4 ms·

Saying being socially inept is entirely within your control is like saying being bad at math is entirely within your control. You have to understand that for a

Saying being socially inept is entirely within your control is like saying being bad at math is entirely within your control. You have to understand that for a huge chunk of the population, abstract inter-personal models like ring theory and the "Kvetching Order" are just genuinely above them and if you were to try and stop the conversation so you could educate them on how better to converse, you'd end up being the boorish one. Most people out there don't need Western psychology models to describe the emergent patterns in own their behavior. Most people just have friends and don't need to take a mental tally of whether they're the present adult in the room. I think that if you find someone's presence annoying or off-putting, it's probably not due to a lack of ring theory education, they might just have a personality.

hansvm 2y ago
Being bad at math _is_ entirely within your control.... The societal prior that most people are innately bad at math does throw a bit of a wrench in things. Alice doesn't get accolades for telling Bob that his failings are his fault and fixable, even in the best of scenarios. With a strong prior that spending thousands of hours studying won't help, Bob is further disinclined from even "wasting time" entertaining conversations attempting to explain the opposite position. Nevertheless, nearly anyone who gets over that particular mental trap and finds a halfway decent mentor (or even just a particularly adept late-undergraduate tutor) is able to learn those concepts.