Before you assume that there is a "Correct answer" to this conversational situation at all, consider this:
Think of the most "socially adequate" person you know. This is the friend who inevitably ends up leading half the conversations at parties, the friend who can crack the same unfunny joke you did the day before and bring people to tears, the friend who within ten minutes of meeting a person will have already broken the ice and be chattering away.
Now imagine them in the same "hot sauce" situation as you. Do you think it matters what they say? Can you imagine a (feasible) situation where anything they say comes off as awkward or pretentious?
My take on the matter is that what you say doesn't matter half as much as simple charisma and charm. There are people who could've corrected the secretary and recieved friendly gratitude for the input, and people who's correction would've created a conversational gap and unending awkwardness.
I wish there was a more formalized nature to studying this area, apart from "Just REALLY LISTEN to people." but maybe that's the key.
I really do think there's a deep truth hidden in all that rambly discussion, something about the basic nature of some of our impulses (often male) to SHOW WHAT THEY KNOW, rather than necessarily having REALLY LISTENING as part of their nature.
I try not to just use the "listening" part of conversations to formulate what *I* plan to say. But I bet I do so more than I think I do. Over the years I've just gotten smoother at hiding it, because I spend at least 30% of my listening concentration actually listening and only 70% formulating the "clever" thing *I* want to say. So I'm better at checking myself from saying the wrong thing.
I too wish I could have learned this earlier in life. Unfortunately when my wife flys off the handle now it gets me upset because I start thinking about all the reasons she is no longer thinking rationally.
Most people have a poorly fed ego, so feeding that ego can take you a lot of places in life.
My take on the matter is that what you say doesn't matter half as much as simple charisma and charm. There are people who could've corrected the secretary and recieved friendly gratitude for the input, and people who's correction would've created a conversational gap and unending awkwardness.
You could have possibly done this by first agreeing with her emotion. "It's so frustrating to know they are taking your hot sauce and then selling it overpriced on the other side, but at least that way you aren't smuggling in red liquids to make bombs".
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Unless it's a close friend and I feel like some analytic criticism is necessary for them I'm usually just plain and outwardly understanding. There's no reason to apply too much logic to the workings of the lives of people you don't really care about; they aren't looking for your input.
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Or do your notions of kindness not apply to the internet, because of anonymity?
Actually I can't speak for tehlith, but I myself resemble that statement.
On the internet, I tend to be a lot more verbally aggressive than I would be in real life, and I do agree that its a flaw, at least for me. But in my defense, I'm actually a LOT LESS aggressive than I was a decade ago, and even a month ago. Almost 4 months since my last infraction. Only 1 warning in 4 months. Compare that to 3 infractions in the previous 4 months (actually 4 issued, then 1 retracted because it turned out to be a misunderstanding).
Interestingly enough, people are almost always much more receptive when I'm not aggressive (go figure ).
It's easy to road rage on the internet, especially during occasional stressful patches in life.
I really do think there's a deep truth hidden in all that rambly discussion, something about the basic nature of some of our impulses (often male) to SHOW WHAT THEY KNOW, rather than necessarily having REALLY LISTENING as part of their nature.
I try not to just use the "listening" part of conversations to formulate what *I* plan to say. But I bet I do so more than I think I do. Over the years I've just gotten smoother at hiding it, because I spend at least 30% of my listening concentration actually listening and only 70% formulating the "clever" thing *I* want to say. So I'm better at checking myself from saying the wrong thing.
Does anything I wrote make sense to you here? Would you tend to do the same thing that occurred to me? Am I completely off base? If you're married, do you have a similar perception of emotional IQ differences? Would you have blurted the pointless correction?
(I don't want to make a discussion of gender stereotypes, so if you want that start your own thread. I'm sure that all men and women don't fall into these traditional female/male stereotypes).
Everything you wrote makes sense to me here.
[Then again, I've been told I'm on the autistic scale, so eh.]
But yeah. If people spell things wrong/say wrong things/etc., I feel, almost, like I -have- to correct them. In other words, I'm a pedant. I've pseudo-learned to control it but I usually grimace when I do that, and then they ask why I grimaced, and ... bleh. Oh well.
I do spend most of my concentration listening, though.
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my mouth is full of winsome lies -
and eyes are full of death besides
but luckily the soul is wise -
it sees beyond my blindness and
forced failure makes a better guise,
so as i come again alive,
it feels like life's a decent plan
Oh yeah? I can top that. I know some REAL asshats. They're the ones who always begins their sentence with something like: "Oh really? that's nothing..."
Yeah. Pretty much with strangers, men or women, I'd have restrained myself. Women seem to generally have better sense in holding themselves back though.
we could avoid a lot of these TSA situations if the mass majority of us were allowed to build and pilot our own personal helicopters (instead of cars) for flying where ever we want to go.
helicopters of the size i'm talking about probably can't cross the oceans safely so thats why i say "most" because you'll still need passenger planes for some long distance travel.
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This is just random, but a situation came up the other day that made me think about how immature my basic conversation skills once were... and even how poor my basic common sense was once. Maybe it's still bad. I dunno.
