seemed wrong – they would claim that I didn't care about people's feelings, to which my response was along the lines "What are you talking about? I spend dozens of hours thinking about my friends' feelings."
They didn't have the information that they would have needed to help me: they didn't know that they needed to say "I know that you're thinking a lot about people's feelings as they appear to you from the outside, but you're not thinking about people's actual feelings: you can't assume that you know what's going on in their minds, you have to carefully feel out the situation."
(b) Finally figuring out what was going on corresponds to a huge boost in potential productivity: I finally have nontrivial prospects of transforming from
"The guy who has deep insights but who doesn't get anything done, because he he's socially dysfunctional so nobody listens to him"
to
"The guy who has deep insights and can use them to change the world"
(c) I now have realistic prospects for having a romantic relationship, which was not the case before.
My past attitude had been "The emotional cost of going through yet another traumatic experience of a woman getting angry at me for telling her that I love her isn't worth it. Even if I were able to make a favorable impression, I wouldn't want to date a woman who would hurt me so much just because I approached her in the wrong way."
Now I see that the women in question had no idea what was going on, so I can work on improving my communication skills. Once I get to the point of being able to communicate clearly, I can plausibly have a happy relationship.
(d) The experience made clear to me the extent to which the people who had appeared to be hostile toward me weren't hostile toward me, they were instead hostile toward their construal of me. They wouldn't have been at all hostile if they and known what was going on in my mind.
I had always known on some level that this was true, but I didn't feel it. I now have a deep understanding that there are many instances in which people appeared to be hostile toward me when their feelings weren't directed at me, instead they didn't know enough about what was going on in my mind to be able to see that I wasn't the person who they thought that I was.
I've developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way Martin Luther King was able to. If somebody is angry at me and insults me, I know that it's not me who the person is insulting, it's instead the person's perception of me. So people can't hurt me anymore. Instead my response is "let me try to understand where the person is coming from, and help the person understand where I'm coming from."
This has made my life so much better than it had been before. I understand intuitively that Martin Luther King wasn't some sort of god, that he was human like you and me, and that the human race has the capacity to shift in his direction, and be much happier than we are now.