Comment by nyx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nyx | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what kinds of people benefit from writeups like this. Maybe I'm deceiving myself, but I feel as though I'm a pretty good conversationalist, despite not having much of an in-person social life in my formative years. The suggestions in articles like this one always seem pretty obvious to me.

Are there people out there who read this and realize "oh crap, I interrupt too much," or "huh, I should try to be more aware of the other person's interest level before infodumping on them"? My hunch is that people who might genuinely benefit from these suggestions are, to put it bluntly, generally too poorly socialized to even recognize that their behavior could use the adjustment.

A demographic I could see benefiting more from this kind of thing are the obsessive-optimizer class of folks who interact with others in a cynical, How-to-Win-Friends kind of way, and who see social interactions with fellow humans as something to be min-maxed. I'm sure those people are over-represented on orangesite, so this might be controversial, but I don't think that doing an intentional post-mortem on every social interaction you have is any way to live.

A younger me benefited from articles like this.

I would talk to people but felt like there was a barrier. The back and forth would fall dead. Conversations with me didn't flow as well as it did between other people.

At some point I came across advice like this -- specifically being told to ask more questions.

What a godsend.

I realized many of my conversations followed a simple pattern-- I'd be asked a question, I'd answer, maybe a tangent, conversation lulled, I'd feel asking a question would be rude, conversation ended.

I knew something was wrong in my conversations, but someone had to point at a specific thing to improve

There are both kinds. You are on to something, in that those who 'need' this advice are those for who it will be hardest to 'walk along the line'. But still, yes. Those who are still stuck outside the door even after many years, are precisely those that for one reason or another, have no clue where to find the relevant keys. A few days ago I saw someone lamenting, that their kid had learnt to use caps lock as shift (but never shift itself), and now the kid was reluctant to 'switch to using shift', since his mental mode had formed around caps lock. People will get stuck in all kinds of local minima, and settle for 'well it's worked that way.. for me', no matter how strange it may appear to a passing observer.

Another angle is that asperger people (I have no idea what I'm 'allowed' to call us) seem to lack some of the normal brain 'wiring' that you use to implement the above. To the extent we want to learn to ape/mimic those behaviours, yes, we need to be told about them :-/

People are also wired differently. My wife is neurotypical (?) in this regard, but our daughter is wired like me, and if she's ever going to pick up on any of this, someone is going to have to walk her through it - a lot. Preferably at a point when she has realized she is missing a color or two, because currently none of this is intuitive to her. It's like explaining colors to a blind person.

There is probably a small subset of people who will, but a much larger subset who would not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com