-
I was at the doctor's office, and I was mentioning how I didn't want to go through security with certain medication, without a note, because I was afraid the TSA might confiscate it. I was told by the doctor not to worry, but I insisted that I just couldn't predict what TSA would do, especially after seeing the 90 year old cancer wheelchair lady get frisked on the news, you just never know.
So after I get my note, the secretary relates a story to me complaining about how she and her husband were going through security to take a puddle jumper (small plane with props that you store your luggage UNDER the plane in cargo), and the TSA lady said they had to give up the hot sauce because it was liquids. The secretary and the husband argued with her that they were getting on a plane where they check in the luggage into the bottom of the plane and don't get any access, so its the same as checking the bags, which would not result in hot sauce confiscation. the TSA lady was having none of it though and suggested that if they wanted to keep the hot sauce, they could go mail it. The whole thing was very unreasonable.
Further infuriating the secretary, the gift shop in the terminal had the same hot sauce (its' like $20 a bottle stuff) for sale, which they COULD take on the plane, which she pointed out to me was ALSO hypocritical, since their hot sauce was the same.
NOW:
This is the point at which, I immediately had the impulse to point out that the TSA confiscating liquids was because they don't know if the bottles contain hot sauce or not. So the hot sauce in the gift shop is not the same thing.
I immediately also realized that I should just keep my mouth shut and commiserate with the secretary. I would never have known to keep my mouth shut when I was a boy in high school, or even maybe college or med school (I had a low social IQ for a long time). The wrong thing to say in that situation is to "cleverly" point out the TSA's rationale there, and only a guy with Asperger, or just a conversationally clumsy person would say.
But I believe its precisely what most WOMEN would pick up on instantly.
To me, intellectually speaking, from an Asperger/ technical/ socially inept standpoint, any conversation is "technical, and this appears on its surface to me to be a discussion about the operational issues and problems of the TSA... a point of some kind of debate or analysis...
... but from an EMOTIONAL/SOCIAL standpoint, this is really one person commiserating with me about how the TSA sucks. She's venting at nobody's expense really (a bit for my benefit actually), so why would it even occur to me to correct her on anything? Why would it occur to me to correct her at all on anything? I might as well be correcting her accent on a word. It's really a form of making her feel smaller, and stealing her thunder.
In the car ride home I mentioned all of the above to my wife, and told her that I was pretty sure that my wife, even when she was 10, would have recognized the emotional dynamics of that conversation and it would never have occurred to her to bring up the technical rationale for the TSA "liquids" rule. Meanwhile, it took me well over 30 years of life and awkwardly ending cocktail party conversations, to realize something that most adult women instinctively know.
She laughed and immediately nodded her head, "yeah... a lot of guys are stupid like that."
I think this relates closely to the whole "When women complain to their husbands, they don't want a solution, they are looking for an empathetic ear." thing that we're always told. I am stumbling onto that deep truth via an analytical route here, but I think it is a deep truth about the nature of conversation and social interaction. I wish it was better formalized so that a young man who thinks more analytically than emotionally could learn it sooner in life.
I wish there was a more formalized nature to studying this area, apart from "Just REALLY LISTEN to people." but maybe that's the key.
I really do think there's a deep truth hidden in all that rambly discussion, something about the basic nature of some of our impulses (often male) to SHOW WHAT THEY KNOW, rather than necessarily having REALLY LISTENING as part of their nature.
I try not to just use the "listening" part of conversations to formulate what *I* plan to say. But I bet I do so more than I think I do. Over the years I've just gotten smoother at hiding it, because I spend at least 30% of my listening concentration actually listening and only 70% formulating the "clever" thing *I* want to say. So I'm better at checking myself from saying the wrong thing.
Does anything I wrote make sense to you here? Would you tend to do the same thing that occurred to me? Am I completely off base? If you're married, do you have a similar perception of emotional IQ differences? Would you have blurted the pointless correction?
(I don't want to make a discussion of gender stereotypes, so if you want that start your own thread. I'm sure that all men and women don't fall into these traditional female/male stereotypes).
I completely agree.
BTW, IQ stands for "Intelligence Quotient," so you can't have an "emotional" or "social" IQ.
(That was a joke, trying to show irony considering your point is not to unnecessarily correct people even though I just did, directly after agreeing with you.)
Joe hit the nail on the head. I'm an 18 year old male, but I learned pretty young that most people, most of the time, don't want a solution; they want validation. They want you to tell them how right they are, and how wrong the offending party is. And as Joe so eloquently put it, "it's annoying as all hell."
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Hey, I was reading this thread and I was surprised to find dcartist not only making a lot of the points I wanted to make but also making them from the same background of "game".
I learned a lot about what makes interactions tick from the DVD series The Blueprint Decoded by Real Social Dynamics, which I highly recommend most people get/download on torrent.
To analyze the scenario of the woman complaining about the TSA from what I understand, the coolest "you" possible (the one with a spectacular life and who's got his head straight) simply does not care that this woman is wrong. Since he has enough good interactions with people that he doesn't need to prove himself by helping whoever he's talking to right now or anything else of that ilk, he simply is not motivated to try to correct her. He is so relaxed and confident in himself and what he knows that he naturally acts in the most effective manner in social situations.
