The Sanity Faerie's Primer on Guys

[sanityfaerie]

There's this strange thing that happens in a lot of relationships. Very subtle people and very unsubtle people get together all the time, and hilarity ensues. The subtle people can't understand why the unsubtle people aren't reacting right, and the unsubtle people (we'll call them "guys") don't understand much of *anything*. Thus, Sanityfaerie's

Comments

a few thoughts

[sanityfaerie]

with respect to unsubtle and unclueful people thinking that they are subtle and clueful, and ways to inflict clue on these people, well, that's what clue-hammers are for (also known as clue-bats and clue-by-fours.)

Clue-hammers are very straightforward from a geek guy perspective, and seem to arise naturally out of groups that contain geek guys of varying levels of clue. They may not be as straightforward from an outside perspective.

Essentially, they consist of walking up to someone and saying "Cluehammer: this is how you are broken. This is how you fix yourself." This fix must be both simple and effective. It does not neccessarily have to be a pleasant or quick fix, but it must be something where the person who is receiving the clue-hammer can see immediately that yes, they can do these things, and if they do these things the problem will be fixed. Some of hte more popular clue-hammers are things like "Clue-hammer. Dude, you reek. You gotta take a shower at least once a day, and wash your pits with soap."

I'm not sure exactly how this avoids being insulting, except that it identifies the problem as being one of action or inaction, rather than state. The fact that they reek isn't about them, it's about the fact that they don't shower. As a further aspect, it's not being presented with any sort of motivational component. You aren't taunting them or making their life hell in order to get them to shower, you are assuming that they would rather not reek, and giving them valuable information with respect to that assumed goal (that they do reek, and that showers will fix this.) It's informational, rather than persuasive, and geek guys, on the whole, take direct informational content a lot better than emotionally charged informational content. In more difficult cases (and yeah, people who think they have clue when they really don't *are* more difficult cases) then some degree of (expressed) sympathy may help - as might a degree of initial closeness/trust.

A cluehammer-friendly social circle is also helpful, but that's something that takes time to develop, if not preexisting, and is more useful and necessary in circles that are low-subtlety to begin with. If you frequently interact with any social circles that are low-subtlety but have no cluehammer system, you might want to think about introducing one.

How negativity-averse are you? Cluehammers (and at least a few other techniques) require that you accept and allow the possibility of negative emotional impact for many of their applications, and I could see how that might be an issue for an empath.

In particular, you might know this one already, but there is a degree of script/noscript theory here. Most people run through much of their lives on a script. If you know the script, and like the outcome, you just say your lines and let it happen. If you don't like the outcome, you break the script, and then they (in their current state) have to figure out what to do next by actually thinking. This occasionally pulls down moments of shock, especially if they were deep in script-mode. Some means of script-breaking are relatively safe - leaving an argument and just letting the emotional energy die out for a while, for example. Some means of script-breaking, particularly those involving bluntness and direct applications of truth, can leap pretty heavily into unknown territory with people you don't know very well aready.

Re: a few thoughts

[spacehawk]

I am well acquainted with clue-by-fours and how to use them. I have had to use them in the past. There are ways of doing it that are not insulting, especially if you know the Guy.

However, in order for a technique like this to be successful, the person to be clued in has to understand the parameter over which he is not behaving properly (i.e., to know that body odor exists and that it smells bad and that people react badly to it, and to have a sense of smell so that he knows what "to perceive a scent/to smell" means). At the very least, the person to be clued in has to be aware, or even able to be aware, of the existence the parameter (i.e. "I may have no sense of smell but I know it exists, and that 'smelling bad' is something that bothers everybody else, because they can smell things. I'm the outlying case.").

In addition, "detect air-borne chemicals" is not conceptually challenging to grok, whereas emotional subtlety is far more complex paradigmatically. It is analogous to a fourth spacial dimension to Guys. The best that can be achieved through painstaking analyses is a series of detailed projections onto and cross-sections in 3-space, which the Guys mistake for understanding the thing itself. One can try for years, and the target person's ability to grok emotional subtlety will remain unchanged. I've tried. Basically, at any point in the subtlety spectrum, understanding more than a little more subtle is like visualizing the fourth spacial dimension.

