garbage and think "how could I apply this?" to each thing that I
read.
> That's true, but it's not a clear response. The fact that 95% of
> advice is useless does not imply that I, if I give advice to someone
> else, have a 95% random chance of giving useless advice no matter what
> I say. Neither do you.
Oh well, you missed the point.
> > Saying 'dress well' at the minimum causes you to start paying
> > attention to your dress. Of course all the advice you're ever going
> > to read is going to be extremely limited, there's nothing you can do
> > to change that.
> Sure. But in that case, there must be some other source (after all,
> non-shies learned how to dress well from *somewhere*).
Well if you find it, be sure to let me know.
> > One way to work around it is to ask better questions
> > like I said below, and to use your mind to try to think of possible
> > solutions, instead of thinking about how useless all the advice is.
> How can I possibly "use my mind to try to think of possible
> solutions" to this? You can only reason out solutions if there's some
> basis for reasoning and you and others have stated that this isn't the
> case for clothing (hint: if there was, you could state the base
> propositions..) So this is basically asking me to know something that
> I don't!
Just asking you to try is all. I already gave you the work around
that I thought up in about five seconds. If you use your mind to
think of work arounds instead of using it to prove that the advice
you've received is useless, you might have differant results is all
I'm saying. But hey, whatever works for you!
> > > > Better yet, go buy some clothes you think might look good, take a
> > > > picture of yourself wearing them, and post that. If they suck return
> > > > them. If you can't return them, you've at least learned something.
> > > That's an interesting idea. But what if the opinions I get back are
> > > divided?
> > This question kind of sums up a lot of the problems you're having. In
> > dealing with this stuff there is a very real temptation to want to
> > know what to do in every possible contingency before actually trying
> > anything. You could spend a lifetime trying to plan for every
> > possible fork in the road. It just doesn't work.
> But it does. Watch a non-shy person sometime. Even if something
> unexpected happens, it's very unlikely that they'll just freeze in
> place (smoke pouring from their ears?) with no way of deciding what
> action to take next. It's true, you can't plan out for every fork in
> the road. What you CAN do is to have a sufficient base of information
> that, whichever fork does come up, you can work out what to do on the
> fly. And it's clearly possible to have that, because successful
> people do.
Maybe, but it's doubtful that they sat down and thought about all the
various forks in the road before they actually tried to do anything.
You try an expirement, maybe you suck at it, but maybe you learn
something. The skills you develop may help you to navigate future
forks in the road intuitively, I dunno. But if you're unwilling to
try even a simple expirement like the one above without worrying about
all the future negative possabilities, then I don't know what to tell
you.
> > > I'm not saying that trial and error is useless. What I am saying is
> > > that *just* giving "just use trial and error" as advice falls into the
> > > trap of "dress well" above. You can't actually "just" use trial and
> > > error, since you need something more: a way to choose the next trial
> > > given your record of previous errors. (Which is called a "refinement
> > > system", although I know that's robot talk, but you still have one
> > > even if you don't call it that! ;) )
> > > The entire skill of being able to use trial and error for social
> > > situations is in having an appropriate refinement system. That
> > > refinement system must be based on a large amount of background
> > > knowledge (because any generic one fails due to the size of the search
> > > space) and the statement "use trial and error" fails to impart any of
> > > that knowledge.
> > Since you're not saying that trial and error is useless, then in what
> > ways do you think you could apply trial and error in a useful manner?
> It could be applied in a useful manner if I had an adequate
> refinement system. That is, a system which - after a social situation
> - tells me what I ought to do differently at the next one. At the
> moment I do not have that. If I go out and get ignored all night, I
> do not know if it is because I was badly dressed, because I didn't
> approach enough people, or because I used the wrong words in the
> approaches I did make.
> "Neither do successful people" you say. But at least two of these
> (words and dress) are near-infinite search spaces. Without that
> feedback, it would be possible to spend a lifetime searching the wrong
> one (ie, trying every possible approach line while still dressing
> dorky but not realising it) and never find success. If non-shies were
> making the decision of which one to search purely randomly, no more
> than 50% would succeed (since each person would have a 50% chance of
> guessing on the correct one to search). Therefore it is not random;
> therefore they DO have a refinement system.
