Social Skills

Cristiano Mungioli has good online-dating tips.

Chris Voss is another good person to follow.

Double-messaging is risky. There can be times when it’s okay, but need to be careful. https://www.verywellmind.com/double-texting-dos-and-don-ts-8784078

Another thing you can mirror is effort. How much effort is someone putting into the conversation? If they’re sending typos, leaving out punctuation, making grammatical mistakes while you put in the effort to make none of those mistakes, there’s an imbalance.

Scheduling emails and text messages can help. But you risk sending outdated replies if you get another message in the meantime. I wish there was a feature to automatically cancel a scheduled message.

Another rule of thumb, I think also from Atomic Attraction: roughly mirror people’s response times. If someone takes days to get back to you, and you answer right away, you come off low value, even desperate.

Daniel Vassallo says to give, give, give, give before you ask. In other words, provide much more value than you hope to get from others. Only then can you realistically expect anything back.

Include source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUgdpM_keet/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

social_intell on IG says the way to distinguish between genuine interest and polite dismissal is specificity.

If someone says ‘keep me posted on that’ or ‘we should hang out sometime’, that’s vague; they’re politely ending the conversation. If you do follow up with them, you’re outing yourself as low value and socially incompetent.

If they really want you to follow up, or if they really want to hang out again, they’ll be specific: ‘let me introduce you to my colleague Peter, he can solve your problem, what’s your email?’, or ‘are you free next Wednesday at 7?’

When somebody asks what you do for a living, there’s two layers to this question, according to IG account social_intell.

One layer is surface: taking the question literally, answering literally like ‘I’m a project manager at company X.'

But social_intell says they’re really gauging your status and whether you extract or provide value. You should explain what problem you can solve for people and what you’re building: eg “I help companies build products people actually want. What about you?”

I forget if I came up with this myself or if I read this somewhere.

Another rule of thumb: in verbal group conversations, like in Twitter spaces, keep an eye on speakers’ average mic time and try not to go above that. (Realistically, that means undershooting the average, because you’re liable to underestimate your own mic time.) Consistently going above will come off as rambling or dominating.

I’m kind of socially retarded, but explicit study of social skills has helped. Here are some things I’ve learned.

I read Atomic Attraction years ago but I remember liking it. I’ve spoken to the author, Christopher Canwell. As I recall, he argues that the ratio between gray and blue text bubbles should be roughly 1:1. As a rule of thumb.