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Comment by totalrobe | Hacker News Reader

I think all individuals have to build social skills to bring to towards 'socially normal', and it varies from where on the spectrum they started. Very outgoing and empathetic people have to learn to tone it down and vice versa.

It seems to me like the author became very self-conscious to the point of anxiety, which is not a healthy opposite of autistic.

Possibly because he simply hadn't needed them yet, he hadn't learned to build the emotional defenses that most folks use to navigate the complex social web that is life.

Scott Adams explains this better than I can, but the most balanced people are selfish enough to guard their own emotional well-being while still being available enough to positively influence others.

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"I think all individuals have to build social skills to bring to towards 'socially normal', and it varies from where on the spectrum they started".

That's my observation, too. When I was a teen I would completely rebel against any kind of conformity, especially against the idea of "socially expected" behaviour.

However by my 20's I ended up learning that sometimes what is socially expected is expected exactly because it's the smartest thing to do in that situation.

Funny how these things work out.

> However by my 20's I ended up learning that sometimes what is socially expected is expected exactly because it's the smartest thing to do in that situation.

Perhaps you should develop some kind of mathematical model (say, some kind of proof calculus) for computing what is the smartest thing to do, so that teenager in the future can derive mathematical correctness proofs that it really is the best (in a mathematical sense) to do so that they can invest their hate of conformity into things that are much more worth it.

This was literally the funniest thing that I've read on HN so far. Took me a few minutes to stop laughing.

Reminded me of the time Russell tried to reduce all language to logic, only to be thwarted by a rebellious twenty-something Austrian who claimed that all logic was tautology.

So I think if those teens were really that rebellious then they might try something similar with my social-calculus.

But still, it sounds like a fun exercise. "What are the primitive elements of a social interaction?" Hmmm :)

This was not meant to be funny. I was rebellious (in my own kind) in my teenager years and still am (in a different way). What I found out is that because I didn't know lots of things I wasted my enegy in my teenager years on some wrong things (but also on some right things). Why? Because there are lots of things that they won't teach you in school - yes, the school curriculum is some kind of gouvernment brain washing. I wish I had known them before.

Of course I could say: Teach your children this and this. But times will change and knowledge will change, too. But the more abstract and general it is, the longer it stays correct. Thus my idea to formalize it as an abstract proof calculus.

Oh! Sorry, I didn't mean to misunderstand. The reason I found it funny was because it reminded me of something a close friend would say, because that's exactly the sort of thing that I'm into.

I'm totally with you on the whole "wasted a lot of time in my youth pursuing unsuccessful paths" thing. And looking back, yeah, it's the stuff that the adults/authority figures in your youth don't tell you that really throws you off. So many times in the ten years that I've left school I've had those "aha" moments, and then I thought "well, that would've been pretty useful to know a decade ago". And the annoying thing is, is realizing that there were people my age who already knew that thing back then, due to a slightly different upbringing. It would be nice to minimize that sort of unpredictable randomness from the process.

Do you want to chat more about this off-site? I think we could come up with some interesting ideas between the two of us!

  >> This was literally the funniest thing that
  >> I've read on HN so far.
  >
  > This was not meant to be funny.

As an outsider reading the comments as they arrived, it felt like a slow motion train wreck. Initially I read wolfgke's proposal as straight forward, although after tangled_zan's response I was less sure. It seemed like a delicious irony in the context of a thread about overcoming the difficulty of reading other's intents.

In the spirit of Teen Talk Barbie (http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/21/business/company-news-matt...) allow me to say "Communication is hard!". Your polite recovery on both sides, though, is something all should aspire to.

Thanks for the compliment!

Yeah, I did not intend for my "this was funny" comment in a negative light, it was a genuinely fun thing to read.

I often wish that more people came up to me with proposal of developing domain specific formal systems, so when it actually happened in reality, I was a bit taken offguard by the unexpectedness of it :P

For some people, it is just as important to know why something is true as it is to know something is true.

> Perhaps you should develop some kind of mathematical model (say, some kind of proof calculus) for computing what is the smartest thing to do

Quick sanity check: should this logic be powerful enough to prove every true fact about natural number arithmetic? ;)

> Quick sanity check: should this logic be powerful enough to prove every true fact about natural number arithmetic? ;)

I'm very pragmatic: If such a proof calculus is able to prove useful things, it serves its purpose. If someone found out that there is a deep connection to, say, natural number arithmetic, I would, of course, be very delighted. I personally think it's much more realistic to expect that connections to rather different mathematical topics will be found first: For example many people have contradictory opinions at the same time. If by such a calculus we had a model with strong predictive power how humans resolve such ambiguities by emotions, this could lead to a leap in developing artificial agents that work in an environment with contradictory data. Or to a development of a theory of error-correcting codes for data that is much more highly structured than words over some alphabet.

But one never knows...

Heh heh, I see what you did there ;)

Sounds suspiciously like you grew up.

I think the concept is healthy narcissism. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_narcissism

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