Tact Filters (1996)
mit.edu
mit.edu
Think of IPS like it was a school subject. If you are learning maths slower than everyone else then when it is time to move on to multiplication you are still trying to get the hang of carrying the tens in addition. To catch up you have to go faster than everyone else, but that isn't possible. Now you have to leave addition and start doing multiplication, and you still haven't got the hang of addition, without which multiplication doesn't make sense. Pretty soon you are floundering in a mess of abstractions built on other abstractions that you don't understand, and it all goes downhill from there.
Of course there are remedial classes for maths, reading etc. They help a lot; sometimes some dedicated tuition can pin down the specific issue and deal with it. But there are no remedial classes for IPS; the slow learner is left to sink or swim on their own.
If you fail to get the hang of IPS when you start school the process is very similar to failing elementary arithmetic. You can't understand why everyone else is doing the things they are doing, or what they mean when they say things. So you get excluded by classmates during break, which means that you don't learn new IPS. And when you do catch on to something you do it wrong, or you don't realise that it's what everyone was doing last year, so now its considered childish. So you stay excluded, always wondering what the magic words are that will let you break into the social circle. Eventually you reach adulthood, and you still don't know this stuff. You are like someone who managed to get through school without learning to read (still happens, sadly), and now finds themselves being shouted at by the boss for not bothering to read the instructions.
It's called Therapy. Unfortunately they will try to teach it covertly because "normal" people can't take direct constructive criticism of their behavior.
I imagine it would be more like a class where every project is a group project but you're required to not either slack off or do it all yourself, and your grades depend on how much the rest of team enjoyed working with you, maybe. That's still limited to "work social skills" vs "personal life social skills," though.
Child psychologists will do this. (not all, and not all the time of course)
I said they do it covertly. They laugh at your joke? It might be they find it funny, or it could be they are offering positive feedback for you making an attempt at appropriate social behavior. They use non-verbal feedback all the time to encourage or discourage things, which can make their behavior very strange at times until you realize what's happening. If you call them out on what they're doing they are very likely to gaslight you and deny your perceptions.
It gets really fun when they try to use an extinction schedule and politely dismiss something as uninteresting that would otherwise be at least on "oh that's nice".
Bullshit, these are some of the aspects of therapy that I call bullshit and can actually be harmful to "clients".
The therapist is not your friend. They will not give you useful advice that makes them feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable. They do not care about you.
I don't advocate it. Not at all. Just pointing out that it exists. The field has a lot of huge problems that need to be overcome IMHO. As you say, they tend to be of a particular political persuasion (or forced to accept things), and are taught/told that they can still handle any type of client (which is just self serving on their part).
I use language transactionally as a command and interrogation method, which rubs people the wrong way. If you're the boss that's ok. If you're dependent on people that's not going to work. It is what it is, I can be obsequious if needed but it's gonna make me stupid due to computational resource constraints. People would say I'm a sociopath but I'm really nice. My empathy is turned up to 1000% so I'm very sensitive to other's emotional states oddly, though I have the coarsest ability to make others feel better, and it usually backfires.
Anyway if I can figure it out it certainly can be done and there's probably a book about how to do it.
I have just always erred on the side of either being my own boss through self employment and an in-demand skill, or early on by working jobs that require extreme competency or that had a fast pace. I definitely understand exactly what you mean with transactional language and command/interrogation (I ask people to rephrase things alot when I want to confirm what they are trying to get across but aren't directly stating it).
It's been done. There are many, many books about it. They're not explicitly about teaching social skills though. They're about a specific subgoal of socialising that is common and deeply felt, which generalises to more or less all of social life.
You're not a sociopath, you're autistic. Welcome to the club.
It's often not part of formal school instruction, but there are social skills classes available, at least for children. Typically through ocupational/behavioral therapists.
The classes themselves have a lot in common with both anger management and conflict resolution pedagogy, in that the method was mostly to build skills by practicing explicit, step-by-step processes until they converted into intuition.
I have to say, I participated grudgingly when I was younger, but with a few decades' hindsight I think the classes have given me a long-term advantage over my peers; rather than a house of cards built on habit and intuition, my habits and intuitions are built onto an explicit framework that I can readily integrate new social skills into.
Therefore, being "good" at socializing is extremely contextual. People speak of having a different personality when they speak a foreign language. This is a predictable outcome, since without total fluency, they will neither speak nor listen with identical competence.
