Hacker News Reader

Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

Part of being truly social (and being emotionally mature) is to understand and apply the difference between manipulation and being mindful about behavior and speech. Same as honesty - honesty doesn't need to be brutal honesty. One can be authentic without being hurtful.

>Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation

Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.

The actual meta-skill that is being developed by maturing emotionally and using soft skills appropriately (for the benefit of the situation and the participants, not for manipulation) is tact. Same as how people learn to apply just a little pressure when handling glassware, and a lot of pressure when lifting a heavy weight.

This is addressed by the author here:

https://www.improveyoursocialskills.com/foundations/social-m...

View on HN

> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.

The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.

I think if someone is already not taken by any of their inner things entirely, then they are already doing this regulation thing. The social skills that are described in the article (and soft skills in general) are just a next step on the same path, focusing on getting along, rather than completely internal regulation.

I too have wildly different area of interest, level of interest, and approach to things than most people around me do. Soft skills helped me to connect anyways, for at least two reasons:

1. With them I can approach, and connect to the interest of others.

2. I can explain to people my interest, and make it more interesting to them as well.

Also, these are not for all time, all the time. The healthy thing is to vary the guardedness in different contexts. The flexibility in this is a skill in itself, and again, something that connects to, and can raise, emotional intelligence.

There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.

Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".

>"first of all, you need to not be yourself"

Yes, that seems part of it, as long as all you know is "yourself without social skills". With social skills, and leaving some of that "yourself" behind, you will discover that don't just change, or reduce yourself, in a social setting, but become more yourself as a whole. The very definition of "yourself" changes, broadens because of this added experience.

Right. You don't need to be fake; but you need to be in control of yourself. Aware, mindful, and civilized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com