Social Skills

[2024-06-13 Thu]

  1. It seems like a lot of people are very averse to confrontation and therefore providing negative feedback.

  2. This is problematic because this means that you are now in a position where you need information to figure out what is a good way to co-ordinate with them, but you do not know their preferred norms

  3. Here are some heuristics

    1. Leave the place (kitchen, bathroom, etc.) as clean or cleaner than when you arrived

      1. Anthropic evidence of other people's preferences

      2. Cleaner is usually better too, since that adds tolerance to the co-ordination metric

    2. Observe how people do things in common areas (such as cleaning the kitchen, or how they deal with noise) and imitate them.

      1. You could also ask them how they do things instead of asking how they prefer you do things, since they'll tell you polite untruths.

  4. I guess you could call this anti-inductive

  5. In non-adverserial conditions, it seems like just asking for feedback works (but people are loath to give it by default)

    1. For example, I recently learned to cross-check my tea / cafe orders with the staff because they'll 'happily' roll with whatever order you provide even if it wouldn't make sense to them (such as oolong tea with a very sweet chocolate avocado cake, which I actually ordered today at a tea house).

    2. Also, asking for recommendations is also a sensible thing you can do

      1. This usually works with service staff (people whose job is to help other people), and it probably isn't a good idea with normal people, unless you do the usual social ritual signalling to make the interaction more amenable and less defensive / uncertain / scary for them (and you also approach the sort of people who will likely help you)

    3. This reminds me of advice that goes something like: "Just ask!" or something equally dumb

      1. All the important parts of the advice is implicit and not communicated, because it relies so much on social understanding, social norms, local social real-time reading of what is going on such that you know whether it makes sense to "Just ask!" or not, etc.

      2. Being autistic is not fun