That guy doesn't actually exist, but he's a useful theoretical construct because people almost always naturally love that guy, and the closer you can be to that guy, the better you do in social situations. You don't have to be that guy to do any given thing you want to do, and I'm still working on internalizing the idea that good enough is good enough, but he is really an immensely helpful tool for realizing where and why you come across wrinkles in your interactions.
Interestingly enough, people are almost always much more receptive when I'm not aggressive (go figure ).
Yup. That is, indeed. I remember that happening a couple times between you and I.
Yeah I find myself needed to control that impulse. I think I've gotten better with time, but it's rather difficult as well. It's probably because I'm not that great at reading atmosphere as well, though.
Think of the most "socially adequate" person you know. This is the friend who inevitably ends up leading half the conversations at parties, the friend who can crack the same unfunny joke you did the day before and bring people to tears, the friend who within ten minutes of meeting a person will have already broken the ice and be chattering away.
Now imagine them in the same "hot sauce" situation as you. Do you think it matters what they say? Can you imagine a (feasible) situation where anything they say comes off as awkward or pretentious?
My take on the matter is that what you say doesn't matter half as much as simple charisma and charm. There are people who could've corrected the secretary and recieved friendly gratitude for the input, and people who's correction would've created a conversational gap and unending awkwardness.
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I too wish I could have learned this earlier in life. Unfortunately when my wife flys off the handle now it gets me upset because I start thinking about all the reasons she is no longer thinking rationally.
Most people have a poorly fed ego, so feeding that ego can take you a lot of places in life.
You could have possibly done this by first agreeing with her emotion. "It's so frustrating to know they are taking your hot sauce and then selling it overpriced on the other side, but at least that way you aren't smuggling in red liquids to make bombs".
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It's called being kind to others regardless of your own egotistical notions of what an appropriate response is.
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Or do your notions of kindness not apply to the internet, because of anonymity?
My thoughts on the subject were solicited by the OP.
On the internet, I tend to be a lot more verbally aggressive than I would be in real life, and I do agree that its a flaw, at least for me. But in my defense, I'm actually a LOT LESS aggressive than I was a decade ago, and even a month ago. Almost 4 months since my last infraction. Only 1 warning in 4 months. Compare that to 3 infractions in the previous 4 months (actually 4 issued, then 1 retracted because it turned out to be a misunderstanding).
Interestingly enough, people are almost always much more receptive when I'm not aggressive (go figure ).
It's easy to road rage on the internet, especially during occasional stressful patches in life.
Everything you wrote makes sense to me here.
[Then again, I've been told I'm on the autistic scale, so eh.]
But yeah. If people spell things wrong/say wrong things/etc., I feel, almost, like I -have- to correct them. In other words, I'm a pedant. I've pseudo-learned to control it but I usually grimace when I do that, and then they ask why I grimaced, and ... bleh. Oh well.
I do spend most of my concentration listening, though.
and eyes are full of death besides
but luckily the soul is wise -
it sees beyond my blindness and
forced failure makes a better guise,
so as i come again alive,
it feels like life's a decent plan
Reach out and torch someone . . .
helicopters of the size i'm talking about probably can't cross the oceans safely so thats why i say "most" because you'll still need passenger planes for some long distance travel.
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---------------------------------------------------
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---------------------------------------------------
[I]Some call it dig through time, when really your digging through CRAP!
Merfolk! showing magic players what a shower is since Lorwyn!
I completely agree.
BTW, IQ stands for "Intelligence Quotient," so you can't have an "emotional" or "social" IQ.
(That was a joke, trying to show irony considering your point is not to unnecessarily correct people even though I just did, directly after agreeing with you.)
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Sometimes, you are doing more of a service to a person by simply being honest with them than you would be by 'saying something nice'.
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WBRKaalia of the VastRBW
BChainer, Dementia MasterB
Legacy
0Manaless Dredge0
RGoblinsR
Standard
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I learned a lot about what makes interactions tick from the DVD series The Blueprint Decoded by Real Social Dynamics, which I highly recommend most people get/download on torrent.
To analyze the scenario of the woman complaining about the TSA from what I understand, the coolest "you" possible (the one with a spectacular life and who's got his head straight) simply does not care that this woman is wrong. Since he has enough good interactions with people that he doesn't need to prove himself by helping whoever he's talking to right now or anything else of that ilk, he simply is not motivated to try to correct her. He is so relaxed and confident in himself and what he knows that he naturally acts in the most effective manner in social situations.
That guy doesn't actually exist, but he's a useful theoretical construct because people almost always naturally love that guy, and the closer you can be to that guy, the better you do in social situations. You don't have to be that guy to do any given thing you want to do, and I'm still working on internalizing the idea that good enough is good enough, but he is really an immensely helpful tool for realizing where and why you come across wrinkles in your interactions.
Yup. That is, indeed. I remember that happening a couple times between you and I.
Yeah I find myself needed to control that impulse. I think I've gotten better with time, but it's rather difficult as well. It's probably because I'm not that great at reading atmosphere as well, though.
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