For very simple mistakes, one can use a clue-by-four technique, but for anything more complex, Guys are simply unable to perceive the level on which the mistakes are occurring. They are unable even to intellectually grasp what such a level could even look like. If someone tries to explain to them what they're doing wrong, the words used simply make no sense at all (i.e. "Ana? Kata? What? Where?").

The solution, in my experience, is to take an entirely different approach to dealing with Guys, and with perceptual gradients in general. Crossing the gradient is not possible. Working around it, for many contexts, is possible.

Re: a few thoughts

[sanityfaerie]

Ah. I had misunderstood. My intuition would be that such things *could* be fixed, in some cases, but would be more a process of slow education than anything else. Throwing graduate studies at someone who hasn't gone past high school fails to function regardless of the field, especially if they have little natural aptitude.

On the other side, it would seem that attempting to lift up someone to the point that they could understand the issues you have with their behavior would be not even remotely worth the time/energy investment in the majority of cases. I simply note that it is possible to improve one's actual understanding of subtlety, and that this improvement can be induced. Certainly, having to first break through a false self-image of subtlety would make an already difficult and inefficient task even moreso.

Re: a few thoughts

[spacehawk]

You are correct- in the majority of cases, it is not with the time and energy. What energy is spent should be on things on which the target person can improve, not on those things in which the target person cannot. (If such improvement were possible, you'd think after fifty years of being married to my grandmother, my grandfather would have learned by now. ^_^).

We are also using the word "subtlety" differently. I am not talking about a series of proscriptive rules governing how to behave. I am talking about a perceptual subtlety. Guys can memorize a series of fixed, simple patterns, but without the perceptual subtlety, they will still be unable to accurately apply their learning to new situations, or even to detect when such new situations arise (without another clue-by-four). Explicit instruction only goes so far. Think of it a bit as memorizing the solutions to various algebraic equations, without actually understanding why the answers are the way they are, or being able to solve equations for yourself. However, as I said, when it comes to social skills, Guys are often also unable even to recognize the new situations as such, and will assume they are looking at familiar patterns unless given further explicit instruction.

Of course, also, "Guy-ness" varies in extremity. And then, there's the fact that unlike in math, social situations do not have unique "solutions". The more subtle one is, the more possibilities one sees as to how to handle things. There is no "right answer", although there are good approaches and bad approaches.

Re: a few thoughts

[sanityfaerie]

Actually, I was using the same definition of subtlety you were. It can be learned. Upon arrival to college, I had essentially no subtlety at all. The social skills I had were extremely narrow, though adequate in depth. I was not looking. Had I been looking, I would not have known what to look for. Had I known what to look for, I would not have known what it meant when I saw it. Had I known what it meant, I would not have understood anything about the systems it functioned in, or any sort of deeper implications. Had I understood the implications, I still would not have known what to do about it. I was hopeless - utterly hopeless. On the whole, my social skills were well below par for incoming freshmen males at an engineering college.

Since then, I have dramatically improved my abilities across the board through a variety of means, mostly involving increased interest, internal restructuring, and long study. It was not a particularly fast process, but it continues. It also involved some prices to be paid on my part. A fair bit of my improved insight was induced by someone not myself (though this individual is sufficiently willing to lie to themselves that it is no longer possible to know how deliberate this was). I therefore state that it is possible to improve, not just by accumulation of rules but by actual development of subtlety, and it is possible for that improvement to be induced externally.

Re: a few thoughts

[spacehawk]

Hm. This is very interesting. I would like to learn about this process, and your journey.

Re: a few thoughts

[sanityfaerie]

replies in stealth mode. If you do not have access to them, I'll see what I can do about destealthing selectively.