My stages of learning to be a socially normal person • Hacker News Board

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#191

Post by tomhow » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:19 AM UTC

guy2345 wrote: post #125

collingreen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we find it distasteful to have things we're fully aware of explicitly spelled out. A trite quip here is "nobody wants to see how the sausage is made".

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#192

Post by phantasmish » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:19 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #189

etangent wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Except because they are not conscious about it, we give them a pass. One of the characteristics of autistic-spectrum individuals is that they must make a conscious effort to achieve goals that are achieved unconsciously by most of u…

> A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Except because they are not conscious about it, we give them a pass. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to what’s describe in this blog post. The writer describes taking on different personas and trying different tricks with other people portrayed as subjects of some sort of experiment. The casual mentions of how they tried so…

> The writer describes taking on different personas and trying different tricks with other people portrayed as subjects of some sort of experiment.

It’s typically not done quite so intentionally, but this sounds like most folks’ junior high and high school years. Sometimes also college.

I know I totally changed in those years, and it was mostly by noticing what “worked” and leaning into it.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#193

Post by mewpmewp2 » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:25 AM UTC

mcdeltat wrote: post #174

zozbot234 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely be charming towards people and play the "game" of social interaction while being quite aware that this is what you're doing. The point is that this need not involve outright lying or BS at all and that the latter is what such terms as "manipulation" actually imply in a very practical sense; not that it somehow counts against you if you're aware of what's happening at a pure level of social interact…

Fair point about lying. I agree, outright lying is not ethical and would be more manipulative, I agree. Is the author lying?

Looking at the definition of manipulation, it occurs to me that manipulation must be a win-lose situation. Otherwise it is persuasion. You could use the same technique, but if it is win win for both it is persuasion, but if you are gaining from their expense it is manipulation. At least according to Wikipedia.

There are also white lies. Are you manipulating children if you are claiming santa exists? Are you manipulating a person if you either omit a truth or do a white lie because you know truth at that moment in time would be worse for their life.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#194

Post by mewpmewp2 » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #169

mcdeltat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for the same set of actions, it's fine if you're unaware of the underlying mechanisms, and manipulation if you are aware? If you dig through the weeds of it you can argue just about everything we do socially is manipulation. We are social because we're social animals and will die without help from other humans (well, particularly thousands of years ago). At the end of the day, we are nice to people to get things f…

"we are nice to people to get what we want" is flat out not true. We are nice to people because cooperative societies out performed the non-cooperative ones on the macro level. On a micro level this kind of attitude sometimes/often prevails, we call the people who act like this "jerks", and the people who try to justify it with these kinds of rationale "sociopaths", because to the group as a whole its so incredibly d…

Both are true. We want to survive and being nice to others increases our likelihood of survival. Wanting to survive is also selected by evolution and wanting to be nice in order to survive in a group setting that increases survival odds too.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#195

Post by mewpmewp2 » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:31 AM UTC

donatj wrote: post #52

> The other day, someone told me, “I can’t imagine you ever being awkward with people.” I was telling my therapist of several years recently about being uncomfortable with the number of new people I've had to meet recently. He seemed surprised that I wasn't excited by it all and said something along the lines of "You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character." It struck me… am I really that good at…

I think I can do small talk, but still it stresses me out and I would rather be alone.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#196

Post by Aurornis » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:31 AM UTC

niam wrote: post #67

Aurornis wrote: post #47

This post wasn't what I was expecting from the "socially normal" title. While there is a lot of self-reflection and growth in this piece, a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Look at the first two subheadings: > 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person > 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game The post felt like a rollercoa…

If the limit of someone's behavior winds up making everyone happier-off, I don't understand why I ought to care. In that sense, calling it "manipulative" seems either inappropriate or not very useful. At least with something like adultery, there's a pretty obvious ill consequence of someone finding out what's going on behind the scenes. But if I looked behind the curtains of someone like OP and found out that the rea…

> If the limit of someone's behavior winds up making everyone happier-off, I don't understand why I ought to care.

I guess I don’t believe this behavior actually leaves the targets better off.

