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What? And if you force me to do your social song and dance, does that telegraph that you don't care about me? I care about the person and the work. Not about w

by bserge 6y ago

What? And if you force me to do your social song and dance, does that telegraph that you don't care about me? I care about the person and the work. Not about whether they hold their spoon and knife in the right hand.

tarboreus 6y ago
Etiquette sends a strong signal that you're socially reliable. Working in groups is difficult and you can't just brute force it by waving your hands and saying you only care about the work or about being nice or whatever. Disagreements happen constantly and you can't just fight or disband the group every time you don't reach consensus, or you can but your group will be quickly outcompeted by a more functional group. Etiquette and other social skills allow for continued cooperation in social circumstances with many moving parts and competing interests. Doing things like sitting down when others sit down, etc. are really just table stakes. If you don't have the basics of reading a situation and applying rudimentary social norms appropriately you're kind of socially radioactive and will be treated accordingly, i.e. you won't move on to the more interesting interactions and you'll be placed in a baby zone unless people need to negotiate with you for specific resources. Programmers can get away with this better than most because it's a skill people need, but it's still kind of a disaster not to get decent with this stuff and you probably won't even understand how much it's damaging you.
- RobertKerans 6y ago
  It's quite sad that you've needed to put that much thought into an explanation.
  - adverbly 6y ago
    It actually does take that much thought though! Social dynamics are extremely complex to model, and they are way more important than we think. There is a lot of complex game theory and metagaming going on. Most of it goes over my head, but people's "gut feeling" about others takes a lot of things into account(what they know that I know, etc...). Communicating while maintaining good gut feelings is not easy! We basically need to hack our own minds to get things right.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
And if they did something more extreme like for example literally eat like a walrus? That wouldn't weird you out even a little bit? Nothing in the back of your mind would say "watch out for that guy, he seems a bit psychopath-y"?

by bserge 6y ago

tarboreus 6y ago

Etiquette sends a strong signal that you're socially reliable. Working in groups is difficult and you can't just brute force it by waving your hands and saying you only care about the work or about being nice or whatever. Disagreements happen constantly and you can't just fight or disband the group every time you don't reach consensus, or you can but your group will be quickly outcompeted by a more functional group. Etiquette and other social skills allow for continued cooperation in social circumstances with many moving parts and competing interests. Doing things like sitting down when others sit down, etc. are really just table stakes. If you don't have the basics of reading a situation and applying rudimentary social norms appropriately you're kind of socially radioactive and will be treated accordingly, i.e. you won't move on to the more interesting interactions and you'll be placed in a baby zone unless people need to negotiate with you for specific resources. Programmers can get away with this better than most because it's a skill people need, but it's still kind of a disaster not to get decent with this stuff and you probably won't even understand how much it's damaging you.

RobertKerans 6y ago
It's quite sad that you've needed to put that much thought into an explanation.
- adverbly 6y ago
  It actually does take that much thought though! Social dynamics are extremely complex to model, and they are way more important than we think. There is a lot of complex game theory and metagaming going on. Most of it goes over my head, but people's "gut feeling" about others takes a lot of things into account(what they know that I know, etc...). Communicating while maintaining good gut feelings is not easy! We basically need to hack our own minds to get things right.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

And if they did something more extreme like for example literally eat like a walrus? That wouldn't weird you out even a little bit? Nothing in the back of your mind would say "watch out for that guy, he seems a bit psychopath-y"?