Yep, just keep intellectualizing all the problems you might have.
Maybe you'll work out an intellectual solution to these hypothetical
problems. This doesn't interest me personally, as I prefer to deal
with real situations instead of made up ones, but that's just me.
> > > Again, I'm not doing it because it's going to eventually work, I'm
> > > doing it because it's my only option. If I've crawled through the
> > > desert for 20 miles, I might well accept that there's no oasis, but
> > > carrying on beats lying on the sand to die.
> > It's just peculiar that you've settled on this one pattern of behavior
> > as your alternative to doing nothing. You've dismissed reading books
> > and doing research on the internet because it's not useful, but by
> > your above reasoning reading that stuff *at minimum* can't be any more
> > useless than what you've been doing.
> The books, and most of the internet content, is static and finite.
> The responses I get here are dynamic and theoretically infinite over
> time.
Ok, if it works for you. I like to poke my head in here every year or
two and see how you're doing. In my opinion you're not going to get
anywhere as long as you keep clinging to these logical arguments, but
that's just one man's opinion.
> > > > You're a bright guy,
> > > > surely you could think of some differant approaches to learning? One
> > > > obvious example would be to lessen your expectations about what you
> > > > think a group mostly comprised of the *least* socially skilled people
> > > > in society are going to be able to teach you about socializing.
> > > That's one of the awkward problems with learning social skills: the
> > > people who are really good at them either a) won't teach, because they
> > > don't care, b) can't teach, because they aren't conscious of having
> > > learned. Again, I don't know how to get around this, as there don't
> > > appear to be any socially skilled teachers who are capable of teaching
> > > someone with a skill level as low as mine.
> > As I've alluded to above, in this arena of knowledge I've found the
> > best way to get people to give good specific advice is to relate to
> > them specifically what I've tried and what happened. The more I can
> > relate in terms of what I said, how I felt, etc., the better they can
> > evaluate what likely mistakes I'm making so I can correct them.
> > They're still operating on less than perfect knowledge of the
> > situations I'm facing, but that is the nature of communication.
> Usually their knowledge of the situations isn't the problem. The
> problem is that they have no idea how to communicate their advice in
> language that can be understood without knowledge that, if possessed,
> would render the advice unnecessary.
Well there's no way around that one is there? You've got an air-tight
argument.
> > > Why would I want to try different newsgroups? People on other ngs
> > > probably will be even more prone to chuck out unresolvable abstract
> > > advice because they've not experience social problems themselves, and
> > > they'll be even more resistant and hostile to requests for detail.
> > Once again, you're basing this on hypothetical situations instead of
> > actual real life events.
> Um, no, these are actual real life events. Look at the responses that
> Robert Maas got when he posted about a newsgroup meet on another ng he
> subscribed to. I've been seriously slammed by the editor of a
> webforum for asking even the milder kind of question that's attracted
> discussion on a.s.s.
Ok if you're using robert maas as a typical example of what's likely
to happen to you, then I don't know what to tell you. I've seen lots
of folks do what I've described above. If you're getting hostile
responses, maybe the problem isn't the folks on the other end? Maybe
asking questions in a differant manner might yield you differant
results? (I've already described one possible alternate approach you
could take if you were interested).
> > If all the advice you've gotten here has
> > been useless, then how could anyone be even more prone to give out bad
> > advice? People that are naturally socially skilled in general have a
> > hard time teaching people the skills they need, but this is only a
> > general rule. There are people out there who are also good teachers,
> > it's just a matter of seeking them out IME.
> I have no idea how they would be saught out.
The easiest way is to do some searching on the internet. One forum
that many people find helpful is
www.fastseduction.com, but this could
take you a very long time to wade through all the information there to
pick out the useful bits that you could apply, and on top of that
there's no guarantee that any of it will work, so maybe it's not worth
it to you. That's your call.
Marlow
