Hacker News Reader

Comment by StefanKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious how obvious vs non-obvious social positioning like this is to people here. It all feels fairly obvious and intuitive to me, but I suspect some of the lessons have been learned over time and didn’t actually come built in but were learned gradually through observation. Thinking back on it, it was probably in my mid 20s that I started paying conscious attention to how body positioning affects people socially and making efforts to make sure that everyone is physically included in conversations. Now I am acutely aware of it all the time.

View on HN

Japanese business culture has an almost absurdly heightened sensitivity to positioning, diction, and body language.

I've heard of people getting upset about the ordering of email addresses in messages (this was a successful law firm where ordering was supposed to be based on "rank").

This is a real thing. I’ve experienced it myself. I tried to explain that the email client may reorder them, etc.

Zero knowledge about this, but I'd absolutely love to know more if you can suggest any sources. Or is it one of those unsaid things that one comes to know?

My main resource is Japanese TV, which is unfortunately hard to see outside Japan. They have quiz shows that are meant to train jobseekers on how to behave and maximize their chances. It’s right down to details like which seat to take in the waiting area before your meeting, where and when to sit in a conference room, whether or not to accept a drink offer, how to knock on a door, how to close a door behind you, etc.

It's also very interesting to me how so much of this stuff about body language is now shrouded in, well, if not "shame", then at least embarrassment. All because the pick-up artist community has relentlessly focused on body language as some magical panacea to anyone's romantic woes.

This is one of the few blog posts I've read that talks about body language from a purely social perspective.

I wish there was more content like this on social norms, extroversion, and social signalling that didn't go at all into strange PUA themes.

Glad you like the subject. I obviously think it's an underrated yet fascinating and rewarding area to focus one's attention, otherwise I wouldn't be writing these things.

Pick up without the stink is a mantra for the blog. I got the idea from a blog post with a catchy title on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RZrw9wpEWEwWRTzLk/more-art-l...

I think it just takes exposure and experience, and some people have had more than others. In my experience becoming accomplished requires repeated interactions with a large but rather stable social environment, where >5% of the people you encounter in a day (or evening) will be familiar to you and the rest loosely connected. That forces a person's reputation as a valued and testable trait over time. It also rewards making new social connections as they are likely to connect back to existing relationships.

It's a skill that you develop. Like bodybuilding or anything else where you can physically see differences, some people will have natural dispositions towards certain directions, but that's like, responsible differences at the .1%. It's a skill, like math aptitude, or abstract thinking. If you do it a lot, you will develop it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com