And this also means that a group like a high school class can have a nominal social order, but it's premised on popular appreciation, which molds a certain "type" into the cool kids - the ones who actively work on appealing to a broad "teen audience" in their communication. After getting a little bit of an edge, it self-reenforces and becomes what that class knows to appreciate, at which point the cool kid's performance skills don't actually have to progress much further and they can just coast along the wave through graduation.
It's more often people who can't be appreciated in what they're doing yet(immaturity from their classmates, lack of direction from parents and teachers, unusual thought patterns etc.) who get the "outcast" label. For the most part, they are not "bad" at socialising, they're just tuned differently.
And so if you go to a gathering assuming "actually, maybe everyone is pretty bad at communicating on average" and then look for ways to fill in gaps according to their filters and preferences, the doors can open really fast. It just takes a lot of knowing oneself to succeed, since your ability to adapt style can only go so far - you're better off giving an amazing performance in the communication styles you're good at than a mediocre one in a popular, more competitive style.
If you want to go on a diet, there are countless books/journals/courses that will help you out. If you want to exercise, or learn to draw, or to play chess, or any other skill, there's abundance of support and information.
But if you're nerdy and socially awkward, it's hard to get any mentorship/support without being labeled a creep. You're on your own, you either have to "get" it naturally (by having good parents, happy childhood, etc), or be shamed into staying away from the attractive and socially well-adjusted people.
Some of the most life-changing learning resources I've ever encountered (like RSD) are very difficult to recommend to people, so it's harder to help out the guys who are struggling the way I used to.
Compared to OP: For those who prefer tactful statements: using 'tact' and avoiding speaking directly avoids 'demonstrating superiority'; but tact-less statements would appear to be 'demonstrating superiority'. But for those who prefer information, adding tact just dilutes and slows things down.
If you spent twenty years being called a "smart kid" and then went to a job where all the smart kids end up, then you may have a rock-solid self-image. That gives you a certain amount of immunity to tactless comments. It also gives you the confidence to make tactless comments.
On the other hand, not all the people you want to work with grew up that way or have that kind of self-image. In order to avoid hurting people around you, you should learn to speak tactfully.
I think what happened is just that nerds care about speaking directly. There are also a number of types of neurodiversity over-represented in nerds, such as autism, ADHD, and social anxiety disorders.
Speaking tactfully naturally takes extra time. An autistic person would not pick up on the necessary social cues in order to speak tactfully. Someone with ADHD may be irritated by the interruption and want to get back to work. Someone with social anxiety may just want to leave the interaction.
Yet, in spite of this, there are plenty of nerds who care about tact, and make an effort to consider other people's feelings when they talk. The effort is appreciated.
This is, of course, why we programmers are famous for the delight we take in coding on a whiteboard in front of a large audience; the comfortable ease with which we talk to beautiful members of the opposite sex; and the fact none of us have ever been described as shy :)
That's some pretty strong self-image of the "I'm a smart kid" sort.
The problem is Product demanding estimates, not my ability to estimate in the midst of uncertainty and ask questions to reduce it.
The problem is Java, C, or whatever "legacy" technology is being used. Despite the fact that the whole world runs on it.
Growing up as a smart kid interested in computers from 1976-1996 was a very different experience than the same from 2001-2021.
In other words, revenge of the nerds. Every toy out there is now STEM in some way (either in actuality or in branding), and everyone realizes that tech is more likely to make money.
Are you a nerd? I ask because it's extremely risky to speculate about how the minds of people of a type that you're not, work. That's precisely the problem we nerds have trying to understand non-nerds: their minds work differently and we don't understand how, at least not instinctively; we have to laboriously build up such understanding by hand, and we get reminded constantly of how limited our understanding is even after we've spent years building it up.
> If you spent twenty years being called a "smart kid" and then went to a job where all the smart kids end up, then you may have a rock-solid self-image. That gives you a certain amount of immunity to tactless comments. It also gives you the confidence to make tactless comments.
If you qualify all three of these sentences with "around other nerds", then they are true. But, at least in my own personal experience, they're not true without the qualifier.
Food for thought: remember the studies that showed that kids who were told they were smart did less well on subsequent tests than kids who were told they had made a great effort? That's because "smart", at least the way we instinctively parse that word, is something not under our control. When someone tells me I'm "smart", I don't feel more confident, because "smart" is something I don't control; I can't command myself to be smart, the way I can command myself to make a concerted effort. So being told all the time that you're a smart kid doesn't actually improve your self-image.
What does improve your self-image if you're a nerd is being told that some problem solution you came up with is right--provided it comes from someone whose opinion you expect to be right, such as another nerd or a teacher. Having that happen often as you're growing up does give you a lot of confidence when you're trying to solve the next problem. But that only works in an environment where correct solutions are the measure of value, i.e., around other nerds.
