What does the phrase 'social skills' mean in 2024?

Post Reply New Topic

My personal understanding of 'social skills' is pretty simple. It fits the following:

1) Having basic skills with reciprocity and mirroring where appropriate (ie. if someone's polite / amicable your mirror, if they're imperial you don't).

2) Saying things that are topical / on-point with the conversation.

3) Be aware of social and political sensitivities within reason - ie. don't use slurs, don't speak of people as if you're carefully avoiding slurs, don't get in knock-down drag-out political or philosophic debates, technically it's better if you don't touch philosophy, politics, religion, or music at all unless off in a very small or specialized side-conversation away from others.

4) Dress for occasions and know basic customs around them.


I'm coming to the opinion that these are deemed somehow insufficient in 2024 - ie. that it's easy to do all four of the above and still not be conforming to social standards sufficiently? I'm trying to figure out where exactly people are coming from so I can even figure out where the additional load is coming from.

Conformity is for sheep

Apparently so is being able to eat and finance your own lodging - hence the difficulty.

You seem to have a pretty good working description. I'm not sure what you think is missing from it.

I often worry that I'm missing 'Easily manipulated' or some similar thing that people try to rename as mandatory ('cool' or 'hip' are good example) and from there it heads out to constant covert power games. It's kind of liquid astroturf made of popularity contests in the room.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 02 Nov 2024, 4:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

I regard social skills as the ability to manipulate others, for good or bad.

I have modest social skills, enough to get by.

Some people like my boss have social skills to move mountains, they can get people to do all kinds of favors for them that I never would have dreamed were possible. They build up massive spreadsheets in their mind of favors they have done for others, and they look for ways to build up goodwill with others. They remember names and birthdays and other details about significant people in their network, and they have a vast network of all this data in their mind. You pass someone on the street, and the social person can tell you their name, their Mama, where they live and who they went out with.

I think society needs to understand that there's probably whole OCEAN five-factor profiles that would want nothing to do with even needing to think about the competition to manipulate as if it's a requirement for survival (to me that's Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex's foraging rats in Mediations on Moloch) and they're deeply depressed if they're forced to bother because there's so much other meaningful stuff they'd rather focus on. Keep those people happy and guess what! They can make cool stuff and new discoveries! More stuff for human thriving! It's like there's somehow zero belief that we can have better lives if we pull together positively which then reinforces self-fulfilling prophecies. I get that there's real suffering out there, I get that marriages in late 20's early 30's have been precedents for civil wars in the past, we're in weird times in that respect and that's trickling down into how people see and treat each other (it's especially bad for anyone who can't balance out a few thousand dollar emergency bill and on top of that have the risk of kids, or alternately realize they could never afford them). Weak men are clearly creating hard times. It's the popularity of the raiding and mugging mentality that I don't get and outside of diagnosed or diagnosable mental illness it's morally unrelatable.