Doing a lot of experiments where you feign connections and openness with other people is going to leave a lot of the targets feeling unhappy when they realize they were tricked into opening up to someone who was just using them as a target for their experiments.

Take, for example, the section of the post where he talks about getting someone to open up into “cathartic sobbing” but displays zero interest in the person’s problems, only wonder about how he managed to trigger that through yet another technique.

My takeaway was distinctly different about the net effects of these social connection experiments. It was fine in the context of waiting tables where everyone knows the interaction is temporary and transactional, but the parts where it expanded into mind-reading people’s weaknesses and insecurities and then leveraging that into “connections” that he later laments not actually wanting.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#197

Post by Slow_Hand » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:32 AM UTC

acuozzo wrote: post #96

donatj wrote: post #52

> The other day, someone told me, “I can’t imagine you ever being awkward with people.” I was telling my therapist of several years recently about being uncomfortable with the number of new people I've had to meet recently. He seemed surprised that I wasn't excited by it all and said something along the lines of "You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character." It struck me… am I really that good at…

> I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years. Forget small talk. Listen-- really listen --and engage with open ears. When it's your turn to talk, offer up an anecdote in reply if it's on topic or take the opportunity to pivot to a related topic you're passionate about. If you do the latter: do. not. info-dump. Give them a chance to play the game I just described to you from their si…

Yes yes yes. You rarely need to DO anything other than listen. Just be a good listener. Maybe identify handles in what they're saying and then occasionally ask them about them:

How did that make you feel? Wait, you did what? Why did you do that? What do you enjoy about that?

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#198

Post by mewpmewp2 » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:35 AM UTC

legerdemain wrote: post #139

smeej wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best small talkers say very little. We just ask interested questions about what you've already said. An easy cold opener at parties is, "So how do you know the host?" Then inquire about whether they're still doing that thing, or how long ago it was, or where they did it, whether they learned any cool things--the point is to keep asking questions. Most people love talking about themselves and things they like to d…

You might think so, but a lot of people can tell when you're ELIZA-ing them to death, and they will learn to avoid you. There are a lot of people on HN who want a technical manual for how to party, and a lot of them keep telling each other that the art of conversation is about attentive listening. Can you imagine a conversation between two people practicing attentive listening on each other?

Yeah if an awkward person does it they can be called out as if they are interrogating or interviewing. I actually remember trying these tactics when I was teenager... and that is how it came off. I tried so many weird things because I was so unhappy with my social performance.

Usually safer way is making observations rather than directly asking or at least continously asking things over and over as if to desperately try to keep the conversation going.

But even then if you are awkward, it will still come off awkward and people will try to excuse them out of that situation no matter how much theory you might read online.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#199

Post by pstuart » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:36 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #190

jrochkind1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They call that too: > There are two reactions that one could have to the previous section. “Wow, that’s cool, how he developed the ability to create a lot of deep connections in this lonely world.” And: “that is a weird and creepy thing to want, sounds kind of vampiric.” I believe that both reactions are correct in some proportion. > Here is the thing about going around the world in a state of emotional openness and…

> This post actually kind of blows my mind. I suggest re-reading it from some different perspectives. Consider that the narrator may not be entirely reliable. They way they talk about being able to read other people and manipulate them into a sense of openness and connection has some hints of behaviors that are associated with people who view themselves as superior to others and view others as mere targets for their…

It's stages in their life and it goes from manipulation to letting go. Even the manipulation was not malicious -- they just wanted to have "better" experiences with other people (and maybe upsell an entrée at first).

And as a socially awkward individual I found it quite interesting.

Re: My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

#200

Post by wybiral » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:37 AM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #183

zozbot234 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends, of course. Some people might fill their resume with outright BS, and this would be widely regarded as manipulative.

Depends how you define outright BS. I bet most people at least cherrypick the best data points amongst thousands of possible, giving a look that doesn't really represent them as a whole. And then they omit some undesirable things. Similar to how people on social media will only post their best moments, giving inaccurate representation of their lives and themselves while overall causing others to feel like they are mi…

If they have thousands of examples to cherry pick from... That's a signal of experience. So it's not entirely manipulation. If you can pick from your experience and find the best examples and you have several... You have experience.