> I think what happened is just that nerds care about speaking directly.
That's true, but it's really just a side effect of the fact that nerds care about actually solving problems. Which implies that the best way to get a nerd to learn how to be tactful is to point out that doing so can help them to solve a problem: namely, how to cooperate effectively with non-nerds to get something useful accomplished.
The inbound tact filter, in fact, is just the same sort of thing, but applied to interacting with other nerds. Nerds know that other nerds don't apply tact in the outbound direction, because they're too concerned with communicating accurate information to muddy it up with tact filters. But we nerds also know from experience that nobody, including us, likes to be told they're wrong, or that something they've worked hard on isn't done yet and needs more work. So we apply the inbound tact filter as a hack around our own emotions as much as anything else--to get us past the initial emotional reaction and on to actually solving the problem. At least, that's my experience.
I don't think they're that strongly correlated, and the correlation that exists may just come from the fact that people with both no-tact filter and high intolerance of tactlessness are so undesirable to work with that you won't find them in many populations due to selection.
People of reasonable emotional intelligence can work with tactless people and they can work with fragile people, but being asked to work with a tactless fragile person is asking for quite a bit more. :)
Even more, you can get a person who's always asserting dominance and they either rise to the very top or fall to the very bottom. Which is to say, there's a certain porousness between emotionally incompetent and "just being dick".
"but being asked to work with a tactless fragile person is asking for quite a bit more. :)"
No one can work with a tactless, fragile person. But plenty of people for tactless, fragile people.
This is because most of us will try to understand other people from their own perspectives. This is the case even when one tries to put themselves in other's shoes -- it often fall short because one simply doesn't have other's shoes.
Unfortunately, decades of eternal September seem to have washed many of those lessons away. With the rise of professional trolls, and the inherent instinct to make a scene of some, now we have people trying to offend on one side, and people trying to get offended on the other... while they're both trying to be the loudest and drown out everyone else.
As a natural nerd, took me 5+ years of unintentionally offending people at work to figure out the same lesson. Turns out nerds are somewhat overrepresented in early startups, but the trend doesn’t hold as companies grow!
Another general takeaway from this is “tailor your communication to your audience”. If they’re in marketing, you could talk about a project in terms of the potential conversion lift. If they’re engineers, maybe emphasizing how the same project improves dev speed is more valuable.
In tactless mode there is little space for manipulation, misrepresentation, and other kinds of bullshit.
In tactless mode coercion cannot be sugarcoated, becomes overt, imposing a much higher social cost on the one attempting it.
All in all, tactless communication is much more efficient and clear, this is why it is used, e.g., in the military.
The wrong way is to get impatient with their attempts at tact and act as if they would given additional time and patience, be more manipulative. This assumes that manipulation requires more space & time because it is highly intentional. In my experience, most manipulative speech is a fast emotional (perhaps system 1) reaction to a situation where a fearful speaker is desperately trying to establish control of the outcome of an interaction. It often strives to protect the speaker’s own ego.
Tact is exerting the mental effort to be clear about what one is not trying to say about someone else's ego while being clear about what one is trying to say about the facts of a situation. If you try to get others to be tactless by impatience, their fact-clarity will drop alongside their ego-preservation.
So if you wish another to speak with less tact, the right way to do that is to set them at ease by saying things that indicate you have a low ego attachment to the topic and that you are willing to re-think your own beliefs. Then, they can redirect their mental RAM to creating increased fact-clarity.
In short: Send signals that you are in "scout mindset" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MYEtQ5Zdn8.
I'm fine dealing with respectful tactlessness, but what can grind my gears is when others demand more information or work from you without showing they know what they're asking of you, or at least that they're willing to provide anything in return.
For example, sometimes people simply ask "why didn't you do it such-and-such way?" which takes very little effort on their part -- it seems to me it should be their job to compare their idea to the proposed/existing design rather than mine, unless they offer well-thought-out reasons, or otherwise have a good track record of being insightful.
Something related to this fallacy is something I saw on HN years ago, about how in the feminist movement flat hierarchies ended up having a hidden power structure, which in many ways is worse than when the power structure is formalized. I guess there's some value in "RTFM," so long as whoever says this knows it's in the FM (unfortunately many times it's not).
Is probably the article you are thinking of.
> Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
Tact Filters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789364 - July 2011 (1 comment)
How people form their messages and how they interpret incoming ones is way more complex.
If it was an outright lack of emotional intelligence or social skills, either nerds wouldn’t get on with each other, or only nerds would, depending on which group you think is lacking.