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My EQ is less than half of my IQ, so I have been trying to help people with the sciences, and get their advice on how to deal with emotional reactions. I seldom get much help, and never with the details I want.
Today, I remember the struggles of the early robot mechanics, who discovered that "Pass the salt" had to be broken down into "Move gripper to coordinates of salt . . " etc. for hundreds of lines. Even most nerds can't do that, so it is even less likely to find someone who can give detailed emotional instructions. Often, even major chapters are assumed. So, it may not be so much a case of people having to be persuaded to give me elementary lessons as there being no formal lessons at all for such arts. I have always been careful not to patronize people with what I thought was obvious technical data, so I thought there was a similar reluctance to overcome.

A difference in learning, I think. It seems to me that most people learn about emotion and social reciprocation by a kind of "osmosis" that is mostly invisible to them. It's hard for them to "teach" lessons about such things because their "learning" was mostly subconscious, and they're barely aware that it is something which they "learned". It makes me recall my teenage years, trying to get dating advice from friends; they always repeated that when someone was interested in me I would "just know it". They're not aware of how they "just know it", because their subconscious just takes care of recognising the signs without any conscious intervention, so it's not something which they can convert to a set of explicit instructions.

Emotion is only part of the problem.

You simply have to know things about the world. Vast amounts of things to simply understand the phrase "pass the salt".

You have to know that salt is a condiment. That it comes in little containers with holes in the top. That folks use salt to season what theyre eating. And that folks eat together usually at the same table as a social thing, and so on and so on..

Human creatures from a particular culture, even young children, and village idiots, all just know all of this stuff without being told. And we fellow humans all take it for granted that every other human knows all of that stuff. But when it comes programming a machine you cant take any of it for granted. You have write lines of instruction for everthing.

That the phrase "pass the salt" means "place the salt shaker close to me so I can reach it...for the purpose seasoning what I am eating", and

Then you hafta to tell the machine to put its clasping things on to the glass shaker at the correct coordinates of the dinner table, but not so tightly that it breaks the container, and so on... And then to place it in front of the person making that command, but place it a proper distance (by having your robot glance at the person's arms and calculate that persons armlength and place within that armlength?), and not to THROW the salt shaker at the person, or punch them in the chest with it...

I know what you mean.
I came myself to this "pass the salt" issue when starting to learn programming
And as a female-type aspie, I maintain some kind of artificial EI, based on years of careful observations, analysis and pattern-seeking in human behaviors and my own states. I score something close to median in both emotional and social intelligence – but it's not "natural" or "obvious", it's running comparison algorithms on my huge database of possible social situations. So it's successful enough but quite exhausting.

Yes, I believe people learn social and emotional stuff through some kind of osmosis.
As we are not really aware how the servomachanisms of our muscles work so we can just grab the saltshaker with the right force and move all the muscles the right way to "pass" it while not falling down, etc. Or how we recognize what is on a picture. It's so deep in our brains that we are unaware of the processes. Lots of research is required to come down to what is actually happening on lower levels.

And typical humans are just like that also with social and emotional stuff.
Psychology and sociology are about breaking it to parts and digging to the lower levels... but they don't have really good methodology, esp. psychology doesn't.

I read an interesting book back at Uni called "the cultural origins of human cognition." In very brief terms, Tomasello argues that humans alone share what he terms the cultural ratchet. Basically, it is a form of cumulative natural selection acting on culture. So the reason we advance so fast in terms of cultural cognition is humans have a unique capacity to imitate. And when we imitate we bring into that imitation the whole cultural history of our species.

I often think one of the things that is typical to many, if not most people, with autism is the inability to instinctively imitate and so tap into this vast array of cultural understanding.

It can be good to not naturally imitate of course. But learning to imitate through logic and reasoning is certainly exhausting.

I read a book last week to my children separately. It was about a girl going for a sleepover at her grandparents' house for the first time. She had three magic objects that could bring her home when she got home-sick. The first two times they take her home and after a quick check she feels comfortable enough to go back and continue the sleepover. The third time her family are not there. She panics.

My 3 year old NT child immediately said when I asked the location of the mum and brother, "oh they have gone early to pick her up at her grandmothers" (the right ending of the book) whilst my 8 year old Aspie said "they have left the country and gone on holiday without her." It really made me understand how different social and emotional understanding is for my two children.

Thanks. I muddled through OK for most of my life, but my tolerance was based on giving people the benefit of the doubt much of the time. Now, that doubt has resolved into an awareness of ignorant arrogance, and I have to learn compassion for fools and worse.

Cultural imitation is very handy, if possible. I used to be able to settle some situations very quickly with a John Wayne imitation.

Indeed, I never had any luck pursuing girls I was attracted to, but I have had more partners than average by noticing which conversations seemed to flow easier, (and then becoming single again.) They became interested in me because of what I was working on, and then felt challenged to get noticed. It wasn't always easy. One who had seen me around her office invited me for coffee. I don't drink coffee, and I wasn't thirsty, so I just said "No thanks" and it was years before I realized that there had been more to the exchange. I guess my emotions got tickled, so they kept reminding the intellect until it went "Doh!"